J. I. Packer quotes:

My advice to a new husband is nothing more than 'husbands, love your wives.' And 'love your wife as Christ has loved the church.' Never forget that you are Christ's representative in serving your wife.

Christianity has stayed stable, as it must do. The doctrines don't change. The understanding of what it means to walk with God doesn't change. The reality of worship doesn't change, not at heart, anyway. So Christianity appears to be stuck.

Repentance is more than just sorrow for the past; repentance is a change of mind and heart, a new life of denying self and serving the Savior as king in self's place.

Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching.

I'm not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger - and then moving on quickly to the next blogger.

What were we made for? To know God. What aim should we have in life? To know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives? To know God. What is the best thing in life? To know God. What in humans gives God most pleasure? Knowledge of himself.

I must ask the Lord to direct the Holy Spirit within me to drain the life out of sin and in prayer.

The Spirit is not given to make Bible study needless, but to make it effective.

The whole story of the Father's Christ-exalting plan of redeeming love, from eternity to eternity, must be told, or the radical reorientation of life for which the gospel calls will not be understood, and the required total shift from man-centeredness to God-centeredness, and more specifically from self-centeredness to Christ-centeredness, will not take place.

There's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. When you truly know God, you have energy to serve Him, boldness to share Him, and contentment in Him.

There is a tremendous relief in knowing that {God's} love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.

The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.

Calvinism is the consistent endeavor to acknowledge the Creator as the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will.

I'm saying that an editorial process that is preparing the material for publication counts as part of the inspiring process whereby God, in his sovereignty, gave every word.

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."

God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.

I never get to the end of mortifying sin because sin in my heart, where it's still marauding even though it's no longer dominant, sin in my heart is constantly expressing itself in new disorderly desires.

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.

The infallibility and inerrancy of biblical teaching does not, however, guarantee the infallibility and inerrancy of any interpretation or interpreter of that teaching; nor does the recognition of its qualities as the Word of God in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert. This can be determined only by careful Bible study.

The fruit of wisdom is Christlikeness, peace, humility and love. And, the root of it is faith in Christ as the manifested wisdom of God

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

Even when we cannot see the why and wherefore of God's dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always.

[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.

But that is not because these principles are traditional; it is because they are biblical. There is certainly an arrogant, hide-bound type of traditionalism, unthinking and uncritical, which is carnal and devilish. But there is also a respectful willingness to take help from the Church's past in order to understand the Bible in the present; and such traditionalism is spiritual and Christian.

What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world - 'I don't ever want this to stop' - will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop."

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

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.

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.

To know that nothing happens in God's world apart from God's will may frighten the godless, but it stabilizes the saints.

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.

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.

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.

We need to discover all over again that worship is natural to the Christian, as it was to the godly Israelites who wrote the psalms, and that the habit of celebrating the greatness and graciousness of God yields an endless flow of thankfulness, joy, and zeal.

The Christian's instinct of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God.

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.

A half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.

There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. not merely that we know God, but that He knows us.

The Christian's life in all its aspects-intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness-is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it. So apart from him, not only will there be no lively believers and no lively congregations, there will be no believers and no congregations at all.

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.

Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.

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.

It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the most profound unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became man; Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as this truth of the incarnation.

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it - the fact that He knows me.

For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?

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?

Thank you, Mr.Lewis, for being you. I wouldn't have missed you for the world.

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

When we reach the outer limit of what Scripture says, it is time to stop arguing and start worshipping.

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.

Our high and privileged calling is to do the will of God in the power of God for the glory of God.

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.

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.

The Life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration

I'm amazed at the amount of time people spend on the Internet.

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.

Confidence that one's impressions are God-given is no guarantee that this is really so, even when they persist and grow stronger through long seasons of prayer. Bible-based wisdom must judge them.

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

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

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

Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.

What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world - 'I don't ever want this to stop' - will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop.

There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.

William Wilberforce...w as a great man who impacted the Western world as few others have done. Blessed with brains, charm, influence and initiative, much wealth ... he put evangelism on Britain's map as a power for social change, first by overthrowing the slave trade almost single-handed and then by generating a stream of societies for doing good and reducing evil in public life... To forget such men is foolish.

Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God.

It is staggering that God should love sinners, yet it is true.

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 few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God's work as Judge.

If you are walking backward, away from something you think is a mistake, you may be right in supposing it is a mistake, but for you to be walking backward is never right. You know what happens to people who walk backward.... We are meant to walk forward, not backward, and reaction is always a matter of walking backward.

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.

The way to be truly happy is to be truly human, and the way to be truly human is to be truly godly.

Not until we have become humble and teachable, standing in awe of God's holiness and sovereignty...a cknowledging our own littleness, distrusting our own thoughts, and willing to have our minds turned upside down, can divine wisdom become ours.

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.

God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.

Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.

Evangelical churches are weaker than we realize because we don't teach the confessions and doctrine.

In some Old Testament books, it's very evident that an editor has been at work. That's quite all right. It's part of the process.

Do I as a Christian understand myself? Do I know my own real identity? My own real destiny? I am a child of God, God is my Father; heaven is my home; every day is one day nearer. My Saviour is my brother; every Christian is my brother too. Say it over and over again to yourself first thing in the morning, last thing at night, as you wait for the bus, any time when your mind is free, and ask God that you may be enabled to live as one who knows it is all utterly and completely true. For this is the Christians secret of the Christian life, of a God-honouring life.

Christ had no interest in gathering vast crowds of professed adherents who would melt away as soon as they found out what following Him actually demanded of them. In our own presentation of Christ's gospel, therefore, we need to lay a similar stress on the cost of following Christ and make sinners face it soberly before we urge them to respond to the message of free forgiveness. In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.

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.

If I were the devil, one of my first aims would be to stop folk from digging into the Bible.

The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away.

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.

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.

What God does in time, He planned from eternity. And all that He planned in eternity He carries out in time.

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

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.

We dishonor God if we proclaim a Savior who satisfies and then go around discontent

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

The gospel tells that our Judge has become our Savior.

Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ's sheep.

I need not torment myself with the fear that my faith may fail; as grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end. Faith, both in its origin and continuance, is a gift of grace (Phil 1:29).

We never move on FROM the Gospel, we move on IN the Gospel

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God.

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

What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.

Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance.

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

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

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

Repentance, as we know, is basically not moaning and remorse, but turning and change.

Simple assent to the gospel, divorced from a transforming commitment to the living Christ, is by Biblical standards less than faith, and less than saving, and to elicit only assent of this kind would be to secure only false conversions.

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

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.

Calvary not merely made possible the salvation of those for whom Christ died; it ensured that they would be brought to faith and their salvation made actual.

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.

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

Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.

If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both.

God has spoken to man, and the Bible is his Word, given to us to make us wise unto salvation... Godliness means responding to God's revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God's Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.

God made life, and God alone can tell us its meaning.

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.

The Holy Spirit is God the evangelist.

There are no small sins against a great God

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.