Philip Yancey Quotations | Page 3

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

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.

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

I begin with confession not in order to feel miserable, rather to call to mind a reality I often ignore. When I acknowledge where I stand before a perfect God, it restores the true state of the universe. Confession simply establishes the proper ground rules of creatures relating to their creator.

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

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

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

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

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

It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you've heard everything before and that you have nothing left to learn.

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.

Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.

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

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

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

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

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.

Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.

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.'

O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice

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

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

The Old Testament anticipates [Jesus] all the way through.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

He (Job) did not seek the Giver because of His gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver.

The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labour for', as Sir Thomas More expressed it. The inner voice of prayer expresses itself naturally in action, just as the inner voice of my brain guides all my bodily actions.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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!"

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

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

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

Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.

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

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

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

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.

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

Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.

[...]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?

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.

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.

... 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.

Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.

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.

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 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.

... the approach of admitting our errors, besides being most true to a gospel of grace, is also most effective at expressing who we are. Propaganda turns people off; humbly admitting mistakes disarms.

... learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

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

I think God isn't interested in intervening every time some little bad thing happens. God is interested in getting the message of good news and love and comfort and hope across through people like us, ordinary people, or extraordinary people like Bono.

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.

Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day.

Love is an overarching style of relating to another.

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.

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