J. I. Packer - Knowing God (1973)

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

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

J. I. Packer
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
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 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.

J. I. Packer
Wisdom is the power to see, and the inclination to choose, the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.

J. I. Packer
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.

J. I. Packer
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.

J. I. Packer
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.

J. I. Packer
The most universally awesome experience that mankind knows is to stand alone on a clear night and look at the stars. It was God who first set the stars in space; He is their Maker and Master... such are His power and His majesty.

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
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
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.

J. I. Packer
What is less often noticed is that it is precisely the kind of moral instruction that parents are constantly trying to give their children — concrete, imaginative, teaching general principles from particular instances, and seeking all the time to bring the children to appreciate and share the parent's own attitudes and view of life… The all-embracing principles of conduct

J. I. Packer
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.

J. I. Packer
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
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
Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity? In the faith of the New Testament it is central. The love of God, the taking of human form by the Son, the meaning of the cross, Christ's heavenly intercession, the way of salvation-all are to be explained in terms of itand any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards

J. I. Packer
There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.

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
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
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.

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
The Christian's instincts of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God. But this is knowledge which Christians today largely lack: and that is one reason why our faith is so feeble and our worship so flabby... When a person in the church, let alone the person in the street, uses the word God, the thought is rarely of divine majesty.

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

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

J. I. Packer