A Passion for Faithfulness Quotes

“Where quantifiable success is god, pride always grows strong and spreads through the soul as cancer sometimes gallops through the body. Shrinking spiritual stature and growing moral weakness thence result, and in pastoral leaders, especially those who have become sure they are succeeding, the various forms of abuse and exploitation that follow can be horrific. The fruit of nourished pride is invariably bitter. Orienting all Christian action to visible success as its goal, a move which to many moderns seems supremely sensible and businesslike, is thus more a weakness in the church than it is a strength; it is a seedbed both of unspiritual vainglory for the self-rated succeeders and of unspiritual despair for the self-rated failures, and a source of shallowness and superficiality all round.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Nearly two centuries ago, Charles Simeon had hanging in his study at King’s College, Cambridge, a portrait of Henry Martyn, his protégé, a pioneer missionary who gave his life in service to the Muslim world. Simeon would sometimes tell visitors that the businesslike expression on Martyn’s face in the portrait came as a message to him every time he looked at it, reminding him of the importance of not frittering life away in trifling pursuits. Then he would wag his finger at the portrait and say, in front of his visitors, playfully yet seriously, as it were to Martyn, to himself, and to his Lord, “And I won’t trifle—I won’t trifle.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“So discipline should be seen as essentially educational and pastoral rather than as essentially judicial and retributive. It is a matter of putting people on the right track rather than of memorializing the fact that they were once on the wrong one.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Repentance, which humbles, and praise, which excites, are still the two activities which, with God’s blessing, lead most directly into spiritual renewing, and joy and self-giving are still the two activities in which spiritual renewing most naturally expresses itself.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“The same principle applies today. Grief for sin, and joy in God’s forgiveness and the assurance of his love, are not far from each other, for the God who convicts of sin is the God of mercy who saves, and repenting of sin and trusting Christ for forgiveness are two sides of the same coin.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“It is worth observing, before we move on, that a counterpart of what Nehemiah saw to be needed in Jerusalem in the mid-fifth century B.C. is just as badly needed in the modern West. Parents no longer teach their children the Bible at home; preaching in the church is often topical and superficial rather than expository and theological, and Sunday school teaching is often very rudimentary as far as the Bible is concerned; and the public educational system, the media, and the press, both popular and academic, all treat Christianity as a dead letter, only surviving as a hobby for persons of an unusual type. So there is not the least encouragement in our culture to become biblically literate, and the net result is a generation frighteningly and pathetically ignorant of the Word of God. No significant movement towards God can be expected while this remains so.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“There has always been a true elite of God’s leaders,” writes John White. “They are the meek who inherit the earth (Mt. 5:5). They weep and pray in secret, and defy earth and hell in public. They tremble when faced with danger, but die in their tracks rather than turn back. They are like a shepherd defending his sheep or a mother protecting her young. They sacrifice without grumbling, give without calculating, suffer without groaning. To those in their charge they say, ‘We live if you do well.’ Their price is above rubies. And Nehemiah was one of them.” 3”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“It is those who know their God who are able to keep their head in panicky conditions, and they can do this because of what is in their heart. What is that? Not just an intellectual orthodoxy, but an unflagging, all-absorbing passion for closeness to God himself.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Understandably, it is when people see their leader identifying most closely with themselves that they identify most closely with him.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“But there can be no doubt that learning to praise God properly for his judgments, no less than for his mercies, is something that all the saints have to look forward to, as part of God’s schooling of them in the life of holiness.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“In local churches and parachurch bodies, any leader who values order above ardor and routine above revival, and who pours cold water on visionaries as soon as they propose that something be done, risks becoming a new Sanballat or Tobiah.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“The preaching pastors who have left behind them the most virile and mature churches have been those whose pulpit work was linked with good organizing, done by others if not by themselves. Check it out: you will find that it is so.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Well does James Boice observe: “Charles Swindoll has it right, I think, when he refers to Nehemiah as ‘A Leader— From the Knees Up!’”4”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“William Temple said somewhere that whereas we think our real work is our activity, to which prayer is an adjunct, our praying is our real work, and our activity is the index of how we have done it.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Work in the biblical sense is always goal-oriented; it is action with an end in view.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“In the Bible, work as such means any exertion of effort that aims at producing a new state of affairs. Such exertions involve our creativity, which is part of God’s image in us, and which needs to be harnessed and expressed in action if our nature is to be properly fulfilled.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Apathy and sluggishness with regard to ordinary obedience brings deafness when God calls to special service.