Top 300 Philip Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.”

— Philip Yancey

252. “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

253. “My slowness to act is a sign of mercy, not of weakness.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

255. “Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe.”

— Philip Yancey

256. “The promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.”

— Philip Yancey

257. “Most observers understand the difference between a committed Christian who accepts Jesus as a model for living and a ‘cultural Christian’ who happens to live in a nation with a Christian heritage. Most Muslims do not.”

— Philip Yancey

258. “We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.”

— Philip Yancey

259. “I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

261. “The test of observance of Christ’s teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the extent of our deviation. LEO TOLSTOY The.”

— Philip Yancey

262. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “Release what is good.”

— Philip Yancey

282. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Jesus honored the dignity of people, whether he agreed with them or not. He would not found his kingdom on the basis of race or class or other such divisions.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

288. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

298. “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

299. “The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment forward.”

— Philip Yancey

300. “We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe ought to be changed.”

— Philip Yancey