39 Philip Yancey Quotes

A God wise enough to create me and the world I live in is wise enough to watch out for me.

I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

If God doesn't want something for me, I shouldn't want it either. Spending time in meditative prayer, getting to know God, helps align my desires with God's.

God's terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though He did not exist, to spit in His face, to crucify Him.

When Jesus came to earth, demons recognized him, the sick flocked to him, and sinners doused his feet and head with perfume. Meanwhile he offended pious Jews with their strict preconceptions of what God should be like. Their rejection makes me wonder, could religious types be doing just the reverse now? Could we be perpetuating an image of Jesus that fits our pious expectations but does not match the person portrayed so vividly in the Gospels?

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

History shows that when the church uses the tools of the world's kingdom, it becomes as ineffectual, or as tyrannical, as any other power structure. And whenever the church has intermingled with the state, the appeal of the faith suffers as well. Ironically, our respect in the world declines in proportion to how vigorously we attempt to force others to adopt our point of view.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion. I sometimes wonder which have hurt worse.

Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God's point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God's will, the work of the kingdom. We are God's fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.

If we comprehend what Christ has done for us, then surely out of gratitude we will strive to live 'worthy' of such great love. We will strive for holiness not to make God love us but because He already does.

Whatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.

Some who attempt prayer never have the sense of anyone listening on the other end. They blame themselves for doing it wrong.... Prayer requires the faith to believe that God listens.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

The test of observance of Christ's teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the extent of our deviation.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

Critics of Christianity correctly point out that the church has proved an unreliable carrier of moral values. The church has indeed made mistakes, launching Crusades, censuring scientists, burning witches, trading in slaves, supporting tyrannical regimes. Yet the church also has an inbuilt potential for self-correction because it rests on a platform of transcendent moral authority. When human beings take upon themselves the Luciferian chore of redefining morality, untethered to any transcendent source, all hell breaks loose.

All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.

God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. He wants us to cleave to him, as Job did, even when we have every reason to deny him hotly.

One who has been touched by grace will no longer look on those who stray as "those evil people" or "those poor people who need our help." Nor must we search for signs of "loveworthiness." Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell... In the bottom line realm of ungrace, some workers deserve more than others; in the realm of grace the word 'deserve' does not even apply.

Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.

Faith is not an insurance policy. Or as Eddie Askew suggests, maybe it is: insurance does not prevent accidents, but rather gives a secure base from which to face their consequences.

Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.

Love deems this world worth rescuing.

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.

Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

Everyone has an image of God distorted in some way--we must, of course, since God transcends our capacities to imagine him.

The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

Grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us. Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, "Be good." Jesus' stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, "Help!"

Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus' love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace. That does not mean, of course, that Christians should not involve themselves in politics. It simply means that as we do so we must not let the rules of power displace the command to love.

We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life - by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.

Source: The Jesus I Never Knew

I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.

Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.