232 Quotes by J.I. Packer

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

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

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

John Wesley at eighty-five wrote in his journal that the only sign of deterioration that he could see in himself was that he could not run as fast as he used to. With all due deference to that wonderful, seemingly tireless little man, we may reasonably suspect that he was overlooking some things at this point, just as some do when they assure us that they never had a day’s illness in their life. We cannot stop our bodies aging, any more than King Canute’s say-so could stop the tide coming in.

Daydreaming and indulgence of nostalgia are unhappy habits, making for unrealism and discontent. Like all bad habits, they tighten their grip on us until we set ourselves against them and, with God’s help, break them. Elderly retirees are prone to find that a disciplined breaking of them is an increasingly necessary task in life’s last lap, in which steady looking ahead in each present moment becomes a bigger and bigger factor in inner spiritual health.

Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught.

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

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

But the way to tell whether in fact you are evangelizing is not to ask whether conversions are known to have resulted from your witness. It is to ask whether you are faithfully making known the gospel message.