Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.”

— Philip Yancey

252. “Change came from below, as it usually does, rather than being imposed from above.”

— Philip Yancey

253. “The more we love, and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God – who, after all, loves ornery creatures like us.”

— Philip Yancey

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

257. “From Jesus I learn that, whatever activism I get involved in, it must not drive out love and humility, or otherwise I betray the kingdom of heaven.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

259. “But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we’ll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty which is forever.”

— Philip Yancey

260. “I’m convinced that human beings instinctively seek two things. We long for meaning, a sense that our life somehow matters to the world around us. And we long for community, a sense of being loved.”

— Philip Yancey

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.”

— Philip Yancey

265. “But the Lord say he won’t put more on us than we can stand. If we can’t take it, he’ll be right there beside us giving stren’th we didn’t know we had.”

— Philip Yancey

266. “Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.”

— Philip Yancey

267. “All of the images of Jesus and of the kingdom are small things: be a light in the darkness.”

— Philip Yancey

268. “In God’s presence I feel small because I am small.”

— Philip Yancey

269. “Today, each time an election rolls around Christians debate whether this or that candidate is “God’s man” for the White House. Projecting myself back into Jesus’ time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was “God’s man” for the empire.”

— Philip Yancey

270. “Never do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God’s secret will; rather, he healed them.”

— Philip Yancey

271. “Moreover, conservative Christians have come to accept that Jesus’ gospel applies to the whole person and not just the soul. Didn’t Jesus inaugurate his own ministry with a declaration of good news for the poor, the oppressed, the prisoners, and the blind?”

— Philip Yancey

272. “The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.”

— Philip Yancey

273. “When I don’t know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.”

— Philip Yancey

274. “Along with Chesterton, I’ve had to take my place among those who acknowledge that we are what is wrong with the world. What is my snobbishness toward my childhood church, for instance, but an inverted form of the harsh judgment it showed me?”

— Philip Yancey

275. “Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving – God’s self-giving and human self-giving – and not about self-imposing.”

— Philip Yancey

276. “Health and life, I would say, in the full and final sense of those words, are not what we die out of, but what we die into.”

— Philip Yancey

277. “Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.”

— Philip Yancey

278. “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

279. “The deadening part of Bible study is when you think you’ve already got it all figured out.”

— Philip Yancey

280. “The deepest longings we feel on earth, as parents, as lovers, are mere flickers of the hungering desire God feels for us. It is a desire that cost him the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.”

— Philip Yancey

281. “We should feel dissonance; we are, after all, immortals trapped in mortal surroundings. We lack unity because long ago a gap fissured open between our mortal and immortal parts; theologians trace the fault line back to the Fall.”

— Philip Yancey

282. “Sometimes the only meaning we can offer a suffering person is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has a meaning for us.”

— Philip Yancey

283. “Release what is good.”

— Philip Yancey

284. “God had “hallowed” creation by separating the sacred from the profane, the clean from the unclean. Jesus did not cancel out the hallowing principle, rather he changed its source. We ourselves can be agents of God’s holiness, for God now dwells within us. In the midst of an unclean world we can stride, as Jesus did, seeking ways to be a source of holiness.”

— Philip Yancey

285. “God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.”

— Philip Yancey

286. “Jesus’ story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day’s wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.”

— Philip Yancey

287. “We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not “What did I get out of it?” but rather “Was God pleased with what happened?”

— Philip Yancey

288. “People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer.”

— Philip Yancey

289. “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.”

— Philip Yancey

290. “Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.”

— Philip Yancey

291. “God is already present in my life and all around me; prayer offers the chance to attend and respond to that presence.”

— Philip Yancey

292. “Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus’ love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace.”

— Philip Yancey

293. “Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.”

— Philip Yancey

294. “I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!”

— Philip Yancey

295. “I believe Christians walk a mental tightrope and are in constant danger of falling in one of two directions. On this subject, errors in thinking can have tragic results. The first error comes when we attribute all suffering to God, seeing it as his punishment for human mistakes; the second error does just the opposite, assuming that life with God will never include suffering.”

— Philip Yancey

296. “My publisher conducted a website poll, and of the 678 respondents only 23 felt satisfied with the time they were spending in prayer. That.”

— Philip Yancey

297. “Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.”

— Philip Yancey

298. “We pray because we can’t help it. The.”

— Philip Yancey

299. “God must love art because most of the Bible is expressed in the form of story or poetry.”

— Philip Yancey

300. “After reporting on such moments, the historian Paul Johnson concludes, “Attempts to perfect Christian societies in this world, whether conducted by popes or revolutionaries, have tended to degenerate into red terrors.”

— Philip Yancey