Top 200 J.I. Packer Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle however do.”

— J.I. Packer

102. “In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.”

— J.I. Packer

103. “The gospel tells that our Judge has become our Savior.”

— J.I. Packer

104. “I must ask the Lord to direct the Holy Spirit within me to drain the life out of sin and in prayer.”

— J.I. Packer

105. “Think against your feelings; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.”

— J.I. Packer

106. “The battle against pride in the heart is lifelong, so humility should become an ever more deeply seated attitude of living.”

— J.I. Packer

107. “Joy is a condition that is experienced, but it is more than a feeling; it is, primarily, a state of mind.”

— J.I. Packer

108. “Scripture is the most up-to-date and relevant reading that ever comes my way.”

— J.I. Packer

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

— J.I. Packer

110. “I never get to the end of mortifying sin because sin in my heart, where it’s still marauding even though it’s no longer dominant, sin in my heart is constantly expressing itself in new disorderly desires.”

— J.I. Packer

111. “Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.”

— J.I. Packer

112. “Think against your feelings; argue yourself out of the gloom they have spread; look up from your problems to the God of the gospel.”

— J.I. Packer

113. “There are ministers who never speak of repentance or self-denial. Naturally they are popular, but they are false prophets.”

— J.I. Packer

114. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

115. “This one word ‘grace’ contains within itself the whole of New Testament theology.”

— J.I. Packer

116. “He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.”

— J.I. Packer

117. “The Spirit is not given to make Bible study needless, but to make it effective.”

— J.I. Packer

118. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

119. “A British professor of theology once described to me the world to which believers will go as “an unknown country with a well-known inhabitant.” When Jesus Christ the courier has already become well known to us through the Gospels and Pastoral Letters of the New Testament, the prospect of transitioning with him into a world in which we shall see him as he is and be constantly in his company will be something we find alluring rather than alarming.”

— J.I. Packer

120. “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

121. “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

122. “A simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Savior than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct.”

— J.I. Packer

123. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

124. “The meaning of “He will give us all things” can be put thus: one day we will see that nothing – literally nothing – which could have increased our eternal happiness has been denied us, and that nothing – literally nothing – that could have reduced that happiness has been left with us.”

— J.I. Packer

125. “The essence of God’s action in wrath is to give people what they choose, in all its implications.”

— J.I. Packer

126. “Living becomes an awesome business when you realize that you spend every moment of your life in the sight and company of an omniscient, omnipresent Creator.”

— J.I. Packer

127. “We are not fit for a place in God’s family; the idea of his loving and exalting us sinners as he loves and has exalted the Lord Jesus sounds ludicrous and wild – yet that, and nothing less than that, is what our adoption means.”

— J.I. Packer

128. “Suffering is getting what you do not want while wanting what you do not get.”

— J.I. Packer

129. “If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both.”

— J.I. Packer

130. “God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.”

— J.I. Packer

131. “Arminianism is ‘natural’ in one sense, in that it represents a characteristic perversion of Biblical teaching by the fallen mind of man.”

— J.I. Packer

132. “We think of God as too much like what we are. Learn to acknowledge the full majesty of your incomparable God and Savior.”

— J.I. Packer

133. “To mend our own relationship with God, regaining God’s favor after having once lost it, is beyond the power of any one of us. And one must see and bow to this before one can share the biblical faith in God’s grace.”

— J.I. Packer

134. “Our best works are shot through with sin and contain something for which we need to be forgiven.”

— J.I. Packer

135. “The Life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration.”

— J.I. Packer

136. “We dishonor God if we proclaim a Savior who satisfies and then go around discontent.”

— J.I. Packer

137. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

138. “I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger – and then moving on quickly to the next blogger.”

— J.I. Packer

139. “We are to order our lives by the light of His Law, not by our guesses about His plan.”

— J.I. Packer

140. “Sinners cannot obey the gospel, any more than the law, without renewal of heart.”

— J.I. Packer

141. “Trying to describe what I do in prayer would be like telling the world how I make love to my wife.”

— J.I. Packer

142. “Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching.”

— J.I. Packer

143. “Simple assent to the gospel, divorced from a transforming commitment to the living Christ, is by Biblical standards less than faith, and less than saving, and to elicit only assent of this kind would be to secure only false conversions.”

— J.I. Packer

144. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

145. “The character of God is today, and always will be, exactly what it was in Bible times.”

— J.I. Packer

146. “There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon.”

— J.I. Packer

147. “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.”

— J.I. Packer

148. “There are few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God’s work as Judge.”

— J.I. Packer

149. “If one preaches the Bible biblically, one cannot help preaching the gospel all the time...”

— J.I. Packer

150. “There is nothing more irreligious than self-absorbed religion.”

— J.I. Packer