Top 275 Quotes & Sayings by Philip Yancey - Page 4

God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it?

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

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

[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?

... learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

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

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

Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.

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

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

Prayer is a place where God and humans meet.

I never see God. I seldom run into visual clues that remind me of God unless I am looking. The act of looking, the pursuit itself, makes possible the encounter. For this reason, Christianity has always insisted that trust and obedience come first, and knowledge follows.

If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

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.

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

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

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

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.

I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.

God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.

Prayer unfolds in the stillness of the soul.

Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God.

Prayer is - not just bowing your head a few times a day, it pervades all of life.

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.

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.

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

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

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

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

Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

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.

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

Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.

Jesus represents a point of common ground an esteemed rabbi to the Jew, a god to the Hindu, an enlightened one to the Buddhist, a great prophet to the Muslim. Even to the New Age guru, Jesus is the pinnacle of God-consciousness. At the same time, Jesus is the divider. None but Christians see Him as a member of the Godhead on an exclusive mission to repair the broken world.

prayer, and only prayer, restores my vision to one that more resembles God's. i awake from blindness to see that wealth lurks as a terrible danger, not a goal worth striving for; that value depends not on race or status but on the image of God every person bears; that no amount of effort to improve physical beauty has much relevance for the world beyond.

Be salt, and a little bit of salt keeps the whole society from going rancid.

In the move The Last Emperor, the young child anointed as the last emperor of China lives a magical life of luxury with a thousand eunuch servants at his command. "What happens when you do wrong?" his brother asks. "When I do wrong, someone else is punished," the boy emperor replies. To demonstrate, he breaks a jar, and one of the servants is beaten. In Christian theology, Jesus reversed that ancient pattern: when the servants erred, the King was punished. Grace is free only because the giver himself has borned the cost.

Capitalism rules worldwide, and a society whose economic fabric depends on constant growth requires that its citizens have ever-expanding needs and wants... In the West, it will take one with soul force equal to Gandhi's to change the prevailing dogma of ever increasing GNP. We may be forced to change our profligate ways some day, when the soil is depleted, the aquifers drained, the icecaps melted, and all the oil wells pumped dry. But the crisis will wait another fifty years or so; we'll leave those problems to a generation yet unborn.

Goodness cannot be imposed externally, from the top down; it must grow internally, from the bottom up.

The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

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

We should do whatever we can to cut through the scum that has grown on our understanding and rediscover freshness.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

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.

All of the images of Jesus and of the kingdom are small things: be a light in the darkness.

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

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.

We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the "real" world and the unseen world as the "unreal" world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite.

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.

Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.

I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.

Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for people who live in comfort.

We should be asking: How do we respond to a post-Christian society?

...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.

Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

If God doesn't want something for me, then I shouldn't want it either.

We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.

You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it

... we need to reclaim the "goodnewness" of the gospel, and the best place to start is to rediscover the good news ourselves.