J.I. Packer (76)
a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth 
J.I. Packer
A Quest for Godliness (126)9.8K
I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is.
People treat God's sovereignty as a matter of controversy, but in Scripture it is a matter of worship.
With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Knowing God (The Love of God, 130)
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.
God ordains our prayers as means of receiving what he plans to give, all to enrich our relationship to him. As the perfect Father of his children, he reserves the right to answer the requests we should have made rather than those we actually made when we have asked for the wrong thing; but he will take action one way or another in every situation of need that we bring before him. Systematic Theology A Lecture
The Supper is rightly viewed as a means of grace. The efficacy of the sacraments ...resides not in the faith or virtue of the minister but in the faithfulness of God. As the preaching of the Word makes the gospel audible, so the sacraments make it visible, and the Holy Spirit stirs up faith by both means.
Tom Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds, but Wright does more than that; he denies a crucial component of justification, namely imputation.
Calvary's saving power does not depend on faith being added to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it.
The Christian's motto should not be 'Let go and let God' but 'Trust God and get going.
In goodness and sovereignty God permits evil, punishes evil with evil, brings good from evil and redeems from evil.
The cross is the object of faith, the theme of worship, the means of bringing men to God, the basis of living the saved life, the burden of apostolic preaching, and the reality signified by the sacraments.
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.
For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. 'Father' is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.Knowing God (??)
New Testament references to the blood of Christ are regularly sacrificial (e.g., Rom 3:25; 5:9; Eph 1:7; Rev 1:5). As a perfect sacrifice for sin (Rom 8:3; Eph 5:2; 1Pet 1:18–19), Christ's death was our redemption (i.e., our rescue by ransom: the paying of a price that freed us from the jeopardy of guilt, enslavement to sin, and expectation of wrath; Rom 3:24; Gal 4:4–5; Col 1:14)Concise Theology, Tyndale House, 135
God loves all in some ways, and God loves some in all ways.
Father' is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.
In the New Testament, grace means God's love in action toward people 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. Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.
If you ask, 'Why is this happening?' no light may come, but if you ask, 'How am I to glorify God now?' there will always be an answer.
There is tremendous relief in knowing his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me.
Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.
Adoption is the highest privilege of the gospel. The traitor is forgiven, brought in for supper, and given the family name. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.
Readiness to die is the first step in learning to live.
It is here, in the thing that happened after the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. 'The Word became flesh' (Jn. 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, 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.Knowing God
The fact that today's evangelicals are so largely out of touch with their own history, and so cannot discern how small and dry and lightweight and superficial and childish they are compared with those from whom they take their name, is one of the more glaring of our current shortcomings, all the more so for going constantly unnoticed.
Those who suppose that the doctrine of God's grace tends to encourage moral laxity are simply showing that, in the most literal sense, they do not know what they are talking about. For love awakens love in return; Knowing God (The Grace of God, 152)
there are few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God's work as Judge. Knowing God (God the Judge, 152)
The Bible appears like a symphony orchestra, with the Holy Spirit as its Toscanini; each instrumentalist has been brought willingly, spontaneously, creatively, to play his notes just as the great conductor desired, in full harmony with each other, though none of them could ever hear the music as a whole. God Has Spoken (99)
We think of God as too much like what we are. Learn to acknowledge the full majesty of your incomparable God and Savior.
Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God. . . . Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come.
The life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration.
The church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.
Application is the preacher's highway from the head to the heart.
The proper aim of preaching is to mediate meetings with God.
Wait on the Lord' is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.
The Scriptures are the lifeline God throws us in order to ensure he and we stay connected while the rescue is in process.
Every view of Scripture proves, on analysis, to be bound up with an overall view of God and man.
The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God's help to do just that.
He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Savior, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.
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For Christians, this means taking God's moral law as our rule and God's incarnate Son as our model; this is where our analysis of holiness must startRediscovering Holiness
Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive and one fears, prayerless. Cultivating an ethos that encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor, for the most part, seek influence beyond their own Christian circle... [but] the Puritans labored for a holy England and New England -sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgement threatens.
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.
Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ's sheep.
All Christians believe in divine sovereignty. On our feet we may have arguments about it, but on our knees we are all agreed.
For the Christian, the best is always yet to be. . . . Our Father's wealth is immeasurable, and we will inherit the entire estate.
We never move on from the gospel; we move on in the gospel.
To know that nothing happens in God's world apart from God's will may frighten the godless, but it stabilizes the saints.
Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a man's heart.
There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God's favor to them in life, through death and on for ever.
There are teachers in the church today who never speak of repentance, self-denial, the call to be relatively poor for the Lord's sake, or any other demanding aspect of discipleship. Naturally they are popular and approved, but for all that, they are false prophetsKnowing God (?)
I pray to the Father through the mediation of the Son and the enabling of the Holy Spirit. I may speak also to the Son and the Spirit directly when this is appropriate: that is, when I am praying about something that Scripture specified as the direct concern of either.
