Philip Yancey quotes - page 3

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. (Philip Yancey)
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it. View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out evil, and even overcame death. View quote
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
We are all trophies of God's grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls who you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe. (pp.88) View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near. View quote
Philip Yancey
The world says you gain your life by getting more and more and more and more, but Jesus says, 'No, that leads to death. You get it back by giving it away and when you give it away you get it back.' (Philip Yancey)
We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe ought to be changed. View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny. View quote
Philip Yancey
[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion. View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it? View quote
Philip Yancey
[...]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? View quote
Philip Yancey
What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot. View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will. (Philip Yancey)
A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change. View quote
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. View quote
Philip Yancey
Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love. View quote
Philip Yancey
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. View quote
Philip Yancey