Top 100 J I Packer Quotes
#1. One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.
J.I. Packer
#2. Holiness is the object of our new creation. We are born again so that we may grow up into Christlikeness.
J.I. Packer
#3. The Life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration
J.I. Packer
#4. Part of the answer to the question that life's roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my Heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Chrislike virtue.
J.I. Packer
#5. 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.
J.I. Packer
#6. How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each Truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.
J.I. Packer
#7. 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.
J.I. Packer
#8. This is what all the work of grace aims at - an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with him. Grace is God drawing us sinners closer and closer to himself.
J.I. Packer
#9. The idea that all are children of God is not found in the Bible anywhere.
J.I. Packer
#10. Our high and privileged calling is to do the will of God in the power of God for the glory of God.
J.I. Packer
#11. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away.
J.I. Packer
#12. As signs of inadequacy and weakness, they look on wealth as a source of stability and strength. Our proud hearts shrink from weakness, real or fancied, in all its forms, as we have already noted, and they embrace whatever looks like strength, including the goal and the reality of affluence. The
J.I. Packer
#13. The Trinity is the basis of the gospel, and the gospel is a declaration of the Trinity in action.
J.I. Packer
#14. Prayer to God as Father is for Christians only.
J.I. Packer
#15. To mend our own relationship with God, regaining God's favor after having once lost it, is beyond the power of any one of us. And one must see and bow to this before one can share the biblical faith in God's grace.
J.I. Packer
#16. We are only living truly human lives just so far as we are labouring to keep God's commandments; no further.
J.I. Packer
#17. 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.
J.I. Packer
#18. There is unspeakable comfort in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.
J.I. Packer
#19. Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a 'popular piety' claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.
J.I. Packer
#20. Our best works are shot through with sin and contain something for which we need to be forgiven.
J.I. Packer
#21. Certainly true worship invigorates, but to plan invigoration is not necessarily to order worship.
J.I. Packer
#22. Only when you know how to die can you know how to live.
J.I. Packer
#23. Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.
J.I. Packer
#24. 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.
J.I. Packer
#25. Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it.
J.I. Packer
#26. New Testament writers do not tell me why God chose to save me. They only tell me to be thankful that He did.
J.I. Packer
#27. There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.
J.I. Packer
#28. I am fat and flabby and that Dr. J. I. Packer is right when he says, "Here then is the root cause of our moral flabbiness; we have neglected God's Law."3
Alistair Begg
#29. Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.
J.I. Packer
#30. 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
J.I. Packer
#31. 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.
J.I. Packer
#32. 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.
J.I. Packer
#33. 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.
J.I. Packer
#34. The Holy Spirit is God the evangelist.
J.I. Packer
#35. Our Lord Jesus Christ is both God for man and man for God;
J.I. Packer
#36. The Gospel is not the ABC's of the Christian life; it is the A through Z of the Christian life.
J.I. Packer
#37. Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God's attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.
J.I. Packer
#38. We never move on FROM the Gospel, we move on IN the Gospel
J.I. Packer
#39. Historical exegesis is only the preliminary part of interpretation; application is its essence. Exegesis without application should not be called interpretation at all.
J.I. Packer
#40. The battle against pride in the heart is lifelong, so humility should become an ever more deeply seated attitude of living
J.I. Packer
#41. We meet God through entering into a relationship both of dependance on Jesus as our Saviour and Friend and of discipleship to Him as our Lord and Master.
J.I. Packer
#42. 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.
J.I. Packer
#43. Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching.
J.I. Packer
#44. Gift of wisdom consisting in the power to do this, the gift actually presupposes our conscious inability to do it,
J.I. Packer
#45. 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.
J.I. Packer
#46. A deepening sense of one's sinfulness remains a touchstone of the genuine Christian life.
J.I. Packer
#47. I will be your God," is an unconditional undertaking on God's part to be "for us" (Rom. 8:31), "on our side" (Ps. 124:1-5), using all his resources for the furthering of the ultimate good of those ("us") to whom he thus pledges himself.
J.I. Packer
#48. The nasty thing which no polite person nowadays will talk about in public. But death, even when unmentionable, remains inescapable. The one sure fact of life is that one day, with or without warning, quietly or painfully, it is going to stop.
J.I. Packer
#49. The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .
J.I. Packer
#50. I'm amazed at the amount of time people spend on the Internet.
J.I. Packer
#51. Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.
J.I. Packer
#52. It is extraordinary how little the New Testament says about God's interest in our success, by comparison with the enormous amount that it says about God's interest in our holiness, our maturity in Christ, and our growth into the fullness of His image.
J.I. Packer
#53. The Christian's instinct of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God.
J.I. Packer
#54. 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.
