J. I. Packer
It is staggering that God should love sinners, yet it is true.Collection: Should
We are to order our lives by the light of His Law, not by our guesses about His plan.Collection: Christian
One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.Collection: Bible
Martin Luther described the doctrine of justification by faith as the article of faith that decides whether the church is standing or falling. By this he meant that when this doctrine is understood, believed, and preached, as it was in New-Testament times, the church stands in the grace of God and is alive; but where it is neglected, overlaid, or denied, ... the church falls from grace and its life drains away, leaving it in a state of darkness and death.Collection: Fall
The preachers commission is to declare the whole counsel of God; but the cross is the center of that counsel.Collection: Crosses
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.Collection: Spiritual
Whatever else in the Bible catches your eye, do not let it distract you from Him.Collection: Eye
The way to be truly happy is to be truly human, and the way to be truly human is to be truly godly.Collection: Godly
The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again.Collection: Born Again
In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Commitment
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.Collection: Angel
Any theology that does not lead to song is, at a fundamental level, a flawed theology.Collection: Song
God's overriding goal is to glorify Himself.Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Christian
Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.Collection: Fiction
Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.Collection: Men
The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. No account of God's peace which does not start here can do other than mislead.Collection: Firsts
The more you praise, the more vigor you will have for prayer; and the more you pray, the more matter you will have for praise.Collection: Prayer
Think against your feelings; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.Collection: Emotional
What, after all, are the world's deepest problems? They are what they always have been, the individual's problemsâthe meaning of life and death, the mastery of self, the quest for value and worth-whileness and freedom within, the transcending of loneliness, the longing for love and a sense of significance, and for peace. Society's problems are deep, but the individual's problems go deeper; Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, or Shakespeare will show us that, if we hesitate to take it from the Bible.Collection: Loneliness
All true theology has an evangelistic thrust, and all true evangelism is theology in action.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Faith
Trying to describe what I do in prayer would be like telling the world how I make love to my wife.Collection: Prayer
If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it's bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited.Collection: Conceited
The words and lives of Christian men must be in continual process of reformation by the written Word of their God. This means that ecclesiastical traditions and private theological speculations may never be identified with the word which God speaks, but are to be classed among the words of men which the Word of God must reform.Collection: Christian
To mend our own relationship with God, regaining God's favor after having once lost it, is beyond the power of any one of us. And one must see and bow to this before one can share the biblical faith in God's grace.Collection: Biblical
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.Collection: Believe
God's Word is not presented in Scripture in the form of a theological system, but it admits of being stated in that form, and, indeed, requires to be so stated before we can properly grasp it - grasp it, that is, as a whole. Every text has its immediate context in the passage from which it comes, its broader context in the book to which it belongs, and its ultimate context in the Bible as a whole; and it needs to be rightly related to each of these contexts if its character, scope and significance is to be adequately understood.Collection: Book
The most excellent study of expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity.Collection: Christian
We are only living truly human lives just so far as we are labouring to keep God's commandments; no further.Collection: Human Life
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.Collection: Christian
Im amazed at the amount of time people spend on the Internet.Collection: People
The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.Collection: Church
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.Collection: Prayer
There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon.Collection: Two
Our are speculations are not the measure of our God.Collection: Speculation
Calvinism is the consistent endeavor to acknowledge the Creator as the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will.Collection: Lord
Jesus' pattern prayer, which is both crutch, road, and walking lesson for the spiritually lame like ourselves, tells us to start with God: for God matters infinitely more than we do.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Prayer
Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.Collection: Spiritual
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 standardsCollection: Son
Holy is the Bible word for all that makes God different from us, in particular his awesome power and purity.Collection: Different
Men who know their God are before anything else men who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God's glory come to expression is in their prayers. If there is little energy for such prayer, and little consequent practice of it, this is a sure sign that as yet we scarcely know our God.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Christian
Evangelical churches are weaker than we realize because we dont teach the confessions and doctrine.Collection: Church
God made us thinking beings, and he guides our minds as we think things out in his presence.Collection: Thinking
N.T. Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregroundsCollection: Backgrounds
God then does not profess to answer in Scripture all the questions that we, in our boundless curiosity, would like to ask about Scripture. He tells us merely as much as He sees we need to know as a basis for our life of faith.Collection: Curiosity