20 Unforgettable Quotes by J. I. Packer

On 17th July 2020, another giant of the Christian faith, J. I. Packer went to be with the Lord. I discovered the works of Dr. Packer when I was doing my masters degree in theology and missions in 2017. I got to know about his popular book Knowing God. Later on, I asked my good friend Carl Desmonds to get me other books by him. Carl got me Knowing Man as well.

I respect and honour people who have lived their faith in all changing times. Dr. Packer is not far from that. He has earned a special place in our heart as a Christian theologian, author, lecturer, and conference speaker. He was born in 1926.

Today, I want to share 20 unforgettable quotes from his numerous works.

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

#3. “God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives. Felt weakness deepens dependence on Christ for strength each day. The weaker we feel, the harder we lean. And the harder we lean, the stronger we grow spiritually, even while our bodies waste away. To live with your ‘thorn’ uncomplainingly — that is, sweet, patient, and free in heart to love and help others, even though every day you feel weak — is true sanctification. It is true healing for the spirit. It is a supreme victory of grace.”

#4. “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.”

#6. “In the New Testament, grace means God’s love in action toward people 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. Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.”

#7. “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.”

#8. “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?”

#9. “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 forever.”

#11. “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.”

#12. “There is tremendous relief in knowing His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me , so that no discovery can disillusion him about me , in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”

#13. “Every time we mention God we become theologians, and the only question is whether we are going to be good ones or bad ones.”

#14. “A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about him.”

#15. “Theology is for doxology and devotion—that is, the praise of God and the practice of godliness.”

#18. “God was happy without humans before they were made; he would have continued happy had he simply destroyed them after they had sinned; but as it is he has set his love upon particular sinners, and this means that, by his own free voluntary choice, he will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of them to heaven. He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.”

#19. “We must recognize that God is at the heart of things and that we exist for his glory, that is to say, we exist for him, not he for us.”

#20. “You don’t get awe until you cultivate the sense that God is very great and you are very small.”