Philip Yancey Quotes

Learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

Unless we love natural goods - sex, alcohol, food, money, success, power - in the way God intended, we become their slaves, as any addict can attest.

I go to church as an expression of my need for God and for God's family.

The Bible never belittles human disappointment ... but it does add one key word: temporary.

We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.

Prayer unfolds in the stillness of the soul.

Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.

We can't expect the nation to operate by Christian principles ... but we can expect this of the church.

Like a dying star, grace dissipates in a final burst of pale light, and is then engulfed by the black hole of ungrace.

Discovered that some of our efforts can actually drown out the good news and become stumbling blocks to faith.

If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.

And perhaps, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit may be our very best defense against a materialist view of mankind here on earth.

I know of only two alternatives to hypocrisy: perfection or honesty.

[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.

The Cross of Christ may have overcome evil, but it did not overcome unfairness. For that, Easter is required.

But the Lord say he won't put more on us than we can stand. If we can't take it, he'll be right there beside us giving stren'th we didn't know we had.

Jesus reserved his hardest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed and legalism.

We truly live only one day at a time. It doesn't really help to worry about the future, which we can't control, or the past, which we can't change.

The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace.

Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.

From such experiments Christians have learned that the gospel grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.

No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.

As Ecclesiastes tells it, a wholesale devotion to pleasure will, paradoxically, lead to a state of utter despair.

What practically defines the evangelical church today is an emphasis on two issues that Jesus did not even mention.

They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.

Change came from below, as it usually does, rather than being imposed from above.

People want to go back to those old days, but it's probably not going to happen.

Christians behave like spies, living in one world while our deepest allegiance belongs to another.

The giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.

Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.

I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.

Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.

We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.

O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice

Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God's laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration.

No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.

We should be asking: How do we respond to a post-Christian society?

When we ignore the world outside the walls we suffer-as does it.

If God doesn't want something for me, then I shouldn't want it either.

Release what is good.

Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.

The Gospels and the rest of the New Testament reflect the life of Jesus, what it means for us & what it means for the world.

The kingdom of God largely exists for the sake of outsiders, as a tangible expression of God's love for all.

Always, no matter the circumstances, we have the assurance of "Immanuel," which simply means "God with us.

We should do whatever we can to cut through the scum that has grown on our understanding and rediscover freshness.

Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.

Believing there is no God does not make the thirst go away.

In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square.

In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.

You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it

Does prayer change God or change me?

Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.

Let me see them as thirsty people, I pray, and teach me how best to present the Living Water.

The more Christians focus on tangential issues, the less we will be heard on matters of true moral significance.

We cannot simply pray and then wait for God to do the rest.

Suffering can never ultimately be meaningless, because God has shared it.

Prayer is - keeping company with God.

Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.

The New Testament persistently presses us upward, toward higher motives for being good.

For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.

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

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

As a Christian, my main concern is not to downgrade others' beliefs but to examine my own.

True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will.

Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about - like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

Think too of all who suffer as if you shared their pain. HEBREWS 13:3

He transforms pain, using it to teach and strengthen us, if we allow it to turn us toward him.

A pilgrim is a fellow-traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide.

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

I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.

Fulfillment comes not in pursuit of happiness, but rather in pursuit of service.

God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.

According to Jesus, what I think about him and how I respond will determine my destiny for all eternity.

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

Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

I would far rather convey grace than explain it.

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

I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.

To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, 'I am human and you are God.

Jesus' kingdom calls us to another way, one that depends not on our performance but his own. We do not have to achieve but merely follow.

We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.

According to Barna surveys, 61 percent of today's youth had been churched at one point during their teen years but are now spiritually disengaged.

Be salt, and a little bit of salt keeps the whole society from going rancid.

God is present in the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, as Jesus claimed in Matthew 25, and we serve God when we serve them.

Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?

Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.

For Jesus, the person was more important than any category or label.

Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.

A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.

In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.

Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands.

As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.

But those of us who follow his conducting through early movements will, with renewed strength, someday burst into song.

God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.

One reason the broader world does not look to Christianity for guidance is that we Christians have not spoken with a credible voice.

Somehow, that "faith" was what God valued, and it soon became clear that faith was the best way for humans to express a love for God.

Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.

Grace is heartfelt, tinged with love, a spillover gift of the God who extended undeserved favor toward us.