Top 100 Philip Yancey Quotes
#1. Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.
Philip Yancey
#2. The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.
Philip Yancey
#3. We, Jesus' followers, are the agents assigned to carry out God's will on earth. Too easily we expect God to do something for us when instead God wants to do it through us.
Philip Yancey
#4. Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.
Philip Yancey
#5. Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about - like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.
Philip Yancey
#6. Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. - Mahatma Gandhi
Philip Yancey
#7. Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands.
Philip Yancey
#8. 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.
Philip Yancey
#9. At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.
Philip Yancey
#10. Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.
Philip Yancey
#12. Think too of all who suffer as if you shared their pain. HEBREWS 13:3
Philip Yancey
#13. Love is an overarching style of relating to another.
Philip Yancey
#14. Is God somehow responsible for the suffering of this world? In this indirect way, yes. But giving a child a pair of ice skates, knowing that he may fall, is a very different matter from knocking him down on the ice.
Philip Yancey
#15. A pilgrim is a fellow-traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide.
Philip Yancey
#16. Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.
Philip Yancey
#17. Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.
Philip Yancey
#18. As a committed Christian, I wanted to discover what adjustments we might need to make in order to communicate the good news to our friends, neighbors, coworkers.
Philip Yancey
#20. Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.
Philip Yancey
#21. God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.
Philip Yancey
#22. Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cured.
Philip Yancey
#23. For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.
Philip Yancey
#24. To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?
Philip Yancey
#25. It is not the same as optimism or wishful thinking, for these imply a denial of reality.
Philip Yancey
#26. We cannot simply pray and then wait for God to do the rest.
Philip Yancey
#28. Our faith rests not just on Jesus' example but on his resurrection.
Philip Yancey
#29. At the heart of sin lies a lack of trust that God intends the best for us.
Philip Yancey
#30. Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message.
Philip Yancey
#31. Jesus gave us a model for the work of the church at the Last Supper. While his disciples kept proposing more organization - Hey, let's elect officers, establish hierarchy, set standards of professionalism - Jesus quietly picked up a towel and basin of water and began to wash their feet.
Philip Yancey
#32. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
Philip Yancey
#33. My mother believed he would be healed. She counted on God, and the worst thing happened, the impact of that error in theology, in thinking, impacted my life from the very beginning.
Philip Yancey
#34. 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.
Philip Yancey
#35. We deserve punishment and get forgiveness; we deserve God's wrath and get God's love.
Philip Yancey
#36. I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.
Philip Yancey
#37. According to Gallup polls, more Americans will pray this week than will exercise, drive a car, have sex, or go to work. Nine in ten of us pray regularly, and three out of four claim to pray every day. To
Philip Yancey
#38. Miracles may occur now and then, but for the most part ordinary pilgrims do God's work by preaching, caring for widows and orphans, challenging society's wrongs, and marshaling the faithful to show the world a better way to live.
Philip Yancey
#39. It has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the church blocked the way.
Philip Yancey
#40. Perhaps the most powerful thing Christians can do to communicate to a skeptical world is to live fulfilled lives, exhibiting proof that Jesus' way truly leads to a life most abundant and most thirst-satisfying.
Philip Yancey
#41. Jesus says in effect, 'Do you want to know what it feels like to be God? When one of those two-legged humans pays attention to me, it feels like I just reclaimed my most valuable possession, which I had given up for lost.' To God himself, it feels like the discovery of a lifetime.
Philip Yancey
#42. What we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God - we change in the very act of rebellion - and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later, especially if it involves repentance?
Philip Yancey
#43. A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
Philip Yancey
#44. The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.
Philip Yancey
#45. Are we concentrating more on the kingdom of this world than on the kingdom that is not of this world?
Philip Yancey
#46. In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.
Philip Yancey
#47. Like a sudden thaw in the middle of winter, grace happens at unexpected moments. It stops us short, catches the breath, disarms. If we manipulate it, try to control it, somehow earn it, that would not be grace. Yet not everyone has tasted of that amazing grace, and not everyone believes in it.
