J. I. Packer Quotes
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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.
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Wisdom is the power to see, and the inclination to choose, the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
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[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.
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Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle however do.
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There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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You thank God [for your salvation] because "you do not attribute your repenting and believing to your own wisdom, or prudence, or sound judgment, or good sense.
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The Christian's instinct of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God.
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If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it's bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited.
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Arminianism is 'natural' in one sense, in that it represents a characteristic perversion of Biblical teaching by the fallen mind of man.
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Revival is the visitation of God which brings to life Christians who have been sleeping and restores a deep sense of God's near presence and holiness. Thence springs a vivid sense of sin and a profound exercise of heart in repentance, praise, and love, with an evangelistic outflow.
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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.
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Calvinism is the consistent endeavor to acknowledge the Creator as the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will.
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What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance, and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?
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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.
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We think of God as too much like what we are. Learn to acknowledge the full majesty of your incomparable God and Savior.
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But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.
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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.
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The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .