J. I. Packer Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

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 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.

J. I. Packer
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.

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

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

J. I. Packer
The point here is not just that an image represents God as having body and parts, whereas in reality he has neither. But the point really goes much deeper. The heart of the objection to pictures and images is that they inevitably conceal most, if not all, of the truth about the personal nature and character of the divine Being whom they represent.

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

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

J. I. Packer
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
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.

J. I. Packer
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.

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

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
We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world....It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.

J. I. Packer
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.

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

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

J. I. Packer
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.

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

J. I. Packer