There are lots of gems in it, especially the challenge to recognise the incalculable difference between merely knowing about God and actually knowing God; and the hugely different fruit of pride and humility respectively, that those two things produce.
But the thing that struck me this week that I've never thought about before is the way Packer uses the word "personal" to describe a Christian's faith.
As my colleague Maurice McCracken (check out his posts at http://bigbadmo.wordpress.com/ - if you all visit he'll maybe write more!) pointed out we are prone to use the word "personal" as a synonym for "private." When we say our faith is 'personal' we are often trying to put it beyond the reach of anyone else's opinion. That's very useful for Christians who want to hold on to Christianity without rally thinking through how to defend it to non-Christians.
Much more disturbingly it's also a device we tend to use to avoid having to listen to any other Christian's views about how we behave - whether that's our commitment to fellowship, sexuality, work ethic or any one of a dozen other "sensitive," "personal" matters.But as Packer uses the word though a "personal" relationship with God is all about knowing God as a person. Packer was mostly addressing those for whom Christianity was too much knowing about God and not enough actually knowing him.
But the truth Packer teaches, that knowing God is, essentially, personal, is valuable for our somewhat different times. Because the very fact that your relationship with God is personal means that it is not, essentially, private. Yes surely some aspects of "you and the Lord" are not to be the detailed business of all your mates and everyone in your church. But you are in a relationship with a person (or perhaps, better, three persons!) such that your attitudes and actions matter to him. And God has placed you, his child, in a church family whose job is precisely to help you understand better what pleases and what grieves him.
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