Philip Yancey Quotes

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

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

I do not get to know God and then do His will. I get to know Him by doing His will.

Jesus announced a great reversal of values in His Sermon on the Mount, elevating not the rich or attractive, but rather the poor, the persecuted, and those who mourn.

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

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.

I have found that living with faith in an unseen world requires constant effort.

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.

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

The uncommitted share many of our core values, but if we do not live out those values in a compelling way, we will not awaken a thirst for their ultimate Source.

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.

God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.

Some things just have to be believed to be seen.

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.

The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.

Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.

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

The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer enters the pool of God's love and widens outward.

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

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

Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.

Homeless people bear God's image too.

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.

What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

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

Prayer is - keeping company with God.

We, Jesus' followers, are the agents assigned to carry out God's will on earth. Too easily we expect God to do something for us when instead God wants to do it through us.

The world says you gain your life by getting more and more and more and more, but Jesus says, 'No, that leads to death. You get it back by giving it away and when you give it away you get it back.'

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.

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

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less

Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message.

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

People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.

Whatever else we may say about it, the atonement fulfills the Jewish principle that only one who has been hurt can forgive. At Calvary, God chose to be hurt.

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

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

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

The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure.