Top 275 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Yancey - Page 3

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

The people who related to God best--Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah--treated him with startling familiarity. They talked to God as if he were sitting in a chair beside them, as one might talk to a counselor, a boss, a parent, or a lover. They treated him like a person.

The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me.

Individuals and societies are not helpless victims of heredity. We have the power to change - not by looking "down" to nature but "up" to God, who consistently calls us forward to become the people we were designed to be. A confused world urgently needs a model of what that looks like. If Christians fail to provide that model, who will?

I am learning that mature faith, which encompasses both simple faith and fidelity, works the opposite of paranoia. It reassembles all the events of life around trust in a loving God. When good things happen, I accept them as gifts from God, worthy of thanksgiving. When bad things happen, I do not take them as necessarily sent by God -- I see evidence in the Bible to the contrary -- and I find in them no reason to divorce God. Rather, I trust that God can use even those bad things for my benefit.

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute 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.

The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God - who, after all, loves ornery creatures like us.

... the core problem with Christians communicating faith: we do not always do so in love. That is an indispensable point to presenting faith in a grace-full way.

Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.

We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe ought to be changed.

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.

By striving to prove how much they deserve God's love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don't deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

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

Grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us. Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, "Be good." Jesus' stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, "Help!"

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

What you and I think about Jesus and how we respond to Him will determine our destiny for all eternity.

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.

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

The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.

Christians fail to communicate to others because we ignore basic principles in relationship. When we make condescending judgments or proclaim lofty words that don't translate into action, or simply speak without first listening, we fail to love - and thus deter a thirsty world from Living Water. The good news about God's grace goes unheard.

We are all trophies of God's grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls who you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe. (pp.88)

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

What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

Henri Nouwen says, "When we come to realize that ... only God saves, then we are free to serve, then we can live truly humble lives." Nouwen changed his approach from "selling pearls," or peddling the good news, to "hunting for the treasure" already present in those he was called to love - a shift from dispensing religion to dispensing grace. It makes all the difference in the world whether I view my neighbor as a potential convert or as someone whom God already loves.

There is but one true Giver in the universe; all else are debtors.

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

John Wesley taught that the gospel of Christ involved more than saving souls. It should have an impact on all of society, and his followers worked to accomplish just that. They were dispensing grace to the broader world, and in the process their spirit helped change a nation, saving it from the revolutionary chaos that had spread across Europe.

I would say my being disheartened has more to do with American culture than anything else. We are becoming a very shallow culture. My goodness, the celebrity ethos has taken over completely. Turn on the television and you see that over and over. There's very little substance. And so, everything gets shorter. Everything is entertainment oriented. Our churches reflect that. A thirty-five minute sermon without a Power Point or video clips is rare these days. That's not true in other countries so much.

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.

When he lived on earth, [Jesus] surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren.

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

Someone asked the Swiss physician & author Paul Tournier how he helped his patients get rid of their fears. He replied, 'I don't. Everything that's worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids--all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.'

Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.

I say this with care, but I wonder if a fierce, insistent desire for a miracle - even a physical healing - sometimes betrays a lack of faith rather than an abundance of it. When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether he reveals himself yet again in the seen world?

Faith is not simply a private matter, or something we practice once a week at church. Rather, it should have a contagious effect on the broader world. Jesus used these images to illustrate His kingdom.: a sprinkle of yeast causing the whole loaf to rise, a pinch of salt preserving a slab of meat, the smallest seed in the garden growing into a great tree in which birds of the air come to nest.

Curiously, the righteous Pharisees had little historical impact, save for a brief time in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. But Jesus' disciples - an ornery, undependable, and hopelessly flawed group of men - became drunk with the power of a gospel that offered free forgiveness to the worst sinners and traitors. Those men managed to change the world.

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

As I read the Bible, it seems clear that God satisfies his "eternal appetite" by loving individual human beings. I imagine He views each halting step forward in my spiritual "walk" with the eagerness of a parent watching a child take the very first step.

Who would complain if God allowed one hour of suffering in an entire lifetime of comfort? Why complain about a lifetime that includes suffering when that lifetime is a mere hour of eternity?

There is an "offense" to the Gospel no matter how graciously we present it. It includes the message that God, not humanity, is the ultimate judge of right and wrong, and that the choices we make here have eternal consequences.

The deadening part of Bible study is when you think you've already got it all figured out.

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?)

Charles Williams has said of the Lord's Prayer, "No word in English carries a greater possibility of terror than the little word 'as' in that clause." What makes the 'as' so terrifying? The fact that Jesus plainly links our forgiven-ness by the Father with our forgiving-ness of fellow human beings. Jesus' next remark could not be more explicit: 'If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.'

Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The point of the Book of Job is not suffering: where is God When It hurts? The prologue (chapters 1-2) dealt with that issue. The point of the Book of Job is faith: Where is Job when it hurts?

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

The shift in American society from admiring Christians to fearing and criticizing them provides an opportunity for self-reflection. How have we been presenting the message we believe in? Might there be a more grace-filled way?

Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing.

Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God's secret will; rather, he healed them.

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

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.

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

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.