Top 275 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Yancey
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Philip Yancey.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.
We're in a celebrity culture, and when I turn on the news today I hear about Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods and Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters and 'Dancing with the Stars,' one thing after another, Kate Gosselin's new body.
For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of 'keeping company with God.'
The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.
The New Testament persistently presses us upward, toward higher motives for being good.
Much of the misgiving that Muslims feel for the West stems from our strong emphasis on freedom, always a risky enterprise. I've heard some say they would rather rear their children in a closely guarded Islamic society than in the United States, where freedom so often leads to decadence.
God endorses the confusion and even outrage that we feel when mysterious things happen.
In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you'll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage - quite the opposite.
I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don't have their hands open, there's something they're grasping because there's a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country.
Most observers understand the difference between a committed Christian who accepts Jesus as a model for living and a 'cultural Christian' who happens to live in a nation with a Christian heritage. Most Muslims do not.
Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.
You are free to reject God. Make sure that you're really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us to reject Him but includes the arguments we can use against Him in the Bible. I respect that.
The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.
As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.
In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.
God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it?
When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I'm qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!
People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.
Christian faith is... basically about love and being loved and reconciliation. These things are so important, they're foundational and they can transform individuals, families.
When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.
It's too bad prayer comes bundled in a package of 'spiritual disciplines.' Really, we should see prayer as a spiritual privilege. We don't do it as a callisthenic exercise to gain points with God; we do it, because it is good for us in every way.
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.
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.
I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the wrong that you did that caused the guilt feelings.
One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
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.'
People who think they are free eventually end up slaves to their own desires, and those who give their freedom away to the only One you can trust with that freedom eventually get it back.
I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.
Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?
I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.
In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.
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.
I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will make sense only in reverse.
I do not get to know God and then do His will. I get to know Him by doing His will.
Jesus is the best clue we have as to what God is like and He is consistently gracious and merciful, especially to those who are failures. He is harsh to uptight, judgmental people, but merciful and gracious to the failures. He seems to draw out the smallest kernel of faith in each person that He's with. So, I presume that that's the way God is going to judge humanity.
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.
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.
Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.
At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.
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.
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.
Some things just have to be believed to be seen.
We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.
... the issue is not whether I agree with someone but rather how I treat someone with whom I profoundly disagree. We Christians are called to use the "weapons of grace," which means treating even our opponents with love and respect.
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.
The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.
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, like water, flows to the lowest part.
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.
Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.
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.
Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.
Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.
The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.
I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.
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.
For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.
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.
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.
The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.
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