a non-cognitive closeness to God in which the mind is emptied of all personal thoughts about him, and indeed of all thoughts whatsoever, [is Eastern] mysticism in Western dress.Praying: Finding Our Way through Duty to Delight (65)
It is safe to say that no religion anywhere has ever laid such stress on the need for thanksgiving, nor called on its adherents so incessantly and insistently to give God thanks, as does the religion of the Bible in both its Old and New Testament forms. Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 993-994). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
converted Christians regularly experience deeper conviction of sin after their conversion than they knew before, and why one dimension of spiritual growth, as we shall shortly see, is growth downward into a more thorough humility and more radical repentance. Though not much is said about this nowadays, a deepening sense of one's sinfulness remains a touchstone of the genuine Christian life.Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 667-669). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
If we want to be fruitful in evangelism, we must cultivate holiness of life.Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Location 456). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Holiness is actually the true health of the person. Anything else is ugliness and deformity at character level; a malfunctioning of the individual; a crippled state of soul. The various forms of bodily sickness and impairment that Jesus healed are so many illustrations of this deeper, inward deformity.Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 444-446). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
whatever further reasons there may be why God exposes us to the joys and sorrows, fulfillments and frustrations, delights and disappointments, happinesses and hurts, that make up the emotional reality of our lives, all these experiences are part of His curriculum for us in the school of holiness, which is His spiritual gymnasium for our reshaping and rebuilding in the moral likeness of Jesus Christ.Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 138-141). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The recovering of old truth, truth that has been a means of blessing in the past, can under God become the means of blessing again in the present, while the quest for newer alternatives may well prove barren.
Packer, J. I.. Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 97-98). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 97-98). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
But the shift of Christian interest away from the pursuit of holiness to focus on fun and fulfillment, ego massage and techniques for present success, and public issues that carry no challenge to one's personal morals, is a fact. To my mind it is a sad and scandalous fact, and one that needs to be reversed.Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Kindle Locations 44-46). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[God] shows his freedom and lordship by discriminating between sinners, causing some to hear the gospel while others do not hear it, and moving some of those who hear it to repentance while leaving others in their unbelief, thus teaching his saints that he owes mercy to none and that it is entirely of his grace, not at all through their own effort, that they themselves have found life.Knowing God
Are you clear what zeal is? It is not fanaticism; it is not wildness; it is not irresponsible enthusiasm; it is not any form of push egoism. It is, rather, a humble, revent, businesslike, single-minded commitment to the hallowing of God's name and the doing of his will.A Passion for Faithfulness
The prayer of a Christian is not an attempt to force God's hand, but a humble acknowledgement of helplessness and dependence.Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
In group Bible studies generally, participants are led to look directly for personal devotional applications without first contemplating the writers' points about the greatness, goals, methods, and mystery of God. In putting together Christian books and magazines for popular reading and in composing, preaching, hearing, and thinking about sermons, the story is the same: it is assumed that our reaction to realities is more significant than any of the realities to which we react.Grounded in the Gospel (11)
Evangelism and theology for the most part go separate ways, and the result is great loss for both. When theology is not held on course by the demands of evangelistic communication, it grows abstract and speculative, wayward in method, theoretical in interest and irresponsible in stance. When evangelism is not fertilized, fed and controlled by theology, it becomes a stylized performance, seeking its effect through manipulative skills rather than the power of vision and the force of truth. Both theology and evangelism are then, in one important sense, unreal, false to their own God-given nature; for all true theology has an evangelistic thrust, and all true evangelism is theology in action. Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Page 71)
The unceasing activity of the Creator, whereby in overflowing bounty and goodwill, He upholds His creatures in ordered existence, guides and governs all events, circumstances, and free acts of angels and men, and directs everything to its appointed goal, for His own glory. The New Bible Dictionary
With what right may we call ourselves children of the Reformation? Much modern Protestantism would be neither owned nor even recognised by the pioneer Reformers. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston, Introduction to the The Bondage of the Will (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1957) pp. 59-60
So the love of God who is spirit is no fitful, fluctuating thing, as the love of man is, nor is it a mere impotent longing for things that may never be; it is, rather, a spontaneous determination of God's whole being in an attitude of benevolence and benefaction, an attitude freely chosen and firmly fixed. Knowing God (The Love of God, 134)
God's love is an exercise of His goodness towards individual sinners whereby, having identified Himself with their welfare, He has given His Son to be their Saviour, and now brings them to know and enjoy Him in a covenant relation Knowing God (The Love of God, 136)
People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament to the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background; but if we examine the New Testament, even in the most cursory way, we find at once that the Old Testament emphasis on God's action as Judge, far from being reduced is actually intensified. Knowing God (God as Judge, 155)
We are ever prone to regard sin lightly, to gloss over its hideousness, to make excuses for it. But the more we study and ponder God's abhorrence of sin and His frightful vengeance upon it, the more likely are we to realise its heinousness. Knowing God (The Wrath of God, 174))
the Christian tastes God in all his or her pleasures, and this increases them, whereas for other people pleasure brings with it a sense of hollowness which reduces it. God Has Spoken (14)
Sometimes, indeed we represent it as a state of virtue (as is man's way with his weaknesses), censuring our predecessors for being too definite and dogmatic, and complimenting ourselves on being open-minded, flexible, and free from obscurantism. We must, however, be careful here. It has been well said that if you open your mind wide enough a great deal of rubbish will be tipped into it. God Has Spoken (34)
Election in scripture is not presented as matter for argument or something to be frightened of. But as reassurance for the people of God, encouragement to praise God for your salvation because it's all his doing. And to trust with full confidence, that he's going to finish the work he's started. Systematic Theology A Lecture
All biblical doctrines are presented as matter for worship and the encouragement and strengthening of faith. And if you and I don't present them in a way that's calculated to produce that same effect we're mishandling scripture. Systematic Theology A Lecture
Instead of saying that because there is evil in the world God can't be wise, because God is wise, the evil in the world makes sense as a means to ultimate good and ultimate glory for the God who is overruling all that happens. Systematic A Lecture
Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.
An idea which is more pagan than Christian has got hold of people's minds, [that] if God was really good and really loving he would behave like an indulgent parent without standards like a parent behaves in the human family today. He would keep the children from any pain or grief that he could, and give them anything they happen to want. Well you know what happens to a human child when brought up like that, they are a spoiled child, and they never attain human maturity. Systematic Lecture
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