Quotes About Grace Philip Yancey

#1. Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus' love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace. That does not mean, of course, that Christians should not involve themselves in politics. It simply means that as we do so we must not let the rules of power displace the command to love.

Philip Yancey

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

Philip Yancey

#5. Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#8. Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.

Philip Yancey

#9. Grace dispensers give out of their own bounty, in gratitude (a word with the same root as grace) for what we have received from God. We serve others not with some hidden scheme of making converts, rather to contribute to the common good, to help humans flourish as God intended.

Philip Yancey

#10. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues - in short, our lack of grace - may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs.

Philip Yancey

#11. 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.

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#13. 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.

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#15. Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative.

Philip Yancey

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Philip Yancey

#19. If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.

Philip Yancey

#20. Jesus proclaimed unmistakably that God's law is so perfect and absolute that no one can achieve righteousness. Yet God's grace is so great that we do not have to.

Philip Yancey

#21. 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

#22. Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.

Philip Yancey

#23. What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is "on tap"?

Philip Yancey

#24. In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.

Philip Yancey

#25. I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

Philip Yancey

#26. 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?

Philip Yancey

#27. 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

#28. Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

Philip Yancey

#29. 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

#30. The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.

Philip Yancey

#31. The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace.

Philip Yancey

#32. We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#34. 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.

Philip Yancey

#35. A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.

Philip Yancey

#36. Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.

Philip Yancey

#37. God welcomes home anyone who will have him and, in fact, has made the first move already.

Philip Yancey

#38. Many churches offer more entertainment than worship, more uniformity than diversity, more exclusivity than outreach, more law than grace.

Philip Yancey

#39. The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

Philip Yancey

#40. I would far rather convey grace than explain it.

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#42. I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don't have their hands open, there's something they're grasping because there's a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country.

Philip Yancey

#43. Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.

Philip Yancey

#44. It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me.

Philip Yancey

#45. The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.

Philip Yancey

#46. Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

Philip Yancey

#47. Like a dying star, grace dissipates in a final burst of pale light, and is then engulfed by the black hole of ungrace.

Philip Yancey

#48. Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#50. We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.

Philip Yancey

#51. 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.

Philip Yancey

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

Philip Yancey

#53. 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.

Philip Yancey

#54. All of us in the church need "grace-healed eyes" to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us.

Philip Yancey