Philip Yancey
#48. I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like "What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything?" Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.
Philip Yancey
#49. God must love art because most of the Bible is expressed in the form of story or poetry.
Philip Yancey
#50. Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.
Philip Yancey
#51. Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.
Philip Yancey
#52. The redemptive way goes through pain, not around it.
Philip Yancey
#53. As a writer I have received my share of mixed reviews. Even so, as I read through stacks of vituperative letters, I got a strong sense for why the world does not automatically associate the word "grace" with evangelical Christians. Noxious
Philip Yancey
#54. Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.
Philip Yancey
#55. Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.
Philip Yancey
#56. Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.
Philip Yancey
#57. Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source.
Philip Yancey
#58. Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away.
Philip Yancey
#59. God is already present in my life and all around me; prayer offers the chance to attend and respond to that presence.
Philip Yancey
#60. Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.
Philip Yancey
#61. When I ask, "Tell me the first word that comes to your mind when I say Christian," not one time has someone suggested the word love. Yet without question that is the proper biblical answer.
Philip Yancey
#62. Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.
Philip Yancey
#63. 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.
Philip Yancey
#64. O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice
Philip Yancey
#65. Along with Chesterton, I've had to take my place among those who acknowledge that we are what is wrong with the world. What is my snobbishness toward my childhood church, for instance, but an inverted form of the harsh judgment it showed me?
Philip Yancey
#66. Think of all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of their nine hundred years," wrote Martin Luther. "Eve would say, 'You ate the apple,' and Adam would retort, 'You gave it to me.
Philip Yancey
#67. Humility is the real Christian virtue," says Nouwen. "When we come to realize that . . . only God saves, then we are free to serve, then we can live truly humble lives.
Philip Yancey
#68. 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.
Philip Yancey
#69. 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.
Philip Yancey
#70. 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.
Philip Yancey
#71. The proof of spiritual maturity, Tolstoy contended, is not how "pure" you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
Philip Yancey
#72. I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!
Philip Yancey
#73. As Ecclesiastes tells it, a wholesale devotion to pleasure will, paradoxically, lead to a state of utter despair.
Philip Yancey
#74. Always, no matter the circumstances, we have the assurance of "Immanuel," which simply means "God with us.
Philip Yancey
#75. Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.
Philip Yancey
#77. And perhaps, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit may be our very best defense against a materialist view of mankind here on earth.
Philip Yancey
#78. I have more appreciation for why the Bible avoids fuzzy psychologisms and says simply to the stealer, "Steal no more," and to the tempted, "Flee temptation." The Bible challenges us to look upward, not inward, for counsel at moments of crisis.
Philip Yancey
#79. Why are we here? God wants us to flourish, and paradoxically we flourish best by obeying rather than rebelling, by giving more than receiving, by serving rather than being served.
Philip Yancey
#80. 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.
Philip Yancey
#81. Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.
Philip Yancey
#82. God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.
Philip Yancey
#83. 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.
Philip Yancey
#84. To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, 'I am human and you are God.
Philip Yancey
#85. That, at least, is the vision of the church in the New Testament: a colony of heaven in a hostile world. Dwight L. Moody said, Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.
Philip Yancey
#86. Whatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority, that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.
Philip Yancey
#87. 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.
Philip Yancey
#88. A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer's own scars may fade away.
Philip Yancey
#89. I do "good works" for my wife not in order to earn credit but to express my love for her. Likewise, God wants me to serve "in the new way of the Spirit": not out of compulsion but out of desire.
Philip Yancey
#90. We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.
Philip Yancey
#91. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.
Philip Yancey
#92. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Philip Yancey
#93. Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.
Philip Yancey
#94. Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?
Philip Yancey
#95. The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings.
Philip Yancey
#96. What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is "on tap"?
Philip Yancey
#97. In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.
Philip Yancey
#98. 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.
Philip Yancey
#99. Some things just have to be believed to be seen.
Philip Yancey
#100. 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.
Philip Yancey
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