J. I. Packer Church Quotations

The Church, therefore, has two constant needs; instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred.

God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.

Evangelical churches are weaker than we realize because we dont teach the confessions and doctrine.

The task of the church is to make the invisible Kingdom visible through faithful Christian living and witness-bearing .

Today, on our own turf, we face pagan ignorance about God every bit as deep as that which the early church faced in the Roman Empire.

Were it not for the work of the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel, no faith, no church, no Christianity in the world at all.

The Christian's instincts of trust and worship are stimulated very powerfully by knowledge of the greatness of God. But this is knowledge which Christians today largely lack: and that is one reason why our faith is so feeble and our worship so flabby... When a person in the church, let alone the person in the street, uses the word God, the thought is rarely of divine majesty.

The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.

We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world....It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.