J. I. Packer Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

We are only living truly human lives just so far as we are labouring to keep God's commandments; no further.

J. I. Packer
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....

J. I. Packer
The Christian's life in all its aspects-intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness-is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it. So apart from him, not only will there be no lively believers and no lively congregations, there will be no believers and no congregations at all.

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

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

J. I. Packer
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
Creatures are not entitled to register complaints about their Creator.

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

J. I. Packer
For dishonest thinking, however well-intentioned, can only discredit the cause it serves, and must in the long run boomerang disastrously on those who indulge in it.

J. I. Packer
The gospel does in truth proclaim the redemption of reason. Obscurantism is always evil, and wilful error is always sin., All truth is God's truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them.

J. I. Packer
A simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Savior than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct.

J. I. Packer
Always and everywhere the servants of Christ are under orders to evangelize

J. I. Packer
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.

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

J. I. Packer
Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.

J. I. Packer
The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God. This means that ecclesiastical traditions and private theological speculations may never be identified with the word which God speaks, but are to be classed among the words of men which the Word of God must reform.

J. I. Packer
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.

J. I. Packer
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.

J. I. Packer
Our best works are shot through with sin and contain something for which we need to be forgiven.

J. I. Packer
There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon.

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

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

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

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

J. I. Packer
The infallibility and inerrancy of biblical teaching does not, however, guarantee the infallibility and inerrancy of any interpretation or interpreter of that teaching; nor does the recognition of its qualities as the Word of God in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert. This can be determined only by careful Bible study.

J. I. Packer
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.

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

J. I. Packer
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.

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

J. I. Packer