Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Too often the peace of God is thought of as if it were essentially a feeling of inner tranquility, happy and carefree, springing from knowledge that God will shield one from life’s hardest knocks.

the basic ingredient in God’s peace, without which the rest cannot be, is pardon and acceptance into covenant—that

peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us.

first and foremost peace with God;

only those who know them can praise the name of the triune Jehovah as they should.

Do you see the glory of God in his wisdom, power, righteousness, truth and love, supremely disclosed at Calvary, in the making of propitiation for our sins? The Bible does, and we venture to add, if you felt the burden and pressure of your own sins at their true weight, so would you.

These are the songs of the heirs of heaven,

If you are truly a child of God and “the Spirit of his Son” is in you, Wesley’s words have already drawn an echo from your heart; and if they have left you cold, I do not know how you can imagine that you are a Christian at all.

all those for whom he has died,

We are all loved just as fully as Jesus is loved.

The Christian up to his eyes in trouble can take comfort from the knowledge that in God’s kindly plan it all has a positive purpose, to further his sanctification.

fear, therefore, is not that no guidance should be available for them, but that they may miss the guidance which God provides through some fault of their own.

God has a plan for each of his children.

Blackaby says find where God is already working; go there and participate in his will

God has no difficulty in making his will known to his servants.

guidance is a reality intended for, and promised to, every child of God.

apart from the written Word.

these problems cannot be resolved by a direct application of biblical teaching.

just because Scripture cannot decide one’s choice directly, the factor of God-given prompting and inclination, whereby one is drawn to commit oneself to one set of responsibilities rather than another and finds one’s mind settled in peace as one contemplates them, becomes decisive.

this quest for superspirituality leads only to frantic bewilderment or lunacy.

“fanaticism

Also enthusiasm

the fundamental mode whereby our rational Creator guides his rational creatures is by rational understanding and application of his written Word.

the pressure on our consciences of the portrayal of God’s character and will in the Word, which the Spirit enlightens us to understand and apply to ourselves.

seek strength constantly to discharge them”

being “led by the Spirit” in Romans 8:14 relates not to inward “voices” or any such experience, but to mortifying known sin and not living after the flesh!

never expect to be aided to marry an unbeliever, or elope with a married person, as long as 1 Corinthians 7:39 and the seventh commandment stand!

The Spirit leads within the limits which the Word sets, not beyond them.

It is a sign of conceit and immaturity to dispense with taking advice in major decisions. There are always people who know the Bible, human nature and our own gifts and limitations better than we do, and even if we cannot finally accept their advice, nothing but good will come to us from carefully weighing what they say.

We can never distrust ourselves too much.

gain an alarming domination over the minds and consciences of others, who fall under their spell and decline to judge them by ordinary standards.

Trouble should always be treated as a call to consider one’s ways. But trouble is not necessarily a sign of being off track at all; for as the Bible declares in general that “many are the afflictions of the righteous” (Ps 34:19 KJV), so it teaches in particular that following God’s guidance regularly leads to upsets and distresses which one would otherwise have escaped.

Jesus’ disciples were twice caught by night in bad weather on the Sea of Galilee (Mk 4:37; 6:48), and both times the reason why they were there was the command of Jesus himself (see Mk 4:35; 6:45).

No human life has ever been so completely guided by God, and no human being has ever qualified so comprehensively for the description “a man of sorrows.”

Nor does God always tell us the why and wherefore of the frustrations and losses which are part and parcel of the guided life.

And if you are thinking that you know the will of God for your life and you are anxious to do that, you are probably in for a very rude awakening because nobody knows the will of God for his entire life.

Our God is a God who not merely restores, but takes up our mistakes and follies into his plan for us and brings good out of them.

he has not changed.

Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it, he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home.

confidence in the God who will not let us ruin our souls. Our concern, therefore, in this discussion should be more for his glory than for our security—for that is already taken care of. And our self-distrust, while keeping us humble, must not cloud the joy with which we lean on “the Lord Protector”—our

On this basis, they are converted;

diagnosing the “struggle,” which it equates with “defeat,” as a relapse caused by failure to maintain “consecration” and “faith.”

Unregenerate apostates are often cheerful souls, but backsliding Christians are always miserable.

God is now exercising his child—his consecrated child—in the ways of adult godliness, as he exercised Job, and some of the psalmists, and the addressees of the epistle to the Hebrews, by exposing them to strong attacks from the world, the flesh and the devil, so that their powers of resistance might grow greater and their character as people of God become stronger.

every one

the teaching we have in view here sets us against God at this point, as it sets before us a return to babyhood as our supreme good.

The least effect of accepting the proposed remedy will be arrested spiritual development—the emergence of a childish, grinning, irresponsible, self-absorbed breed of evangelical adults. The worst effects, among sincere and honest believers, will be morbid introspection, hysteria, mental breakdown and loss of faith, at any rate in its evangelical form.

What is grace? In the New Testament, grace means God’s love in action toward people who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves, Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).

The New Testament knows both a will of grace and a work of grace. The former is God’s eternal plan to save; the latter is God’s “good work in you” (Phil 1:6), whereby he calls you into living fellowship with Christ (1 Cor 1:9), raises you from death to life (Eph 2:1-6), seals you as his own by the gift of his Spirit (Eph 1:13-14), transforms you into Christ’s image (2 Cor 3:18), and will finally raise your body in glory (Rom 8:30; 1 Cor 15:47-54).

What is the purpose of grace? Primarily, to restore our

relationship with God.

This is what all the work of grace aims at—an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with him.