Category Archives: J. I. Packer

Lord Jesus, You Are My Righteousness, I Am Your Sin

Posted on by under J. I. Packer, Martin Luther

Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him, and say, ‘Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine and given me what is yours. You have become what you were not so that I might become what I was not.’

Martin Luther, quoted by J. I. Packer in Growing in Christ

HT: Of First Importance

The Most Wonderful Message the World Has Ever Heard or Ever Will Hear

Posted on by under J. I. Packer, Nancy Guthrie

This Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity — hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory — because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross. It is the most wonderful message that the world has ever heard, or will hear.

J. I. Packer in Nancy Guthrie, Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 71.

Revival: God’s Work of Church Restoration

Posted on by under J. I. Packer

Revival means the work of God restoring to a moribund church, in a manner out of the ordinary, those standards of Christian life and experience which the New Testament sets forth as being entirely ordinary; and a right-minded concern for revival will express itself, not in a hankering after tongues (ultimately it is of no importance whether we speak in tongues or not), but rather in a longing that the Spirit may shed God’s love abroad in our hearts with greater power. For it is with this (to which deep exercise of soul about sin is often preliminary) that personal revival begins, and by this that revival in the church, once begun, is sustained.

J. I. Packer, Knowing God, pp. 108-109

The Withdrawal and Deprivation of Good

Posted on by under J. I. Packer

Look at the cross, therefore, and you see what form God’s judicial reaction to human sin will finally take. What form is that? In a word, withdrawal and deprivation of good. On the cross Jesus lost all the good that He had before: all sense of His father’s presence and love, all sense of physical, mental and spiritual well-being, all enjoyment of God and of created things, all ease and solace of friendship, were taken from Him, and in their place was nothing but loneliness, pain, a killing sense of human malice and callousness, and a horror of great spiritual darkness.

J. I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 176