Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

52. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

54. “Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn’t act the way we want God to, and why I don’t act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.”

— Philip Yancey

55. “When I am tempted to complain about God’s lack of presence, I remind myself that God has much more reason to complain about my lack of presence.”

— Philip Yancey

56. “The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.”

— Philip Yancey

57. “If God consistently sent lightning bolts in response to bad doctrine, our planet would sparkle nightly like a Christmas tree.”

— Philip Yancey

58. “Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.”

— Philip Yancey

59. “Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.”

— Philip Yancey

60. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

61. “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

62. “Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.”

— Philip Yancey

63. “In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God’s love.”

— Philip Yancey

64. “Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

66. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

67. “I have found that lived out, the hardest place to be a Christian is to be in a nice prosperous country with a lot of entertainment options because there’s so many distractions.”

— Philip Yancey

68. “Herein lies the most solemn challenge facing Christians who want to communicate their faith: if we do not live in a way that draws others to the faith rather than repels them, none of our words will matter.”

— Philip Yancey

69. “Are we concentrating more on the kingdom of this world than on the kingdom that is not of this world?”

— Philip Yancey

70. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

71. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

74. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

75. “Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.”

— Philip Yancey

76. “Rejoicing in suffering” does not mean Christians should act happy about tragedy and pain when they feel like crying. Rather, the Bible aims the spotlight on the end result, the productive use God can make of suffering in our lives. To achieve that result, however, he first needs our commitment of trust, and the process of giving him that commitment can be described as rejoicing.”

— Philip Yancey

77. “When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.”

— Philip Yancey

78. “If we comprehend what Christ has done for us, then surely out of gratitude we will strive to live ‘worthy’ of such great love. We will strive for holiness not to make God love us but because He already does.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

80. “The people who related to God best – Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah – treated him with startling familiarity. They talked to God as if he were sitting in a chair beside them, as one might talk to a counselor, a boss, a parent, or a lover. They treated him like a person.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

82. “My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.”

— Philip Yancey

83. “One prominent spiritual leader insists, “The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform.” Could he have that backwards?”

— Philip Yancey

84. “True healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where God’s people are.”

— Philip Yancey

85. “Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.”

— Philip Yancey

86. “We respond to healing grace by giving it away.”

— Philip Yancey

87. “The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.”

— Philip Yancey

88. “I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

95. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

97. “I have found that living with faith in an unseen world requires constant effort.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

99. “We truly live only one day at a time. It doesn’t really help to worry about the future, which we can’t control, or the past, which we can’t change.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey