One fall afternoon in 1994, as a not-new but certainly newly-serious believer, I wandered into a tiny Christian bookstore near the small Christian college I attended. One book in particular caught my eye. Actually, it was the title that caught my eye:  “Knowing God.” At the time, I’d never heard of the author, J. I. Packer.

When I looked at the dust jacket, however, every Christian leader whose name I did know (like Chuck Colson, Joni Earackson Tada, Chuck Swindoll, Elisabeth Elliot, Billy Graham, and others) said something along the lines of: “This is one of the most important books I’ve ever read other than the Bible itself.” So I picked it up, and I’ve been recommending “Knowing God” ever since.

As I wrote recently on my blog at BreakPoint.org, the book is essentially a work of “devotional theology.” For many Christians, that may sound like two incompatible words, as if diving deep into theological truth is stuff of the “head,” while our walks with God are matters of the “heart.” Packer, in a thoroughly biblical way, destroys that false dichotomy in “Knowing God.”

It was especially two statements this Oxford-trained theologian made in the second chapter that hit me like a ton of bricks. First, “One can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of Him,” and second, “One can know a great deal about godliness without much knowledge of Him.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – J.I Packer’s Christian Journey–and Ours: Knowing God   →