J. i. packer quotes

We dishonor God if we proclaim a Savior who satisfies and then go around discontent

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

The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .

What were we made for? To know God. What aim should we have in life? To know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives? To know God. What is the best thing in life? To know God. What in humans gives God most pleasure? Knowledge of himself.

The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God.

I need not torment myself with the fear that my faith may fail; as grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end. Faith, both in its origin and continuance, is a gift of grace (Phil 1:29).

God's wisdom is not, and never was, pledged to keep a fallen world happy, or to make ungodliness comfortable.

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

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

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

The truth is that, though we were justified by faith alone, the faith that justifies is never alone (it always produces fruit, 'good works,'...a transformed life).

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.

He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.

The way to be truly happy is to be truly human, and the way to be truly human is to be truly godly.

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms... Confusion here is fatal.

We are to order our lives by the light of His Law, not by our guesses about His plan.

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

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

The idea that all are children of God is not found in the Bible anywhere.

[N]obody can produce new evidence of your depravity that will make God change his mind. For God justified you with (so to speak) his eyes open. He knew the worst about you at the time when he accepted you for Jesus' sake; and the verdict which he passed then was, and is, final.

The saving power of the cross does not depend on faith being addded to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it

It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ's Spirit to convince men's consciences of the truth of Christ's gospel; and Christ's human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.

Guidance, like all God's acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it; he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home. Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God's promise; this is how good he is.

Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ's sheep.

God the Father is the giver of Holy Scripture; God the Son is the theme of Holy Scripture; and God the Spirit is the author, authenticator, and interpreter of Holy Scripture.

Wait on the Lord" is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.

The healthy Christian is not necessarily the extrovert, ebullient Christian, but the Christian who has a sense of God's presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God's word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it.

Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.

The measure of all love is its giving. The measure of the love of God is the cross of Christ.

God has spoken to man, and the Bible is his Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation... Godliness means responding to God's revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God's Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.

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?

There are ministers who never speak of repentance or self-denial. Naturally they are popular, but they are false prophets.

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.

God answers the prayer we ought to have made rather than the prayer we did make.

The Son of God came to seek us where we are in order that he might bring us to be with him where he is.

Creatures are not entitled to register complaints about their Creator.

Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.

Revelation does not mean man finding God, but God finding man, God sharing His secrets with us, God showing us Himself. In revelation, God is the agent as well as the object.

Our high and privileged calling is to do the will of God in the power of God for the glory of God.

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

Arminianism is 'natural' in one sense, in that it represents a characteristic perversion of Biblical teaching by the fallen mind of man.

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.

Suffering is getting what you do not want while wanting what you do not get.

Have you been holding back from a risky, costly course to which you know in your heart God has called you? Hold back no longer. Your God is faithful to you, and adequate for you. You will never need more than He can supply, and what He supplies, both materially and spiritually, will always be enough for the present.

Christ had no interest in gathering vast crowds of professed adherents who would melt away as soon as they found out what following Him actually demanded of them. In our own presentation of Christ's gospel, therefore, we need to lay a similar stress on the cost of following Christ and make sinners face it soberly before we urge them to respond to the message of free forgiveness. In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.

Scripture sees hell as self-chosen. . . Hell appears as God's gesture of respect for human choice. All receive what they actually chose. Either to be with God forever, worshipping Him, or without God forever, worshipping themselves.

Do I as a Christian understand myself? Do I know my own real identity? My own real destiny? I am a child of God, God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Saviour is my brother; every Christian is my brother too. Say it over and over again to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time when your mind is free, and ask God that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true. For this is the Christians secret of the Christian life, of a God-honouring life.

We do not make friends with God; God makes friends with us, bringing us to know him by making his love known to us... The word know, when used of God in this way, is a sovereign-grace word, pointing to God's initiative in loving, choosing, redeeming, calling and preserving.

Scripture is the most up-to-date and relevant reading that ever comes my way.

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God.

It is often the case, as all the saints know, that fellowship with the Father and the Son is most vivid and sweet, and Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest.

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.

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

To know God's love is indeed heaven on earth.

Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord.

The modern way with God is to set him at a distance, if not to deny him altogether; and the irony is that modern Christians, preoccupied with maintaining religious practices in an irreligous world, have themselves allowed God to become remote...for churchmen who look at God through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy proportions, cannot hope to end up as more than pigmy Christians.

There is unspeakable comfort in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.

Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.

Every time we mention God we become theologians, and the only question is whether we are going to be good ones or bad ones.

