QUOTES by Philip Yancey
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Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
I think God isn't interested in intervening every time some little bad thing happens. God is interested in getting the message of good news and love and comfort and hope across through people like us, ordinary people, or extraordinary people like Bono.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
I have found that living with faith in an unseen world requires constant effort.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
A God wise enough to create me and the world I live in is wise enough to watch out for me.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
What I see in the Bible, especially in the book of Psalms, which is a book of gratitude for the created world, is a recognition that all good things on Earth are God's, every good gift is from above. They are good if we recognize where they came from and if we treat them the way the Designer intended them to be treated.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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?
Quote by -Philip Yancey
The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion. I sometimes wonder which have hurt worse.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?
Quote by -Philip Yancey
If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you'll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage - quite the opposite.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
You are free to reject God. Make sure that you're really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us to reject Him but includes the arguments we can use against Him in the Bible. I respect that.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God's point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God's will, the work of the kingdom. We are God's fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Some who attempt prayer never have the sense of anyone listening on the other end. They blame themselves for doing it wrong.... Prayer requires the faith to believe that God listens.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can "handle" my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need God's correction - but only by taking those feelings to God will I have the opportunity for correction and healing.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
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.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Thanks to the scientific method, most people in "developed" countries have an outlook of mild deism. We assume things like weather and disease operate according to fixed natural laws. Every so often, though, problems impinge on us so directly that we stretch beyond that mildly deistic stance and ask God to intervene. When a drought drags on too long, we pray for rain. When a young mother gets a diagnosis of cervical cancer, we solicit prayers for her healing. We beseech God as if trying to talk God into something God otherwise might not want to do.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
Prayer is - not just bowing your head a few times a day, it pervades all of life.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.
Quote by -Philip Yancey
prayer, and only prayer, restores my vision to one that more resembles God's. i awake from blindness to see that wealth lurks as a terrible danger, not a goal worth striving for; that value depends not on race or status but on the image of God every person bears; that no amount of effort to improve physical beauty has much relevance for the world beyond.
Quote by -Philip Yancey