Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Perhaps the reason politics has proved such a snare for the church is that power rarely coexists with love. People in power draw up lists of friends and enemies, then reward their friends and punish their enemies. Christians are commanded to love even their enemies.”

— Philip Yancey

102. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

103. “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

104. “The apostle Paul had much to say about the immorality of individual church members, but little to say about the immorality of pagan Rome. He did not rail against the abuses in Rome – slavery, idolatry, gladiator games, political oppression, greed – even though such abuses surely offended Christians of that day every bit as much as our deteriorating society offends Christians today.”

— Philip Yancey

105. “People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.”

— Philip Yancey

106. “We cannot simply pray and then wait for God to do the rest.”

— Philip Yancey

107. “At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.”

— Philip Yancey

108. “There is but one true Giver in the universe; all else are debtors.”

— Philip Yancey

109. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

111. “The only hope for the future lay in an all-embracing attitude of forgiveness of the peoples who had been our enemies.”

— Philip Yancey

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

138. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

144. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “The late Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical American author, wrote: “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the beatitudes. But – often with tears in their eyes – they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, be posted anywhere.”

— Philip Yancey