J. I. Packer
For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?Collection: Goal
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.Collection: Prayer
Nothing can alter the character of God. In the course of a human life, tastes and outlook and temper may change radically: a kind, equable man may turn bitter and crotchety: a man of good-will may grow cynical and callous. But nothing of this sort happens to the Creator. He never becomes less truthful, or merciful, or just, or good, than He used to be.Collection: God
Adoption is the highest privilege the gospel offers.Collection: Adoption
When we reach the outer limit of what Scripture says, it is time to stop arguing and start worshipping.Collection: Limits
Our best works are shot through with sin and contain something for which we need to be forgiven.Collection: Needs
The Church, therefore, has two constant needs; instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred.Collection: Two
Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Son
The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.Collection: Mystery
We meet God through entering into a relationship both of dependance on Jesus as our Saviour and Friend and of discipleship to Him as our Lord and Master.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Doctrine
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.Collection: Focus
The Christian's instinct of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God.Collection: Christian
We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world....It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.Collection: Bible
It has been said that in the New Testament doctrine is grace; and ethics is gratitude; and something is wrong with any form of Christianity in which, experimentally and practically, this saying is not being verified. 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; and love, once awakened, desires to give pleasure.Collection: Gratitude
Certainly true worship invigorates, but to plan invigoration is not necessarily to order worship.Collection: Order
Moreover, the whole purpose of God's mighty acts is to bring man to know Him by faith; and Scripture knows no foundation for faith but the spoken word of God, inviting our trust in Him on the basis of what He has done for us.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Doubt
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.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Christmas
The essence of God's action in wrath is to give people what they choose, in all its implications.Collection: Wrath
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.Collection: Jesus
The character of God is today, and always will be, exactly what it was in Bible times.Collection: Character
Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught.Collection: Taught
God's ways do not change... Still he 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 hew 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.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Father
There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.Collection: Self
We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts. Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level. Let us ask the Lord to show us.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Would Be
But man's eyes are blind through sin, and he can discern no part of God's truth till the Spirit opens them. Inner illumination, leading directly as it does to a deep, inescapable conviction, is thus fundamental to the Spirit's work as a teacher.Collection: Teacher
The Evangelical is not afraid of facts, for he knows that all facts are God's facts; nor is he afraid of thinking, for he knows that all truth is God's truth, and right reason cannot endanger sound faith.Collection: Thinking
Only when it is seen that what decides each individual's destiny is whether or not God decides to save him from his sins, and that this is a decision that God need not make in any individual case, can one begin to grasp the biblical view of grace.Collection: Biblical
God was happy without humans before they were made; he would have continued happy had he simply destroyed them after they had sinned; but as it is he has set his love upon particular sinners, and this means that, by his own free voluntary choice, he will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of them to heaven. He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Christian