Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

For over 40 years, J. I. Packer's classic has been an important tool to help Christians around the world discover the wonder, the glory and the joy of knowing God. In 2006, Christianity TodayChristianity Today voted this title one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals. This edition is updated with Americanized language and spelling and a new preface by the author.

Stemming from Packer's profound theological knowledge, Knowing GodKnowing God brings together two important facets of the Christian faith:
1. Knowing about God and
2. Knowing God through the context of a close relationship with the person of Jesus Christ.

Written in an engaging and practical tone, this thought-provoking work seeks to transform and enrich the Christian understanding of God. Explaining both who God is and how we can relate to him, Packer divides his book into three sections: The first directs our attention to how and why we know God, the second to the attributes of God and the third to the benefits enjoyed by a those who know him intimately. This guide leads readers into a greater understanding of God while providing advice to gaining a closer relationship with him as a result.

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Paperback, 286 pages

Published June 24th 1993 by InterVarsity Press (first published 1973)

tags: theology, spirituality, faith, christianity, christian non fiction, religion, god, nonfiction, christian living, christian

Book Quotes

“Redeeming love and retributive justice joined hands, so to speak, at Calvary, for there God showed himself to be “just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.”

― J.I. Packer

“Never, perhaps, since Paul wrote has there been more need to labor this point than there is today. Modern muddle-headedness and confusion as to the meaning of faith in God are almost beyond description. People say they believe in God, but they have no idea who it is that they believe in, or what difference believing in him may make. Christians who want to help their floundering fellows into what a famous old tract used to call “safety, certainty and enjoyment” are constantly bewildered as to where to begin: the fantastic hodgepodge of fancies about God quite takes their breath away. How on earth have people got into such a muddle? What lies at the root of their confusion? And where is the starting point for setting them straight? To these questions there are several complementary sets of answers. One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word, we have to try to help them unlearn the pride and, in some cases, the misconceptions about Scripture which gave rise to this attitude and to base their convictions henceforth not on what they feel but on what the Bible says. A second answer is that modern people think of all religions as equal and equivalent-they draw their ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources; we have to try to show people the uniqueness and finality of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s last word to man. A third answer is that people have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do; it is our task to try to introduce people to this fact about themselves and so make them self-distrustful and open to correction by the word of Christ. A fourth answer, no less basic than the three already given, is that people today are in the habit of disassociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of his severity; we must seek to wean them from this habit, since nothing but misbelief is possible as long as it persists.”

― J.I. Packer

“We must learn to reverence God. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps 111:10; Prov 9:10; compare Job 28:28; Prov 1:7; 15:33). Not till we have become humble and teachable, standing in awe of God’s holiness and sovereignty (“the great and awesome God,” Neh 1:5; compare 4:14; 9:32; Deut 7:21; 10:17; Ps 99:3; Jer 20:11), acknowledging our own littleness, distrusting our own thoughts and willing to have our minds turned upside down, can divine wisdom become ours. It is to be feared that many Christians spend all their lives in too unhumbled and conceited a frame of mind ever to gain wisdom from God at all. Not for nothing does Scripture say, “with the lowly is wisdom” (Prov 11:2 KJV).”

― J.I. Packer

“The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. . . . God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. . . . It [discipline] produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb 12:6-11).”

― J.I. Packer

“What Abraham needed most of all was to learn the practice of living in God’s presence, seeing all life in relation to him, and looking to him, and him alone, as Commander, Defender and Rewarder.”

― J.I. Packer

“God say through Jeremiah, “Let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me”—for knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a person’s heart.”

― J.I. Packer

“To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One” (Is 40:25 RSV). This question rebukes wrong thoughts about God.”

― J.I. Packer

“Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord and my judgment is passed away from my God?” (Is 40:27 RV). This question rebukes wrong thoughts about ourselves.”

― J.I. Packer

“Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?” (Is 40:28 KJV). This question rebukes our slowness to believe in God’s majesty.”

― J.I. Packer

“John Owen and John Calvin knew more theology than John Bunyan or Billy Bray, but who would deny that the latter pair knew their God every bit as well as the former?”

― J.I. Packer

“First, we must recognize how much we lack knowledge of God. 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.”

― J.I. Packer

“Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him as he takes knowledge of you. Knowing about him is a necessary precondition of trusting in him (‘how could they have faith in one they had never heard of?’ [Romans 10:4 NEB]), but the width of our knowledge about him is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him (pp. 39-40).”

― J.I. Packer

topics: Christianity

“God loves creatures who have become unlovely and (one would have thought) unlovable.”

― J.I. Packer

“What is the purpose of grace? Primarily, to restore our relationship with God. When God lays the foundation of this restored relationship, by forgiving our sins as we trust his Son, he does so in order that henceforth we and he may live in fellowship. And what he does in renewing our nature is intended to make us capable of, and actually to lead us into, the exercise of love, trust, delight, hope and obedience Godward—those acts which, from our side, make up the reality of fellowship with God, who is constantly making himself known to us. This is what all the work of grace aims at—an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with him. Grace is God drawing us sinners closer and closer to himself. How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the world, the flesh and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstances, nor yet by shielding us from troubles created by our own temperament and psychology; but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely. This is the ultimate reason, from our standpoint, why God fills our lives with troubles and perplexities of one sort and another: it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold him fast. The reason why the Bible spends so much of its time reiterating that God is a strong rock, a firm defense, and a sure refuge and help for the weak, is that God spends so much of his time bringing home to us that we are weak, both mentally and morally, and dare not trust ourselves to find, or to follow, the right road.”

― J.I. Packer

“we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. 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.”

― J.I. Packer

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

― J.I. Packer

“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.”

― J.I. Packer

“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.”

― J.I. Packer

“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!”

― J.I. Packer

“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.”

― J.I. Packer

J.I. Packer

What do J. I. Packer, Billy Graham and Richard John Neuhaus have in common? Each was recently named by TIME magazine as among the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.

Dr. Packer, the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology at Regent College, was hailed by TIME as “a doctrinal Solomon” among Protestants. “Mediating debates on everything from a particular Bible translation to the acceptability of free-flowing Pentecostal spirituality, Packer helps unify a community [evange licalism] that could easily fall victim to its internal tensions.”

Knowing God, Dr. Packer’s seminal 1973 work, was lauded as a book which articulated shared beliefs for members of diverse denominations; the TIME profile quotes Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington as saying, “conservative Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists could all look to [Knowing God] and say, ‘This sums it all up for us.’”

In a similar tribute to Dr. Packer almost ten years ago, American theologian Mark Noll wrote in Christianity Today that, “Packer’s ability to address immensely important subjects in crisp, succinct sentences is one of the reasons why, both as an author and speaker, he has played such an important role among American evangelicals for four decades.”

For over 25 years Regent College students have been privileged to study under Dr. Packer’s clear and lucid teaching, and our faculty, staff and students celebrate the international recognition he rightly receives as a leading Christian thinker and teacher.

(http://www.regent-college.edu/about_r...http://www.regent-college.edu/about_r...)... Show more

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