J.I. Packer
#55. But to call God "almighty" does cause problems for some. J.I. Packer says, "Men treat God's sovereignty as a theme for controversy, but in Scripture it is a matter of worship.
Raymond F. Cannata
#56. But man's eyes are blind through sin, and he can discern no part of God's truth till the Spirit opens them. Inner illumination, leading directly as it does to a deep, inescapable conviction, is thus fundamental to the Spirit's work as a teacher.
J.I. Packer
#57. Only when it is seen that what decides each individual's destiny is whether or not God decides to save him from his sins, and that this is a decision that God need not make in any individual case, can one begin to grasp the biblical view of grace.
J.I. Packer
#58. 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.
J.I. Packer
#59. To long for total spiritual well-being is right and natural, but to believe that one is anywhere near it is to be utterly self-deceived.
J.I. Packer
#60. When we reach the outer limit of what Scripture says, it is time to stop arguing and start worshipping.
J.I. Packer
#61. God's wisdom is not, and never was, pledged to keep a fallen world happy, or to make ungodliness comfortable.
J.I. Packer
#62. 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.
J.I. Packer
#63. 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.
J.I. Packer
#64. 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.
J.I. Packer
#65. A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about him.
J.I. Packer
#66. Think against your feelings; argue yourself out of the gloom they have spread; look up from your problems to the God of the gospel.
J.I. Packer
#67. Remember that, as George Whitefield said, man is immortal till his work is done (though God alone defines the work), and get on with what you know to be God's task for you here and now.
J.I. Packer
#68. Richard Baxter: Ye saints, who toil below, Adore your heavenly King, And onward as ye go Some joyful anthem sing. Take what He gives, And praise Him still Through good and ill Who ever lives.
J.I. Packer
#69. 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.
J.I. Packer
#71. If I were the devil I should broadcast doubts about the truths and relevance and good sense and straightforwardness of the Bible ... At all costs I should want to keep them from using their minds in a disciplined way to get the measure of its message.
J.I. Packer
#72. Seek advice, weigh advice, and practice prudence.
J.I. Packer
#73. Where is the sense of distance and difference, then, between believers in Bible times and ourselves? It is excluded. On what grounds? On the grounds that God does not change.
J.I. Packer
#74. What is a Christian? The richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father.
J.I. Packer
#75. Holiness is always the saved sinner's response of gratitude for grace received.
J.I. Packer
#76. The Holy Spirit's main ministry is not to give thrills but to create in us Christlike character.
J.I. Packer
#77. God then does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to know as a basis for our life of faith.
J.I. Packer
#78. This is what the LORD says: 'Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me"' (Jer 9:23-24).
J.I. Packer
#79. The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the Incarnation.
J.I. Packer
#80. There is no holiness without a Christ-centered, Christ-seeking, Christ-serving, Christ-adoring heart.
J.I. Packer
#81. Suffering is getting what you do not want while wanting what you do not get.
J.I. Packer
#82. 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.
J.I. Packer
#83. If I were the devil, one of my first aims would be to stop folk from digging into the Bible.
J.I. Packer
#84. The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again.
J.I. Packer
#85. Holiness and humanness are correlative terms and mutual implicates (as the logicians would put it). To the
J.I. Packer
#86. Holiness starts inside a person, with a right purpose that seeks to express itself in a right performance.
J.I. Packer
#87. The simple statement, 'God is for us', is in truth one of the richest and weightiest utterances that the Bible contains.
J.I. Packer
#88. Repentance, as we know, is basically not moaning and remorse, but turning and change.
J.I. Packer
#89. Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God.
J.I. Packer
#90. God's love is an exercise of his goodness toward sinners who merit only condemnation.
J.I. Packer
#91. Trying to describe what I do in prayer would be like telling the world how I make love to my wife.
J.I. Packer
#92. Today, vast stress is laid on the thought that God is personal, but this truth is so stated as to leave the impression that God is a person of the same sort as we are - weak, inadequate, ineffective, a little pathetic. But this is not the God of the Bible!
J.I. Packer
#93. 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.
J.I. Packer
#94. [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.
J.I. Packer
#95. All true theology has an evangelistic thrust, and all true evangelism is theology in action.
J.I. Packer
#96. Catechesis is the church's ministry of grounding and growing God's people in the Gospel and its implications for doctrine, devotion, duty, and delight.
J.I. Packer
#97. New Testament salvation has three tenses: past, present, and future.
J.I. Packer
#98. We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts. Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level. Let us ask the Lord to show us.
J.I. Packer
#99. God as a helpless baby, he could only lie, stare, wriggle, make noises. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets!
J.I. Packer
#100. Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be ADOPTION THROUGH PROPITIATION, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.
J.I. Packer
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