J. I. Packer Quotes

The church was everything: our social engagements, Sunday morning, Sunday evening. Wednesday night was the hour of power. We had Bible study on certain days. Saturday afternoon was choir practice. I wanted desperately to be a good Christian.

To be a Christian is not only to believe the teaching of Christ, and to practice it; it is not only to try to follow the pattern and example of Christ; it is to be so vitally related to Christ that His life and His power are working in us. It is to be "in Christ," it is for Christ to be in us.

To be in Christ is the source of the Christian life; to be like Christ is the sum of his excellence; to be with Christ is the fullness of his joy.

The Christian idea of 'putting on Christ' is the whole of Christianity.

Everything that happens to me can help me along in my Christian life.

A Christian is not somebody who stays away from all the wicked things he loves and clings to all the righteous things he hates so that he can go to heaven. The fear of the Christian is not going to hell. The fear of the Christian is being separated from Christ.

See that your chief study be about heart, that there God's image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.

Faith and works are necessary to our spiritual life as Christians, as soul and body are to our natural life as men; for faith is the soul of religion, and works the body.

If you want to live the Christian life, you will have to realize that Someone Else has to be in control.

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.

The blood of our Christian brothers is a witness that cries out..If they are Catholic, Orthodox, Copts, Lutherans, it is not important : They are Christians. The blood is the same: It is the blood which confesses Christ.

You might as well try to hear without ears or breathe without lungs, as to try to live a Christian life without the Spirit of God in your heart.

Little works, little thoughts, little loves, little prayers for little Christians, and larger and larger as the years grow.

Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That’s why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.

A wise man had said that your Christian life is like a three-legged stool. The legs are doctrine, experience and practice, which is obedience; and you, will not stay upright unless all three are there. In recent years many Christians have not kept these three together.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

A biblical understanding of the Christian life is not 'let go and let God,' it's 'trust God and get going.'

The most vital question to ask about all who claim to be Christian is this: Have they a soul thirst for God? ... Is their life centered on Him? Do they press forward more and more that they might know Him.

We can think of Lent as a time to eradicate evil or cultivate virtue, a time to pull up weeds or to plant good seeds. Which is better is clear, for the Christian ideal is always positive rather than negative. A person is great not by the ferocity of his hatred of evil, but by the intensity of his love for God. Asceticism and mortification are not the ends of a Christian life; they are only the means. The end is charity. Penance merely makes an opening in our ego in which the Light of God can pour. As we deflate ourselves, God fills us. And it is God’s arrival that is the important event.

The Christian life has been nothing more and nothing less than a daily dependence on and a rediscovery of God's grace.

He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of Life He has - by what I call 'good infection'. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

A man becomes a Christian, he is not born one.

I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.

Faith, and hope, and patience and all the strong, beautiful, vital forces of piety are withered and dead in a prayerless life. The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom, and fruitage in prayer.

The heart and soul of the Christian life is learning to hear God's voice and then developing the courage to do what he asks us to do.