Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

It does not understand t...

of growth in grace. It does not understand the operation of indwelling sin. It confuses the Christian life on earth with the Chr...

But the basic criticism must surely be that it loses sight of the method and purpose of

grace.

What is grace? In the New Testament, grace means God’s love in action toward people who me...

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 i...

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.

How does God in grace prosecute this purpose?

Not by shielding us from assault by the world, the flesh and the devil,

but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely.

God wants us to feel that our way through life is rough and perplexing, so that we may learn thankfully to lean on him.

One of the most startling is that God actually uses our sins and mistakes to this end. He employs the educative discipline of failures and mistakes very frequently.

It is striking to see how much of the Bible deals with godly people making mistakes and God chastening them for it.

God can bring good out of the extremes of our own folly; God can restore the years that the locust has eaten. It is said that those who never make mistakes never make anything;

Is your trouble a sense of failure? the knowledge of having made some ghastly mistake? Go back to God; his restoring grace waits for you.

We need God to make us realists about both ourselves and him.

Paul’s letter to Rome is the high peak of Scripture,

Luther called it “the clearest gospel

of ...

“If a man understands it,” wrote Calvin,“he has a sure road opened for him to the understandi...

Tyn...

“the principal and most excellent part of the New Testament, and most pure Euangelion, t...

All roads in the Bible lead...

when the message of Romans gets into a person’s heart there is no tel...

What do you look for in the Bible?

Is it doctrine—truth about God, taught by God—that you are after?

you will find that Romans gives you all the main themes integrated together: God, man, sin, law, judgment, faith, works, grace,

creation, redemption, justification, sanctification, the plan of salvation, election, reprobation, the person and work of Christ, the work of the Spirit, the Christian hope, the nature of the church, the place of Jew and Gentile in God’s purpose, the philosophy of church and world history, the meaning and message of the Old Testament, the significance of bapti...

the wise person also reads the Bible as a book of life, showing by exposition and example...

What has Romans to offer...

answer is: the fullest cross-section of the life of sin and the life of grace, and the deepest analysis of the way of fai...

Another way of reading the Bible,

is as the book of the church,

Romans, just because it is the classic statement of the gospel by which the church lives, is also the classic account of the church’s identity. What is the church? It is the true seed of faithful Abraham, Jew and non-Jew together, chosen by God,

justified through faith, and freed from sin for a new life of personal righteousness and mutual ministry. It is the family of a loving heavenly Father, living in hope of inheriting his entire fortune. It is the community of the resurrection, in which the powers of Christ’s historic death and present heavenly life are already at

work. And nowhere is this presented so full...

The wise person also reads the Bible as God’s personal letter to each of ...

Read Romans this way and you will find that it has unique power to search out and deal with things which are so much ...

not give them a thought—your sinful habits and attitudes; your instinct for hypocrisy; your natural self-righteousness and self-reliance; your constant unbelief; your moral frivolity, and shallowness in repentance; your halfheartedness, worldliness, fearfulness, despondency; y...

shattering letter has unique power to evoke the joy, assurance, boldness, liberty and ardor of spirit which God both requires...

It was said of Jonathan Edwards that his doctrine was all application and his appl...

No man verily can read it too oft or study it too well [wrote Tyndale]

let every man without exception exercise himself herein

diligently, and record [that is, remember] it night and day continually, until he be full acquainted therewith.

Not every Christian, however, appreciates the magnificence of Romans,

the impact of Romans upon you will depend on what has gone before.

the more you have dug into the rest of the Bible, the more you are exercised with the intellectual and moral