Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There is but one true Giver in the universe; all else are debtors.”

— Philip Yancey

102. “When I listened to public prayers in evangelical churches, I heard people telling God what to do, combined with thinly veiled hints on how others should behave. When.”

— Philip Yancey

103. “We’re concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.”

— Philip Yancey

104. “Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, “Well isn’t that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do about your stuff.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

106. “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

107. “That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus’ word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human father.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

109. “Jesus, who said little about how believers should behave when we gather together and much about how we can affect the world around us.”

— Philip Yancey

110. “Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?”

— Philip Yancey

111. “Politics deals with externals: borders, wealth, crimes. Authentic forgiveness deals with the evil in a person’s heart, something for which politics has no cure.”

— Philip Yancey

112. “The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of power, which are rules of ungrace.”

— Philip Yancey

113. “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.7-22 REINHOLD NIEBUHR.”

— Philip Yancey

114. “In a sort of negative proof of the power of prayer, three times God commanded Jeremiah to stop praying; God wanted no alteration in his plans to punish a rebellious nation.”

— Philip Yancey

115. “Where is God when it hurts? Where God’s people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and now on earth the Messiah takes form in the shape of the church. That’s what the body of Christ means.”

— Philip Yancey

116. “People who think they are free eventually end up slaves to their own desires, and those who give their freedom away to the only One you can trust with that freedom eventually get it back.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

118. “One of the things I found is that the things we want to say for well-intentioned motives often cause more harm than good. People don’t need our words. They mainly need our presence, they need our love. And if you come in too quickly with explanations, you may do more harm than good.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

120. “Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, ‘God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.”

— Philip Yancey

121. “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

122. “Those who observe suffering are tempted to reject God; those who experience it often cannot give up on God, their solace and their agony.” The presence of so many in church on a wintry night proved his point. “You can protest against the evil in the world only if you believe in a good God,” Volf also said. “Otherwise the protest doesn’t make sense.”

— Philip Yancey

123. “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

124. “In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.”

— Philip Yancey

125. “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

126. “Oswald Chambers once said that the Psalms teach you how to pray; Job teaches you how to suffer; the Song of Solomon teaches you how to love; Proverbs teaches you how to live; and Ecclesiastes teaches you how to enjoy.”

— Philip Yancey

127. “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

128. “C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.”

— Philip Yancey

129. “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

130. “If God doesn’t want something for me, I shouldn’t want it either. Spending time in meditative prayer, getting to know God, helps align my desires with God’s.”

— Philip Yancey

131. “Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.”

— Philip Yancey

132. “Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message.”

— Philip Yancey

133. “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

134. “Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.”

— Philip Yancey

135. “No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.”

— Philip Yancey

136. “Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God’s scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.”

— Philip Yancey

137. “Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.”

— Philip Yancey

138. “The main purpose of prayer is not to make life easier, nor to gain magical powers, but to know God.”

— Philip Yancey

139. “The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace.”

— Philip Yancey

140. “In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: “God gets his family back.” From the first book to the last the Bible tells of wayward children and the tortuous lengths to which God will go to bring them home. Indeed, the entire biblical drama ends with a huge family reunion in the book of Revelation.”

— Philip Yancey

141. “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

142. “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

143. “God is the ultimate judge of hypocrisy in the church, I decided; I would leave such judgment in God’s capable hands. I began to relax and grow softer, more forgiving of others. After all, who has a perfect spouse, or perfect parents or children? We do not give up on the institution of family because of its imperfections – why give up on the church?”

— Philip Yancey

144. “We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success. Almost alone in our success-oriented society, we admit that we have failed, are failing, and always will fail.”

— Philip Yancey

145. “Prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.”

— Philip Yancey

146. “Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.”

— Philip Yancey

147. “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

148. “What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.”

— Philip Yancey

149. “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

150. “Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.”

— Philip Yancey