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“We may not ourselves often be guided by this kind of inner nudge— few of us, I think, are; but to discourage Christians from being open to it, as has sometimes been done, is radically Spirit-quenching.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“Being humble is not a matter of pretending to be worthless, but is a form of realism, not only regarding the real badness of one’s sins and stupidities and the real depth of one’s dependence on God’s grace, but also regarding the real range of one’s abilities. Humble believers know what they can and cannot do.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“First, Nehemiah’s walk with God was saturated with his praying, and praying of the truest and purest kind—namely, the sort of praying that is always seeking to clarify its own vision of who and what God is, and to celebrate his reality in constant adoration, and to rethink in his presence such needs and requests as one is bringing to him, so that the stating of them becomes a specifying of “hallowed be thy name . . . thy will be done . . . for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“The only sort of Christianity that can reasonably claim attention for the future is the Bible-based Christianity that defines God in scriptural terms and offers, not affirmation, but transformation of our disordered lives.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“It is no wonder, then, that liberalism typically produces, not martyrs, nor challengers of the secular status quo, but trimmers, people who are always finding reasons for going along with the cultural consensus of the moment, whether on abortion, sexual permissiveness, the basic identity of all religions, the impropriety of evangelism and missionary work, or anything else.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“A zealous man in religion is pre-eminently a man of one thing. It is not enough to say that he is earnest, hearty, uncompromising, thorough-going, wholehearted, fervent in spirit. He only sees one thing, he cares for one thing, he lives for one thing, he is swallowed up in one thing; and that one thing is to please God. Whether he lives, or whether he dies—whether he has health, or whether he has sickness—whether he is rich, or whether he is poor—whether he pleases men, or whether he gives offence—whether he is thought wise, or whether he is thought foolish— whether he gets honour, or whether he gets shame— for all this the zealous man cares nothing at all. He burns for one thing; and that one thing is, to please God, and to advance God’s glory.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“be specific, then: a type in Scripture (tupos in Greek, meaning originally a die-stamp or matching impression) is an event, institution, place, object, office, or functioning person that patterns a greater reality that in some sense is of the same kind and is due to appear on history’s stage at some subsequent point. This greater reality is called the antitype. The term “type” is taken from Romans 5:14, where Adam is called a tupos(“pattern”) of Christ, the one who was to come. “Antitype” comes from 1 Peter 3:21, where baptism, understood not simply as an applying of water to the body but also, and essentially, as an outgoing of faith to God, is called the antitypethat the preserving of Noah through the flood waters by his entering the ark had prefigured. A type establishes a frame for interpreting the greater reality when it appears, and meantime, simply by existing, it inculcates the principle of which the greater reality will in fact be the supreme instance. When the greater reality arrives, it becomes the decisive factor in its own field; one way or another it transcends and supersedes the type. In space-time terms, the type is thenceforth a thing of the past, no longer determinative of what must be done or of what will happen. The biblical account of it, however, is of permanent value as providing concepts and categories for understanding the antitype. Typology thus becomes a kind of phrase book for use in theology.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“A type establishes a frame for interpreting the greater reality when it appears, and meantime, simply by existing, it inculcates the principle of which the greater reality will in fact be the supreme instance. When the greater reality arrives, it becomes the decisive factor in its own field; one way or another it transcends and supersedes the type. In space-time terms, the type is thenceforth a thing of the past, no longer determinative of what must be done or of what will happen. The biblical account of it, however, is of permanent value as providing concepts and categories for understanding the antitype. Typology thus becomes a kind of phrase book for use in theology.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“the building of them into the communal network called the church. The Word, ministered, memorized, and masticated by meditation, has power to do the building up (“exercise of power” is the force of the Greek for “can” in verse 32) through the agency of the Holy Spirit. And within the church on earth this process of building up—or building in, as we might equally well call it when we focus on the people who are its object—goes on all the time. Jesus builds his church, according to his Word. The”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“In light of Paul’s picture of the church growing as a body grows and as a building grows through the process of its erection, it seems regrettable that the phrase “church growth” should nowadays be used exclusively, as it seems to be, of numerical expansion, when the New Testament idea expressed by this phrase is not of quantitative but of qualitative advance. It is always wisest to use biblical phraseology in its biblical sense, and these texts make clear that the growth of the church in Paul’s mind is not a matter of recruits being added to the community (he had other words for that), but of the community being fitted for its destiny through the transforming power of Spirit-taught truth.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)

“In a word, the church is the community that lives in and by covenant communion between the triune God and itself.”
― J.I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom From the Book of Nehemiah (Living Insights Bible Study, 1)