J. I. Packer Quotes

Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives... Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.

In the New Testament grace means God's love in action towards men who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves.

The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor -- spending and being spent -- to enrich their fellow humans, giving time, trouble, care and concern, to do good to others -- and not just their own friends -- in whatever way there seems need.

My advice to a new husband is nothing more than 'husbands, love your wives.' And 'love your wife as Christ has loved the church.' Never forget that you are Christ's representative in serving your wife.

What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.

Many humanists in the West are stirred by a sense of outrage at what professed Christians, past and present, have done; and this makes them see their humanism as a kind of crusade, with the killing of Christianity as its prime goal.

God's ways do not change... Still he shows his freedom and lordship by discriminating between sinners, causing some to hear the gospel while others do not hear it, and moving some of those who hear it to repentance while leaving others in their unbelief, thus teaching his saints that hew owes mercy to none and that it is entirely of his grace, not at all through their own effort, that they themselves have found life.

The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again.

Simple assent to the gospel, divorced from a transforming commitment to the living Christ, is by Biblical standards less than faith, and less than saving, and to elicit only assent of this kind would be to secure only false conversions.

Even when we cannot see the why and wherefore of God's dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always.

Calvary not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom Christ died; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their salvation made actual.

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it - the fact that He knows me.

The Life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration

For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?

Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.

In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.

But that is not because these principles are traditional; it is because they are biblical. There is certainly an arrogant, hide-bound type of traditionalism, unthinking and uncritical, which is carnal and devilish. But there is also a respectful willingness to take help from the Church's past in order to understand the Bible in the present; and such traditionalism is spiritual and Christian.

Certainly true worship invigorates, but to plan invigoration is not necessarily to order worship.

It is Deism which depicts God as the passive onlooker rather than the active governor of His world, and which assures us that the guarantee of human freedom lies in the fact that men's actions are not under God's control. But the Bible teaches rather that the freedom of God, who works in and through His creatures, leading them to act according to their nature, is itself the foundation and guarantee of the freedom of their action.

The battle against pride in the heart is lifelong, so humility should become an ever more deeply seated attitude of living

There's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. When you truly know God, you have energy to serve Him, boldness to share Him, and contentment in Him.

God's love is an exercise of his goodness toward sinners who merit only condemnation.

Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity.

The preachers commission is to declare the whole counsel of God; but the cross is the center of that counsel.

The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity--hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory--because at the Father's will Jesus became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.

If one preaches the Bible biblically, one cannot help preaching the gospel all the time.

The Church, therefore, has two constant needs; instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred.

God is good to all in some ways and to some in all ways.

The worlds greatest need is the personal holiness of Christian people.

God’s wrath is his righteousness reacting against unrighteousness.

The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.

We need to discover all over again that worship is natural to the Christian, as it was to the godly Israelites who wrote the psalms, and that the habit of celebrating the greatness and graciousness of God yields an endless flow of thankfulness, joy, and zeal.

I'm not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger - and then moving on quickly to the next blogger.

The essence of God's action in wrath is to give people what they choose, in all its implications.

Jesus' pattern prayer, which is both crutch, road, and walking lesson for the spiritually lame like ourselves, tells us to start with God: for God matters infinitely more than we do.

Creatures are not entitled to register complaints about their Creator.

We complain today that ministers do not know how to preach; but is it not equally true that our congregations do not know how to hear?

N.T. Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds

The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. No account of God's peace which does not start here can do other than mislead.

There are few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God's work as Judge.

To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God's kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment... The fact is that the subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society, and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter.

Any theology that does not lead to song is, at a fundamental level, a flawed theology.

There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.

The simple statement, 'God is for us', is in truth one of the richest and weightiest utterances that the Bible contains.

A half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.

The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.

God made us thinking beings, and he guides our minds as we think things out in his presence.

God is triune; there are within the Godhead three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and the work of salvation is one in which all three act together, the Father purposing redemption, the Son securing it and the Spirit applying it.