Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.”

— Philip Yancey

202. “Does prayer change God or change me?”

— Philip Yancey

203. “By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.”

— Philip Yancey

204. “I begin with confession not in order to feel miserable, rather to call to mind a reality I often ignore. When I acknowledge where I stand before a perfect God, it restores the true state of the universe. Confession simply establishes the proper ground rules of creatures relating to their creator.”

— Philip Yancey

205. “A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.”

— Philip Yancey

206. “From Jesus I learn that God is on the side of the sufferer.”

— Philip Yancey

207. “Taken as a whole, the Bible clearly puts the emphasis on what pleases God – the point of worship, after all. To worship, says Walter Wink, is to remember Who owns the house.”

— Philip Yancey

208. “People want to go back to those old days, but it’s probably not going to happen.”

— Philip Yancey

209. “If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it’s likely not a place where grace is on tap.”

— Philip Yancey

210. “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

211. “Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change – these are the gates to God’s kingdom.”

— Philip Yancey

212. “The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?”

— Philip Yancey

213. “I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace.”

— Philip Yancey

214. “Frederick Buechner writes, “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.”

— Philip Yancey

215. “Prosperity may dilute prayer too. In my travels I have noticed that Christians in developing countries spend less time pondering the effectiveness of prayer and more time actually praying. The.”

— Philip Yancey

216. “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

217. “If we cannot detect God’s presence in the world, it may be that we have been looking in the wrong places.”

— Philip Yancey

218. “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

219. “Faith is not simply a private matter, or something we practice once a week at church. Rather, it should have a contagious effect on the broader world. Jesus used these images to illustrate his kingdom: a sprinkle of yeast causing the whole loaf to rise, a pinch of salt preserving a slab of meat, the smallest seed in the garden growing into a great tree in which birds of the air come to nest.”

— Philip Yancey

220. “How differently will I relate to the uncommitted if I view them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.”

— Philip Yancey

221. “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

222. “Prayer is – not just bowing your head a few times a day, it pervades all of life.”

— Philip Yancey

223. “A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.”

— Philip Yancey

224. “What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?”

— Philip Yancey

225. “One man told me the most helpful person during his long illness was an office colleague who called every day, just to check. His visits, usually twice a week, never exceeded fifteen minutes, but the consistency of his calls and visits became a fixed point, something he could count on when everything else in his life seemed unstable.”

— Philip Yancey

226. “Self-sufficiency which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet that their lack of self-sufficiency is obvious to them every day. They must turn somewhere for strength, and sometimes they go through life relying on their natural gifts. But there’s a chance, just a chance, that people who lack such natural advantages may cry out to God in their time of need.”

— Philip Yancey

227. “In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square.”

— Philip Yancey

228. “When we ignore the world outside the walls we suffer-as does it.”

— Philip Yancey

229. “The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people – people just like me – who make shockingly bad choices and yet still find themselves pursued by God. As they receive grace and forgiveness, naturally they want to give it to others, and a thread of hope and transformation weaves its way throughout the Bible’s accounts.”

— Philip Yancey

230. “A clear pattern soon emerged, as demonstrated by many polls: the more prominently Christians entered the political arena, the more negatively they were viewed by the rest of society.”

— Philip Yancey

231. “Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.”

— Philip Yancey

232. “As I read the Bible, it seems clear that God satisfies his “eternal appetite” by loving individual human beings. I imagine He views each halting step forward in my spiritual “walk” with the eagerness of a parent watching a child take the very first step.”

— Philip Yancey

233. “For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.”

— Philip Yancey

234. “It was not pastoral teaching, or small group fellowship, or worship services, or books of theology – rather, they mentioned suffering. “People said they grew more during seasons of loss, pain, and crisis than they did at any other time.” We discover the hidden value of suffering only by suffering – not as part of God’s original or ultimate plan for us, but as a redemptive transformation that takes place in the midst of trial.”

— Philip Yancey

235. “As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.”

— Philip Yancey

236. “True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die.”

— Philip Yancey

237. “When the church joined with the state, it tended to wield power rather than dispense grace.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

239. “What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus’ sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?”

— Philip Yancey

240. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

241. “I do not know if that theory is correct, but I do know that singling out one behavior as “sin” and emphasizing it over others provides a convenient way of dodging our own need for grace. High-minded moralism and shrill pronouncements of judgment may help fundraising, but they undermine a gospel of grace.”

— Philip Yancey

242. “Ungrace causes cracks to fissure open between mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, between scientists, and prisoners, and tribes, and races. Left alone, cracks widen, and for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness.”

— Philip Yancey

243. “Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.”

— Philip Yancey

244. “Could it be that Christians, eager to point out how good we are, neglect the basic fact that the gospel sounds like good news only to bad people?”

— Philip Yancey

245. “The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.”

— Philip Yancey

246. “Some things just have to be believed to be seen.”

— Philip Yancey

247. “Democracy requires us to recognize others’ rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person’s ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce. For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil.”

— Philip Yancey

248. “Like everyone else, evangelicals have a right to present arguments on all the issues, but the moment we present them as part of some “Christian” platform we abandon our moral high ground.”

— Philip Yancey

249. “Religious faith – for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace – lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.”

— Philip Yancey

250. “The gospel presents both high ideals and all-encompassing grace. Very often, however, the church tilts one direction or the other. Either it lowers the ideals, adjusting moral standards downward, softening Jesus’ strong commands, rationalizing behavior; or else it pulls in the boundaries of grace, declaring some sins worse than others, some sinners beyond the pale. Few churches stay faithful both to the high ideals of gospel and its bottomless grace.”

— Philip Yancey