Glenn Packiam > Quotes

“tempted to make the same mistake. Every flaw or shortcoming is really someone else’s fault. We would have been all right if not for what they did to us or said to us or didn’t do or didn’t say. At our core we believe that we are good, and that given the right environment, resources, and support, we can make it. But the road to freedom, for addicts and for the rest of us who sin in a less obviously compulsive way, begins with the same admission: I am powerless. I cannot change myself. I cannot make myself better. I can’t starve my cravings enough to kill them. I can’t please God on my own.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Yet God doesn’t intend for us to do nothing about our growth. Sloth is not spiritual. As Dallas Willard wrote, “Grace is not opposed to effort, but [it] is opposed to earning.”[5] The difference between legalism and spiritual discipline is not the work or energy involved; it’s the motivation. Are we doing things to impress God and earn his favor? Or are we doing them because we are dearly loved children of God who are being conformed to the image of his Son by the power of the Spirit (Romans 8:1-17, 29)?”
― Glenn Packiam, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose

“Perhaps part of the reason the Church is malnourished and our faith is anemic is because our worship services have become a theological Happy Meal.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“We must let Him have His way, totally and completely. Let Him expose our pride, our selfishness. Let Him unearth our motives. Let Him show us when we are doing things—even or especially good, noble, godly things like caring for the sick or feeding the poor and homeless—because we want to be noticed or praised or admired. Remember that the same Jesus who healed and told the cured to keep it a secret, the same Jesus who at the peak of His popularity gave His most offensive and enigmatic sermon, the same Jesus who urged us to give in secret—this Jesus is at work in our hearts. He won’t let us get away with simply the right behavior; He wants innocent hearts, full of love and humility. There can be no other gods of fame and influence that we keep paying homage to, hoping to gain immortality.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“From historical theology we find the maxim: lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, which means, “The rule of prayer is the rule of faith which is the rule of life. (Or to put it simply: “As you worship, so you will believe; and as you believe, so you will live.”)”
― Glenn Packiam, Re-Forming Worship: A Futurology of Congregational Music for the Non-Denominational Church

“When His disciples asked Him how to pray, He taught them. More than that: He gave them a prayer.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“This is explicitly kingdom work, kingdom-of-God work, a kingdom already here but also in the making. We are not just picking up the pieces in the wake of the expulsion from Eden and the confusion at Babel. God is making a kingdom, and Christ is King. We are part of the work being done and also participants in the work. As we participate, we realize that we bring no qualifications to the task, none at all. Lest we get in the way of the kingdom work that God is doing, Jesus redefines us all as the poor, the hungry, the grief-stricken, and the despised.”
― Glenn Packiam, Lucky: How the Kingdom Comes to Unlikely People

“If our songs are juvenile, they may simply be a symptom of our adolescent faith. But maybe they are also part of the problem. Maybe our simplistic, peppy songs actually perpetuate our spiritual adolescence. That’s”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“Disappointment is an agent of the cross. But it is also a means of resurrection.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“In our thickheadedness, we so easily and often choose the lesser blessings, often even at the expense of the greater ones.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Part of the point of spiritual formation is training our eyes to see and our ears to hear God in the world, and learning to sing along with creation. That requires changing our tune. We can’t join in God’s symphony if we’re singing our own songs. To hear his song, we must begin with silence and tune our hearts to the notes. As we do, we find ourselves increasingly aligning with the work of God.”
― Glenn Packiam, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose

“We are not in control, but we are deeply loved by the God who is.”
― Glenn Packiam, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose

“The phrase lex orandi, lex credendi means, quite literally, “The rule of prayer is the rule of faith.” Maybe a better way to think of it is, “The way you pray and worship becomes the way you believe.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“The object of our faith is a Person, not a proposition.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“Remember that as followers of Jesus we don’t gauge our success by results but by faithfulness to Jesus Christ and His remarkably different kingdom.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“Cultivation requires intentionality. Fruitfulness flows from faithfulness. Growth happens only on purpose.”
― Glenn Packiam, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose

“Far too often, rumors about God originate in church. We hear a preacher say something about God with confident certainty, and we take it as truth. What we don’t know is that he heard another preacher say it, and that preacher heard another preacher say it, and that preacher read it somewhere, and that author heard his momma say it, and so on. We could blame them. But we would do better to blame ourselves for turning down God’s invitation, for closing our ears and our eyes when He has tried to show Himself to us. No technological advancement, no access to information, no invention of convenience has been able to change the strange human impulse to shun God, to cover up and hide, the way the first man and woman did.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“The desire for fame and success isn’t gone; it’s just christened as the goal of “reaching more people for Christ.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure. (James 4:1–3 NLT)”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“We all experience a measure of suffering, and every experience can be redeemed. C. S. Lewis wrote, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”4”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“Second, fruitfulness is not the same thing as productivity. Productivity is about what we’re doing; fruitfulness is about who we’re becoming.”
― Glenn Packiam, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose

“a God you can explain is a God you can contain. And a God you can contain can’t be worshipped.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“N. T. Wright cheekily remarked that Jesus, in speaking of His death, did not give us an atonement theory; He gave us a meal.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“Intentionality is about abiding in Jesus—and allowing the Holy Spirit to produce his fruit in you for the sake of others.”
― Glenn Packiam, The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose

“After decades of people never being taught how to pray, how to talk to the Creator and King of the world, we begin to pray in the language that comes most naturally. But selfishness is our mother tongue. Tell people to “pray what’s in their heart,” and they will pray selfishly. They will ask for stuff, and plead for more, and raise their hands to the sky to pull down an imaginary lever of prosperity, seeking satisfaction for their insatiable souls.”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“At Mount Sinai, before He gave Moses the commandments, God invited the people He had just rescued from captivity in Egypt to come near. They refused in fear. Moses, you go for us. God was trying to communicate that the rules He was about to give them were a sign of covenant, of relationship with them. He would be their God and they would be His people. But they preferred a less direct approach, someone else to mediate, someone else to relay God’s wishes.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“The disappointment that comes from an unexpected trouble, an unplanned difficulty, can help us die to ourselves, to our attempts at control, to our plans for the perfect life. Disappointment is an agent of the cross.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.… The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.10”
― Glenn Packiam, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing

“We have nice words that cloak our pursuits, making us believe they are godly. Influence. Platform. The opportunity to reach more people. These seem noble and Christian, sanctioned—nay, commissioned—by God. But beneath the veneer are the same ugly demons that drive us all: a thirst for success and fame.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus

“There is a way that God designed us to encounter Him: firsthand. God has always preferred and invited firsthand communication. He desires to show Himself to us, speak to us, draw us to Himself. It is we humans, the objects of His affection, who have repeatedly declined.”
― Glenn Packiam, Secondhand Jesus