Inspirational Quotes by J.I. Packer

“the nasty thing which no polite person nowadays will talk about in public. But death, even when unmentionable, remains inescapable. The one sure fact of life is that one day, with or without warning, quietly or painfully, it is going to stop.”

“From sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil . . . from all blindness of heart; from pride, vain-glory and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness . . . from fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, and flesh, and the devil . . . from sudden [unexpected, and unprepared- for] death . . . from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and Commandment, Good Lord, deliver us.”

“Sub-Christian? Some read the Old Testament as so much primitive groping and guesswork, which the New Testament sweeps away. But “God . . . spoke through the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1), of whom Moses was the greatest (see Deuteronomy 34:10-12); and his Commandments, given through Moses, set a moral and spiritual standard for living which is not superseded, but carries God’s authority forever. Note that Jesus’ twofold law of love, summarizing the Commandments, comes from Moses’ own God-taught elaboration of them (for that is what the Pentateuchal law-codes are). “Love your God” is from Deuteronomy 6:5, “love your neighbor” from Leviticus 19:18. It cannot be too much stressed that Old Testament moral teaching (as distinct from the Old Testament revelation of grace) is not inferior to that of the New Testament, let alone the conventional standards of our time. The barbarities of lawless sex, violence, and exploitation, cutthroat business methods, class warfare, disregard for one’s family, and the like are sanctioned only by our modern secular society. The supposedly primitive Old Testament, and the 3000-year-old Commandments in particular, are bulwarks against all these things. But (you say) doesn’t this sort of talk set the Old Testament above Christ? Can that be right? Surely teaching that antedates him by a millennium and a quarter must be inferior to his? Surely the Commandments are too negative, always and only saying “don’t . . .”? Surely we must look elsewhere for full Christian standards? Fair queries; but there is a twofold answer. First, Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17) that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it; that is, to be, and help others to be, all that God in the Commandments had required. What Jesus destroyed was inadequate expositions of the law, not the law itself (Matthew 5:21-48; 15:1-9; etc.). By giving truer expositions, he actually republished the law. The Sermon on the Mount itself consists of themes from the Decalogue developed in a Christian context. Second, the negative form of the Commandments has positive implications. “Where a sin is forbidden, the contrary duty is commanded” (Westminster Larger Catechism, question 99). The negative form was needed at Sinai (as in the West today) to curb current lawlessness which threatened both godliness and national life. But the positive content pointed up by Christ—loving God with all one’s powers, and one’s neighbor as oneself—is very clearly there, as we shall see.”

“Part of the answer to the question that life's roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my Heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Chrislike virtue.”

“To long for total spiritual well-being is right and natural, but to believe that one is anywhere near it is to be utterly self-deceived.”

“If we want to live and die in peace, holiness is in truth a necessity.”

“Prayer and holiness are learned in a similar way as commitments are made, habits are formed and battles are fought against a real opponent (Satan, in this case), who with great cunning plays constantly on our weak spots.”

“Fundamentally, the factor that makes the difference is neither one’s intelligence quotient, nor the number of books one has read nor the conferences, camps and seminars one has attended, but the quality of the fellowship with Christ that one maintains through life’s vicissitudes.”

“Holy” in both biblical languages means separated and set apart for God, consecrated and made over to Him.”

“New Testament salvation has three tenses: past, present, and future.”

“Sin is a universal, trans-cultural reality;”

“a deepening sense of one’s sinfulness remains a touchstone of the genuine Christian life.”

“Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it.”

“How are we to do this? 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. We have some idea, perhaps, what prayer is, but what is meditation? Well may we ask, for meditation is a lost art today, and Christian people suffer grievously from their ignorance of the practice. 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. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God.”

“For many of us, these are comparatively unfamiliar themes. They were not always so to the people of God. There was a time when the subject of God’s attributes (as it was called) was thought so important as to be included in the catechism which all children in the churches were taught and all adult members were expected to know. Thus, to the fourth question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is God?” the answer read as follows: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” This statement the great Charles Hodge described as “probably the best definition of God ever penned by man.”

“And with what fervour of spirit and strength of faith may he enforce his prayers, by pleading the several gracious promises which are expressly to his case!”

“People who know their God are before anything else people who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God’s glory come to expression is in their prayers.”

“God’s love is holy love. The God whom Jesus made known is not a God who is indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, a God whose ideal for his children is that they should “be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). He will not take into his company any person, however orthodox in mind, who will not follow after holiness of life.”

“God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

“But absurdist tapeworms and Antoinette’s fever are ills from which, in the nature of the case, Christians are immune, except for occasional spells of derangement when the power of temptation presses their minds out of shape—and these, by God’s mercy, do not last.”