Best 253 quotes of Philip Yancey on MyQuotes

Philip Yancey

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    A faithful person sees life from the perspective of trust, not fear. Bedrock faith allows me to believe that, despite the chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how worthless I may feel, I truly matter to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God's Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    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?)

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.'

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.

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    Philip Yancey

    Christians have an important role to play in contending that no human life is "devoid of value." We can do so through courageous protest, as happened in Germany, as well, as in compassionate care for the most vulnerable members of society, as Mother Teresa did. In both approaches theology - what one believes about God and human life - matters. The world desperately needs that good news.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

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    Philip Yancey

    Eugene Peterson points out that "the root meaning in Hebrew of salvation is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge. It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined and cramped." God wants to set free, to make it possible for us to live open and loving lives with God and our neighbors. "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free," wrote the psalmist.

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    Philip Yancey

    Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    Forgiveness is the only way to break the cycle of blame-and pain-in a relationship...It does not settle all questions of blame and justice and fairness...But it does allow relationships to start over. In that way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. It is not our capacity to think that makes us different, but our capacity to repent, and to forgive.

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    Philip Yancey

    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.

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    Philip Yancey

    For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.

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    Philip Yancey

    God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.

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    Philip Yancey

    God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.

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    Philip Yancey

    God operates by different rules of time and space. And God's infinite greatness, which we would expect to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire. A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.

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    Philip Yancey

    God's visit to earth took place in an animal shelter with no attendants present and nowhere to lay the newborn king but a feed trough. ... For just an instant the sky grew luminous with angels, yet who saw the spectacle? Illiterate hirelings who watched the flocks of others, "nobodies" who failed to leave their names.

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

    Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people... Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God.

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    Philip Yancey

    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!

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    Philip Yancey

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

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    Philip Yancey

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