Philip Yancey Quotes

I have found that lived out, the hardest place to be a Christian is to be in a nice prosperous country with a lot of entertainment options because there's so many distractions.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

The world is not against you, but the world is a place where bad things happen. It's just true. Airlines crash, people do evil things. A lot of bad things happen and it causes pain.

If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.

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

My mother believed he would be healed. She counted on God, and the worst thing happened. The impact of that error in theology, in thinking, impacted my life from the very beginning.

God must love art because most of the Bible is expressed in the form of story or poetry.

Release what is good.

As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.

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

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

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

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.

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

If God consistently sent lightning bolts in response to bad doctrine, our planet would sparkle nightly like a Christmas tree.

Love is an overarching style of relating to another.

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

All of us in the church need “grace-healed eyes” to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us.

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

Prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.

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

The first nation to separate Christianity from government produced perhaps the most religious nation on earth.

God’s gifts are best used when we give them away in serving those who have less.

But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?

No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.

It seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for His entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.

Jesus proclaimed unmistakably that God's law is so perfect and absolute that no one can achieve righteousness. Yet God's grace is so great that we do not have to.

Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.

God welcomes home anyone who will have him and, in fact, has made the first move already.

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative.

A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.

Are we concentrating more on the kingdom of this world than on the kingdom that is not of this world?

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

In other words, the proof of spiritual maturity is not how 'pure' you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.