Top 200 J.I. Packer Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “A little knowledge OF God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge ABOUT him.”

— J.I. Packer

52. “The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away.”

— J.I. Packer

53. “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

54. “We never move on FROM the Gospel, we move on IN the Gospel.”

— J.I. Packer

55. “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

56. “The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.”

— J.I. Packer

57. “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

58. “There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death and on for ever.”

— J.I. Packer

59. “A God whom we could understand exhaustively, and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever, would be a God in man’s image, and therefore an imaginary God, not the God of the Bible at all.”

— J.I. Packer

60. “All true theology has an evangelistic thrust, and all true evangelism is theology in action.”

— J.I. Packer

61. “God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.”

— J.I. Packer

62. “Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation.”

— J.I. Packer

63. “There are no small sins against a great God.”

— J.I. Packer

64. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

65. “Even when we cannot see the why and wherefore of God’s dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always.”

— J.I. Packer

66. “Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded.”

— J.I. Packer

67. “God answers the prayer we ought to have made rather than the prayer we did make.”

— J.I. Packer

68. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

69. “For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?”

— J.I. Packer

70. “The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that.”

— J.I. Packer

71. “It is staggering that God should love sinners, yet it is true.”

— J.I. Packer

72. “Our Lord Jesus Christ is both God for man and man for God;.”

— J.I. Packer

73. “What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance, and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?”

— J.I. Packer

74. “It is often the case, as all the saints know, that fellowship with the Father and the Son is most vivid and sweet, and Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest.”

— J.I. Packer

75. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

76. “God’s wisdom is not, and never was, pledged to keep a fallen world happy, or to make ungodliness comfortable.”

— J.I. Packer

77. “Holy people glory, not in their holiness, but in Christ’s cross; for the holiest saint is never more than a justified sinner and never sees himself in any other way.”

— J.I. Packer

78. “Godliness means responding to God’s revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God’s Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.”

— J.I. Packer

79. “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

80. “Getting God in focus means thinking correctly about his character, his sovereignty, his salvation, his love, his Son, his Spirit, and all the realities of his work and ways; it also means thinking rightly about our own relationship to him as creatures either under sin or under grace, either living this responsive life of faith, hope, and love or living unresponsively, in barrenness and gloom of heart.”

— J.I. Packer

81. “The Trinity is the basis of the gospel, and the gospel is a declaration of the Trinity in action.”

— J.I. Packer

82. “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it – the fact that He knows me.”

— J.I. Packer

83. “Live each day as if thy last” is a wise word from a hymn written in 1674 by Thomas Ken. The older we get, the more needful its wisdom becomes, and if we have not already taken it to heart, we should do so now.”

— J.I. Packer

84. “My advice to a new husband is nothing more than ‘husbands, love your wives.’ And ‘love your wife as Christ has loved the church.’ Never forget that you are Christ’s representative in serving your wife.”

— J.I. Packer

85. “The idea that all are children of God is not found in the Bible anywhere.”

— J.I. Packer

86. “To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.”

— J.I. Packer

87. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

88. “Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ’s sheep.”

— J.I. Packer

89. “Repentance, as we know, is basically not moaning and remorse, but turning and change.”

— J.I. Packer

90. “The Holy Spirit is God the evangelist.”

— J.I. Packer

91. “The measure of all love is its giving. The measure of the love of God is the cross of Christ.”

— J.I. Packer

92. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

93. “Pelagianism is the natural heresy of zealous Christians who are not interested in theology.”

— J.I. Packer

94. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

95. “The gospel does in truth proclaim the redemption of reason. Obscurantism is always evil, and wilful error is always sin., All truth is God’s truth; facts, as such, are sacred, and nothing is more un-Christian than to run away from them.”

— J.I. Packer

96. “Any theology that does not lead to song is, at a fundamental level, a flawed theology.”

— J.I. Packer

97. “If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it’s bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited.”

— J.I. Packer

98. “God is good to all in some ways and to some in all ways.”

— J.I. Packer

99. “Only when you know how to die can you know how to live.”

— J.I. Packer

100. “The Christian’s instinct of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God.”

— J.I. Packer