I thought the book would be a wishy-washy, hyper-spiritualised kind of book that you would find at the "New Age" section on the bookstore shelf. Haha, me and my prejudices. Genuinely, however, the trouble with books of these titles is that it tends to puff people up with self-absorption and self-obsession, and leads people to think that God is some kind of wizard to fulfill all your wishes.
But Packer's book is packed with good solid theology, and is - thankfully, and quite rightly - focused on God's actual plans for us, rather than what we want God's plans for us to be.
Packer sets the right tone by expounding on what a theologian essentially is. A lot of us, including Christians, tend to think that a theologian is a ponderous academic, a religious pundit almost. But in reality, we are all theologians. We all have ideas about whether God exists, what He's like. That's really what theology means - what we think about God.
He then later goes on to talk about God's plans for us. But before Packer gets to God's plans for us in our day-to-day lives (which we are most keen to know about, being instinctively self-interested), he addresses God's grand plan for the whole of humanity: that of human salvation accomplished through Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection. The book reveals God's plan to make Christ lord of all, and that all things shall be united with Christ as head (Ephesians 1:10), for Christians to have a perfect relationship with Jesus, for them to be able to approach God's throne with full confidence (Hebrews 4:16), and for His spirit to conform us to Jesus' likeness (Romans 8:28-29).
Interestingly and importantly, although Packer does acknowledge that Christians ought to prayerfully seek for God's guidance in their decisions and lives, he does also emphatically state that trying to pin down "God's will" through some supernatural means can actually be harmful, and for me personally, doing that may hint at a sinful heart that does not trust God.
He writes:
"The source of anxiety is that a desire for guidance is linked with uncertainty about how to get it and fear of the consequences of not getting it. Such anxiety has an unhappy way of escalating. Anxious people get allured by any and every form of certainty that offers itself, no matter how irrational. They become vulnerable to strange influences and do zany things."
Wanting to know God's "will" then, can be distorted to become a way to manage and control God, and instead of leading us to humble dependence on Him, leads us to muscle through in our own way somehow.
After Packer truly establishes that God's purpose is to be found in trusting Christ as Lord and Saviour, Packer goes on to how this would look like in practical terms, i.e. in our daily living. He draws out what it means to be a Christian in sad times and in good times, and how being a Christian leads to self-understanding and also love for others.
Overall, it's a really good book that starts out very strongly by laying the foundation of God's grand purpose for mankind, before delving into the nitty gritty of how this plays out in all our small, but joy-filled lives. Packer does not make this an explicitly doctrinal book (in that, he does not explicitly elaborate on Christian doctrines and creeds), but it is a very helpful book to have in order to gain perspective on God's bigness and how we should re-orient our lives around Him.
On a side note, I received this book from such wonderful Christians when I was baptised. And I'm grateful for them.