Top 200 J.I. Packer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

2. “The stars may fall, but God’s promises will stand and be fulfilled.”

— J.I. Packer

3. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

4. “The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .”

— J.I. Packer

5. “The Holy Spirit’s main ministry is not to give thrills but to create in us Christlike character.”

— J.I. Packer

6. “Men treat God’s sovereignty as a theme for controversy, but in Scripture it is matter for worship.”

— J.I. Packer

7. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

Featured in: Humility Quotes

8. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

11. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

12. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

13. “God made us thinking beings, and he guides our minds as we think things out in his presence.”

— J.I. Packer

14. “To know God’s love is indeed heaven on earth.”

— J.I. Packer

15. “Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

17. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

19. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

20. “Adoption is the highest privilege the gospel offers.”

— J.I. Packer

21. “The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again.”

— J.I. Packer

22. “God’s wrath is his righteousness reacting against unrighteousness.”

— J.I. Packer

23. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

26. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

28. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

29. “Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity.”

— J.I. Packer

30. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

31. “You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God.”

— J.I. Packer

32. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

33. “There is unspeakable comfort in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.”

— J.I. Packer

34. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

35. “God’s overriding goal is to glorify Himself.”

— J.I. Packer

36. “Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.”

— J.I. Packer

37. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

38. “There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me.”

— J.I. Packer

39. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

40. “The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.”

— J.I. Packer

41. “What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God’s sovereignty.”

— J.I. Packer

42. “Wisdom is the power to see, and the inclination to choose, the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.”

— J.I. Packer

43. “A little knowledge OF God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge ABOUT him.”

— J.I. Packer

44. “God is triune; there are within the Godhead three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and the work of salvation is one in which all three act together, the Father purposing redemption, the Son securing it and the Spirit applying it.”

— J.I. Packer

45. “The grace of God is love freely shown toward guilty sinners, contrary to their merit and indeed in defiance of their demerit.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

47. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

48. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

49. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

50. “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.”

— J.I. Packer