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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
J.I. Packer
Started reading
June 4, 2019
“gospel mystery of sanctification.”
in all you do;
the supernaturalizing of our disordered lives
Holiness, like prayer (which is indeed part of it), is something that, though Christians have an instinct for it through their new birth, as we shall see, they have to learn in and through experience. As Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8)—learned what obedience requires, costs and involves through the experience of actually doing His Father’s will up to and in His passion—so Christians must, and do, learn prayer from their struggles to pray and holiness from their battles for purity of heart and righteousness of life.
The routine, which is grueling, is one of doing prescribed things over and over again on the court, against a real opponent, in order to get them really right.
It is reported that on one occasion when Teresa of Ávila was traveling, her conveyance dumped her in the mud. The spunky saint’s first words as she struggled to her feet were: “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few!”
Fundamentally, the factor that makes the difference is neither one’s intelligence quotient, nor the number of books one has read nor the conferences, camps and seminars one has attended, but the quality of the fellowship with Christ that one maintains through life’s vicissitudes.
consecrate themselves totally to the Father, as Jesus did; • say and do only what pleases the Father, as Jesus did; • accept pain, grief, disloyalty, and betrayal, as Jesus did; • care for people and serve their needs without either compromise of principle or ulterior motives in practice, as Jesus did; • accept opposition and isolation, hoping patiently for better things and meantime staying steady under pressure, as Jesus did; • rejoice in the specifics of the Father’s ways and thank Him for His wisdom and goodness, as Jesus did; and so on.
the best they can do is stagger through in a spirit of real if unacknowledged disappointment with God, feeling all the time that He has let them down.
It is easy to understand why those in the first category advance farther and faster in the love, humility, and hope that form the essence of Christlike holiness than those in the second category.
the word implies both devotion and assimilation:
It is the habit of agreeing in God’s judgement, hating what He hates, loving what He loves, and measuring everything in this world by the standard of His Word. . . .
He will bear much, forbear much, overlook much, and be slow to talk of standing on his rights. . . .
A holy man will follow after purity of heart.
He will endeavour to set his affections entirely on things above, and to hold things on earth with a very loose hand.
these things will be the holy man’s chief enjoyments.
Calvin’s dictum that it would be best for a preacher to fall and break his neck as he mounts the pulpit if he is not himself going to be the first to follow God in living his own message.
Holiness Has to Do with My Heart
Holiness starts inside a person, with a right purpose that seeks to express itself in a right performance. It is a matter not just of the motions that I go through but also of the motives that prompt me to go through them.
asceticism
formalism,
legalism,
Holiness is always the saved sinner’s response of gratitude for grace received.
Holiness Has to Do with My Temperament
“the characteristic phenomena of an individual’s nature, including his susceptibility to emotional stimulation, his customary strength and speed of response, the quality of his prevailing mood, and all the peculiarities of fluctuation and intensity of mood, these
being regarded as dependent on constitutional make-up, and therefore largely hereditary in origin.”
Temperament, we might say, is the raw material out of which character is formed. Character is what we do with our temperament. Personality is the final product, the distinct individuality that results.
the sanguine (warm, jolly, outgoing, relaxed, optimistic); • the phlegmatic (cool, low-key, detached, unemotional, apathetic); • the choleric (quick, active, bustling, impatient, with a relatively short fuse); and • the melancholic (somber, pessimistic, inward-looking, inclined to cynicism and depression).
The assertion that I now make, and must myself face, is that I am not to become (or remain) a victim of my temperament.
Yielding to my temperamental weaknesses is, of course, the most natural thing for me to do, and is therefore the hardest sort of sin for me to deal with and detect.
redirecting one’s anger and hostility toward Satan and sin, rather than toward fellow human beings who are obstructing what one regards as the way forward.
to rejoice in God, to give up self-pity and proud pessimism, and to believe, with the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, that through sovereign divine grace, “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Our Lord Jesus Christ is both God for man and man for God; He is God’s incarnate Son, fully divine and fully human. We know Him as both the mediator of divine grace and the model of human godliness.
It is simply human life lived as the Creator intended—in other words, it is perfect and ideal humanness, an existence in which the elements of the human person are completely united in a totally God-honoring and nature-fulfilling way.
As experience proves, no contentment can match the contentment of obeying God, however costly this may prove.)
