Christ had the good of souls in his eye.... - J.I. Packer - Quotes.Pub

Christ had the good of souls in his eye... When you preach, let this be your design, to seek to recover lost sheep... to get some converted, and brought in to your Master.

J.I. Packer Quotes

The fruit of wisdom is Christlikeness, peace, humility and love. And, the root of it is faith in Christ as the manifested wisdom of God.

Humility Quotes

When we looked at God’s wisdom, we saw something of his mind; when we thought of his power, we saw something of his hand and his arm; when we considered his word, we learned about his mouth; but now, contemplating his love, we are to look into his heart.

Good works begin with praise, worship, and honoring and exalting of God as the temper of one’s whole waking life.

The preacher should work to convert his congregation; the wife should work to save her unbelieving husband. Christians are sent to convert, and they should not allow themselves, as Christ’s representatives in the world, to aim at anything less. Evangelizing, therefore, is not simply a matter of teaching, and instructing, and imparting information to the mind. There is more to it than that. Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught.

God seems always to have intended that the life of humans in this world should be probationary and temporary, and should lead in due course to some form of transformation and transition for a richer life elsewhere.

But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.

Today, vast stress is laid on the thought that God is personal, but this truth is so stated as to leave the impression that God is a person of the same sort as we are – weak, inadequate, ineffective, a little pathetic. But this is not the God of the Bible!

New Testament writers do not tell me why God chose to save me. They only tell me to be thankful that He did.

Godliness means responding to God’s revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God’s Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.

There is no holiness without a Christ-centered, Christ-seeking, Christ-serving, Christ-adoring heart.

We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God. It was for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is to this use that we must put it.

The process of learning to be holy, like the process of learning to pray, may properly be thought of as a school – God’s own school, in which the curriculum, the teaching staff, the rules, the discipline, the occasional prizes and the fellow pupils with whom one studies, plays, debates and fraternizes, are all there under God’s sovereign providence.

It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ’s Spirit to convince men’s consciences of the truth of Christ’s gospel; and Christ’s human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.

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.

Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it.

It is certain that Scripture nowhere contradicts Scripture; rather, one passage explains another. This sound principle of interpreting Scripture by Scripture is sometimes called the analogy of Scripture or the analogy of faith.

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.

When you are not conscious of temptation, pray “lead us not into temptation”; and when you are conscious of it, pray “deliver us from evil”; and you will live.

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

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

Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a ‘popular piety’ claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.

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.

Certainly true worship invigorates, but to plan invigoration is not necessarily to order worship.

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.

Our proud humanism, so-called, has made the world more like hell than heaven.

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