J. I. Packer Quotes - Page 3

A God whom we could understand exhaustively, and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever, would be a God in man's image, and therefore an imaginary God, not the God of the Bible at all.

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.

There are ministers who never speak of repentance or self-denial. Naturally they are popular, but they are false prophets.

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.

God is good to all in some ways and to some in all ways.

One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.

We are to order our lives by the light of His Law, not by our guesses about His plan.

You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.

What is a Christian? The richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father.

Every time we mention God we become theologians, and the only question is whether we are going to be good ones or bad ones.

Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded.

We complain today that ministers do not know how to preach; but is it not equally true that our congregations do not know how to hear?

The preachers commission is to declare the whole counsel of God; but the cross is the center of that counsel.

Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.

We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God.

It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ's Spirit to convince men's consciences of the truth of Christ's gospel; and Christ's human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.

Real spiritual growth is always growth downward, so to speak, into profounder humility, which in healthy souls will become more and more apparent as they age.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To know God's love is indeed heaven on earth.

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.

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