This one word 'grace' contains within itself the whole of New Testament theology.

God made life, and God alone can tell us its meaning.

Real spiritual growth is always growth downward, so to speak, into profounder humility, which in healthy souls will become more and more apparent as they age.

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

We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God.

The grace of God is love freely shown toward guilty sinners, contrary to their merit and indeed in defiance of their demerit.

Always and everywhere the servants of Christ are under orders to evangelize

Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.

Living becomes an awesome business when you realize that you spend every moment of your life in the sight and company of an omniscient, omnipresent Creator.

His purpose is simply to draw us closer to Himself in conscious communion with Him.

You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.

One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.

God’s wrath is his righteousness reacting against unrighteousness.

The stars may fall, but God's promises will stand and be fulfilled.

Think against your feelings; argue yourself out of the gloom they have spread; look up from your problems to the God of the gospel.

The fruit of wisdom is Christlikeness, peace, humility and love. And, the root of it is faith in Christ as the manifested wisdom of God

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

Joy is a condition that is experienced, but it is more than a feeling; it is, primarily, a state of mind.

What is a Christian? The richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance.

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.

God has not abandoned us any more than he abandoned Job. He never abandons anyone on whom he has set his love; nor does Christ, the good shepherd, ever lose track of his sheep.

Not until we have become humble and teachable, standing in awe of God's holiness and sovereignty...a cknowledging our own littleness, distrusting our own thoughts, and willing to have our minds turned upside down, can divine wisdom become ours.

We are not fit for a place in God's family; the idea of his loving and exalting us sinners as he loves and has exalted the Lord Jesus sounds ludicrous and wild -- yet that, and nothing less than that, is what our adoption means.

A little knowledge OF God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge ABOUT him.

A God whom we could understand exhaustively, and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever, would be a God in man's image, and therefore an imaginary God, not the God of the Bible at all.

Holy people glory, not in their holiness, but in Christ's cross; for the holiest saint is never more than a justified sinner and never sees himself in any other way.

I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him, because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, One who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted for me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters.

Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded.

The Holy Spirit's main ministry is not to give thrills but to create in us Christlike character.

There are no small sins against a great God

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

Sinners cannot obey the gospel, any more than the law, without renewal of heart.

If I were the devil, one of my first aims would be to stop folk from digging into the Bible.

The Trinity is the basis of the gospel, and the gospel is a declaration of the Trinity in action.

Repentance, as we know, is basically not moaning and remorse, but turning and change.

The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that.

It is staggering that God should love sinners, yet it is true.

God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.

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

Were it not for the work of the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel, no faith, no church, no Christianity in the world at all.

The gospel tells that our Judge has become our Savior.

There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me.

Infallible denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading and so means wholly trustworthy and reliable; inerrant means wholly true. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God who cannot lie, whose word, once spoken, abides for ever, and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly.

A wise man had said that your Christian life is like a three-legged stool. The legs are doctrine, experience and practice, which is obedience; and you, will not stay upright unless all three are there. In recent years many Christians have not kept these three together.

Martin Luther described the doctrine of justification by faith as the article of faith that decides whether the church is standing or falling. By this he meant that when this doctrine is understood, believed, and preached, as it was in New-Testament times, the church stands in the grace of God and is alive; but where it is neglected, overlaid, or denied, ... the church falls from grace and its life drains away, leaving it in a state of darkness and death.

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.

Repentance is more than just sorrow for the past; repentance is a change of mind and heart, a new life of denying self and serving the Savior as king in self's place.

If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both.

The meaning of "He will give us all things" can be put thus: one day we will see that nothing - literally nothing - which could have increased our eternal happiness has been denied us, and that nothing - literally nothing - that could have reduced that happiness has been left with us.

There is a tremendous relief in knowing that {God's} love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.

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 Spirit is not given to make Bible study needless, but to make it effective.

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

To know that nothing happens in God's world apart from God's will may frighten the godless, but it stabilizes the saints.

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

Only when you know how to die can you know how to live.

God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.

There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death and on for ever.

The God of Israel is King of kings and Lord of lords... He know, and foreknows, all things, and his foreknowledge is foreordination; he, therefore, will have the last word, both in world history and in the destiny of every man; his kingdom and righteousness will triumph in the end, for neither men nor angels shall be able to thwart him.

What God does in time, He planned from eternity. And all that He planned in eternity He carries out in time.

The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away.

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.

God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away. To live with your ‘thorn’ uncomplainingly — that is, sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel weak — is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.

Adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification.. . To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.