Philip Yancey famous quotes

When the world asks if there is any hope, we can say absolutely! No one is exempt from tragedy or disappointment- God himself was not exempt. Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of the unfairness, but rather a way through it to the other side.
-- Philip Yancey

#Hope #Encouragement #Jesus

When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward that person.
-- Philip Yancey

#Eye #Doe #Praying

Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.
-- Philip Yancey

#Christmas #Jesus #Powerful

On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out evil, and even overcame death.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Philosophical #Healing

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

#Easter #Pain #Suffering

Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.
-- Philip Yancey

#Mean #Grace #Infinite

True healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are.
-- Philip Yancey

#Hurt #Healing #People

I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come to know a God whose Son made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.
-- Philip Yancey

#Hero #Son #Rights

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

#Passion #Coaching #Victory

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God’s name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)
-- Philip Yancey

#Faith #Morning #Son

As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can "handle" my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need God's correction - but only by taking those feelings to God will I have the opportunity for correction and healing.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jobs #Prayer #Book

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.
-- Philip Yancey

#Faith #Taken #Glasses

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Being Me #Humans

In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Grace #Stories

We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success. Almost alone in our success-oriented society, we admit that we have failed, are failing, and always will fail.
-- Philip Yancey

#Humility #Church #World

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

#Inspirational #Mean #I Have Learned

Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.
-- Philip Yancey

#Suffering #Tragedy #Faith In God

Jesus tended to honor the losers of this world, not the winners. Our modern culture extravagantly rewards beauty, athletic skill, wealth, and artistic achievement, qualities which seemed to impress Jesus not at all.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Skills #Achievement

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Love Is #Evil #People

Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near
-- Philip Yancey

#Heaven #Kingdoms #Desperation

Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.
-- Philip Yancey

#Water #Grace #Flow

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

#Prayer #Important #Use

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

#Disappointment #Belittle #Temporary

What I see in the Bible, especially in the book of Psalms, which is a book of gratitude for the created world, is a recognition that all good things on Earth are God's, every good gift is from above. They are good if we recognize where they came from and if we treat them the way the Designer intended them to be treated.
-- Philip Yancey

#Gratitude #Book #World

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

#Expression #Church #Needs

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.
-- Philip Yancey

#Grace #Church #Littles

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Mean #World

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Suffering #Matter

Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Reality #Views

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

#Christian #Sin #Angry

At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.
-- Philip Yancey

#Heart #Surrender #Power Of Love

I would far rather convey grace than explain it.
-- Philip Yancey

#Grace

Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Believe #Irritation

We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.
-- Philip Yancey

#Hard Work #People #Community

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

#Pain #Grace #Scandal

I once heard a theologian remark that in the Gospels people approached Jesus with a question 183 times whereas he replied with a direct answer only three times. Instead, he responded with a different question, a story, or some other indirection. Evidently Jesus wants us to work out answers on our own, using the principles that he taught and lived.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #People #Work Out

God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.
-- Philip Yancey

#People #Who God Is #Who We Are

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

#Light #Imperfection #Grace

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?
-- Philip Yancey

#Life Changing #Father #Thinking

By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.
-- Philip Yancey

#Missing #May #Want

If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.
-- Philip Yancey

#Christian #Prayer #Struggle

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

#Spiritual #Humility #Maturity

The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.
-- Philip Yancey

#Fall #Grace #World

We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.
-- Philip Yancey

#Journey #Remember #Destination

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

#Squares #Risk #Church

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Church #Trying #Institutions

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Views #May

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Believe #Listening

At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
-- Philip Yancey

#Justice #Unbreakable #Accepted

To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control his Son's suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, "I LOVE YOU." 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. Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.
-- Philip Yancey

#Lonely #Pain #Love You

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

#Doe #Manipulate #Position

Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.
-- Philip Yancey

#Grace #Lenses #Unnoticed

Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Grace #Disease

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

#Grace #Cost #Giver

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.
-- Philip Yancey

#Grace #Alternatives #Harder

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Christian #Jesus #Mean

Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people... Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God.
-- Philip Yancey

#Healing #People #Grace

If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.
-- Philip Yancey

#Jesus #Law #Grace

Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.
-- Philip Yancey

#Powerful #Believe #Grace

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Disappointment #Reality #Thinking

Forgiveness is the only way to break the cycle of blame-and pain-in a relationship...It does not settle all questions of blame and justice and fairness...But it does allow relationships to start over. In that way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. It is not our capacity to think that makes us different, but our capacity to repent, and to forgive.
-- Philip Yancey

#Pain #Thinking #Animal

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Gratitude #Great Love #Doe

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.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Desire #Want

We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.
-- Philip Yancey

#Growing Up #Long #Way

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

#Easter #Evil #Religion

When I am tempted to complain about God's lack of presence, I remind myself that God has much more reason to complain about my lack of presence.
-- Philip Yancey

#Complaining #Reason #Tempted

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

#Argument #Christianity #Lost

Love deems this world worth rescuing.
-- Philip Yancey

#World #This World

We deserve punishment and get forgiveness; we deserve God’s wrath and get God’s love.
-- Philip Yancey

#Punishment #Wrath #Serving God

Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.
-- Philip Yancey

#Prayer #Declaration

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

#Conservative #Sometimes #Feels

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

#Winning #Track #Doubt

Some things just have to be believed to be seen.
-- Philip Yancey