Inspirational Quotes by J.I. Packer
“Prayer and holiness are learned in a similar way as commitments are made, habits are formed and battles are fought against a real opponent (Satan, in this case), who with great cunning plays constantly on our weak spots.”
“Fundamentally, the factor that makes the difference is neither one’s intelligence quotient, nor the number of books one has read nor the conferences, camps and seminars one has attended, but the quality of the fellowship with Christ that one maintains through life’s vicissitudes.”
“Holy” in both biblical languages means separated and set apart for God, consecrated and made over to Him.”
“New Testament salvation has three tenses: past, present, and future.”
“Sin is a universal, trans-cultural reality;”
“a deepening sense of one’s sinfulness remains a touchstone of the genuine Christian life.”
“Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“How are we to do this? 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. We have some idea, perhaps, what prayer is, but what is meditation? Well may we ask, for meditation is a lost art today, and Christian people suffer grievously from their ignorance of the practice. 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. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“For many of us, these are comparatively unfamiliar themes. They were not always so to the people of God. There was a time when the subject of God’s attributes (as it was called) was thought so important as to be included in the catechism which all children in the churches were taught and all adult members were expected to know. Thus, to the fourth question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is God?” the answer read as follows: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” This statement the great Charles Hodge described as “probably the best definition of God ever penned by man.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“And with what fervour of spirit and strength of faith may he enforce his prayers, by pleading the several gracious promises which are expressly to his case!”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“People who know their God are before anything else people who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God’s glory come to expression is in their prayers.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“God’s love is holy love. The God whom Jesus made known is not a God who is indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, a God whose ideal for his children is that they should “be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). He will not take into his company any person, however orthodox in mind, who will not follow after holiness of life.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“But absurdist tapeworms and Antoinette’s fever are ills from which, in the nature of the case, Christians are immune, except for occasional spells of derangement when the power of temptation presses their minds out of shape—and these, by God’s mercy, do not last.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“Paul writes, “God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. . . . We have . . . received . . . the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak [and, he might have added, write], not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:9-13). The Spirit testified to the apostles by revealing to them all truth and inspiring them to communicate it with all truthfulness. Hence the gospel, and hence the New Testament. But the world would have had neither without the Holy Spirit.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end to itself, to approach Bible study with no higher motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied deception.”
― J.I. Packer ,
from Knowing God
“For the doctrine of justification by faith is like Atlas: it bears a world on its shoulders, the entire evangelical knowledge of saving grace. The doctrines of election, of effectual calling, regeneration, and repentance, of adoption, of prayer, of the church, the ministry, and the sacraments, have all to be interpreted and understood in the light of justification by faith. …when justification falls, all true knowledge of the grace of God in human life fall with it, and then, as Luther said, the church itself falls… When Atlas falls, everything that rested on his shoulders comes crashing down too.”
“J.I. Packer writes, “It [knowing God] is the most practical project anyone can engage in. Knowing about God is crucially important for living our lives.” Packer continues, “Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through this life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you.”
“If the only way to be saved is to be chosen, then who cares if we tell people about Jesus anyway?”
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
Dr. Packer, the Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology at Regent College, was hailed by TIME as “a doctrinal Solomon” among Protestants. “Mediating debates on everything from a particular Bible translation to the acceptability of free-flowing Pentecostal spirituality, Packer helps unify a community [evange licalism] that could easily fall victim to its internal tensions.”
Knowing God, Dr. Packer’s seminal 1973 work, was lauded as a book which articulated shared beliefs for members of diverse denominations; the TIME profile quotes Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington as saying, “conservative Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists could all look to [Knowing God] and say, ‘This sums it all up for us.’”
In a similar tribute to Dr. Packer almost ten years ago, American theologian Mark Noll wrote in Christianity Today that, “Packer’s ability to address immensely important subjects in crisp, succinct sentences is one of the reasons why, both as an author and speaker, he has played such an important role among American evangelicals for four decades.”
For over 25 years Regent College students have been privileged to study under Dr. Packer’s clear and lucid teaching, and our faculty, staff and students celebrate the international recognition he rightly receives as a leading Christian thinker and teacher.
(http://www.regent-college.edu/about_r...http://www.regent-college.edu/about_r...)