Rediscovering Holiness Quotes

“Our proud humanism, so-called, has made the world more like hell than heaven.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“I must labor to keep my heart actively responsive to God.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“There is no holiness without a Christ-centered, Christ-seeking, Christ-serving, Christ-adoring heart.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“To summarize, then, it appears that Christian holiness is a number of things together. It has both outward and inward aspects. Holiness is a matter of both action and motivation, conduct and character, divine grace and human effort, obedience and creativity, submission and initiative, consecration to God and commitment to people, self-discipline and self-giving, righteousness and love. It is a matter of Spirit-led law-keeping, a walk, or course of life, in the Spirit that displays the fruit of the Spirit (Christlikeness of attitude and disposition). It is a matter of seeking to imitate Jesus' way of behaving, through depending on Jesus for deliverance from carnal self-absorption and for discernment of spiritual needs and possibilities.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“New Testament writers do not tell me why God chose to save me. They only tell me to be thankful that He did.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“no contentment can match the contentment of obeying God, however costly this may prove.)”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Our Lord Jesus Christ is both God for man and man for God;”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“It is extraordinary how little the New Testament says about God’s interest in our success, by comparison with the enormous amount that it says about God’s interest in our holiness, our maturity in Christ, and our growth into the fullness of His image.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Holiness is always the saved sinner’s response of gratitude for grace received.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“The shape this book has taken reflects my belief that there is need to blow the whistle on the sidelining of personal holiness that has been a general trend among Bible-centered Western Christians during my years of ministry. It is not a trend that one would have expected, since Scripture insists so strongly that Christians are called to holiness, that God is pleased with holiness but outraged by unholiness, and that without holiness none will see the Lord.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Part of the answer to the question that life's roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my Heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Chrislike virtue.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“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.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Two Extremes Scripture and experience warn us that here we have to steer our course between two opposite extremes of disaster. On the one hand, there is the legalistic hypocrisy of Pharisaism (God-serving outward actions proceeding from self-serving inward motives), and on the other hand there is the antinomian idiocy that rattles on about love and liberty, forgetting that the God-given law remains the standard of the God-honoring life. Both Pharisaism and antinomianism are ruinous.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Genuine holiness is genuine Christlikeness, and genuine Christlikeness is genuine humanness—the only genuine humanness there is.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Good works begin with praise, worship, and honoring and exalting of God as the temper of one’s whole waking life.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“The process of learning to be holy, like the process of learning to pray, may properly be thought of as a school—God’s own school, in which the curriculum, the teaching staff, the rules, the discipline, the occasional prizes and the fellow pupils with whom one studies, plays, debates and fraternizes, are all there under God’s sovereign providence.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“No regenerate person in his or her right mind wants to be found cherishing sin!”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“So they do actually and deliberately commit themselves to Him, not only because they know they need to but also because they find themselves so committed that they want to.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“Holiness is thus the demonstration of faith working by love. It is wholly supernatural in the sense that being God’s gracious achievement within us, and wholly natural in being our own true humanness, lost through sin, misconceived through ignorance, and through listening too hard to current culture— but now in a process of restoration through the redirecting and reintegrating energy of new creation in Christ through the Holy Spirit.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“the true answer to the question, “Why is this happening to me?” will often be: It is not chastening or correction for yesterday’s moral lapses. It has nothing to do with the past at all. It has to do only with the use God plans to make of you tomorrow, and how you need to be prepared for that.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Our present task is, as it is sometimes put, to be what we are—to live out what God has wrought in, expressing in action the new life (new vision, motivation, devotion, and sense of direction) that has now become ours.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“To be cleansed means that nothing in my past imposes any restraint on my fellowship with God in the present.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“As Calvin expressed it, in a manner beyond our understanding God loved us even when He hated us. The measure of His love was, and is, the gift of His Son to die for our sins (John 3:16; Rom. 5:8; 1 John 4:8-10).”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Made by God for God, and so made that at the deepest level we cannot find contentment save in a love-relationship with God, we were thus “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Salvation is thus the threefold activity of the triune God. Just as mutual love and honor are revealed as the occupation of the Three-in-One (John 3:35; 5:20; 14:31; 16:14; 17:1,4), so loving and honoring the Trinity become the eternal vocation of those whom the Three-in-One have saved—starting now! One mark of the saved, therefore, is that they currently give themselves to worship, and they want to go on doing so literally forever. This appears in the joyful anticipation of heaven’s eternity described in the hymn “Amazing Grace”: When we’ve been there ten thousand years Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we first begun (emphasis mine).”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“Only when your reading of the written Word feeds into your relationship with the living Word (Jesus) does the Bible operate as the channel of light and life that God means it to be.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“The reaction of man worketh not the righteousness of God.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness

“With regard to the future of Christians much is mysterious. Spiritual growth, like its physical counterpart, is ordinarily a gentle and imperceptible process. One neither sees nor feels it happening. The most that can be said about the subjective side of it is that every now and then, believers realize they are different in this or that way from what they once were. The long-term effects of particular insights, experiences, chastenings, moments of shock, sustained routines and ongoing relationships cannot be calculated in advance. Some Christians change at surface level far faster and more dramatically than others, but how much corresponding change takes place at a deep level cannot be monitored either by the agent or by any human observer. Only God knows, for He alone can search hearts down to the bottom. The spotlight of consciousness enables us to know only a small part of ourselves. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work reaches deep into that large part of ourselves to which we have no access. No wonder, then, that we constantly misconceive and misjudge what God is and is not doing in us, with us and for us, just as we constantly err when we try to assess what God is doing through us in ministry to others.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“What should one say of the worldwide charismatic movement of the past thirty years? Laying aside matters of detail,4 I believe God has generated it in order to counter and correct the death-dealing fashions of thought which, starting with theologians and spreading everywhere, for the past century have done damage by demurring at the truth of the Trinity, diminishing the deity of Jesus Christ, and for practical purposes discounting the Holy Spirit altogether. To deal with these theoretical errors, and the spiritual deadness to which they have given rise, God has raised up this movement of uninhibited and flamboyant Holy Spirit life, whereby the truth of the Trinity is vindicated (D), fellowship-union with the divine Christ through the Spirit as the focus of spiritual life is freshly explored (E), and the thought of Christianity as a supernatural life in the Spirit, singing, sharing, and serving, has again become respectable (P). Those who maintain the errors mentioned are thus comprehensively outflanked, not to say upstaged. How wise is the strategy of God!”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God

“single-minded, wholehearted, free and glad concentration on the business of pleasing God.”
― J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God