Philip Yancey Quotes

“Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.”

— Philip Yancey

“I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come to know a God whose Son made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.”

— 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.

— Philip Yancey

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

— 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.

— Philip Yancey

“In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

“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

Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.

— Philip Yancey

“As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God's name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)”

— 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?”

— 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.

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

We dare not invest so much in the kingdom of this world that we neglect our main task of introducing people to a different kind of kingdom, one based solely on God's grace and forgiveness. Passing laws to enforce morality serves a necessary function, to dam up evil, but it never solves human problems.

— Philip Yancey

“Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.”

— Philip Yancey

“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

“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

“That, at least, is the vision of the church in the New Testament: a colony of heaven in a hostile world. Dwight L. Moody said, Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.”

— Philip Yancey

“Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when they reach a majority they too have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel. Charlemagne ordered a death penalty for all Saxons who would not convert, and in 1492 Spain decreed that all Jews convert to Christianity or be expelled. British Protestants in Ireland once imposed a stiff fine on anyone who did not attend church and deputies forcibly dragged Catholics into Protestant churches. Priests in the American West sometimes chained Indians to church pews to enforce church attendance. After many such episodes in Christendom it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Much of the current hostility against Christians evokes the memory of such examples. The blending of church and state may work for a time but it inevitably provokes a backlash, such as that seen in secular Europe today.”

— Philip Yancey

“Herein lies the most solemn challenge facing Christians who want to communicate their faith: if we do not live in a way that draws others to the faith rather than repels them, none of our words will matter.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

“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

God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

— Philip Yancey

“Culture? As Lesslie Newbigin poses the question, Can one who goes the way of the Cross sit in the seat of Pilate when it falls vacant?”

— Philip Yancey

“A pilgrim is a fellow-traveler on the spiritual journey, not a professional guide.”

— Philip Yancey

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. We must exercise the skill of ethical surgeons in deciding which moral principles apply to society at large and how best to apply them.

— Philip Yancey

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

Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.

— Philip Yancey

A news event in 1995 shocked both sides in the culture war controversy. Norma Leah McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in the famous Supreme Court case of 1973, converted to Christ, got baptized, and joined the pro-life campaign.

— Philip Yancey

He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself. GEORGE HERBERT

— Philip Yancey

From such experiments Christians have learned that the gospel grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.

— Philip Yancey

No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.

— Philip Yancey

“The bible never belittles disappointment, but it does add one key word: temporary - What we feel now, we will not always feel. Our disappointment is itself a sign, and aching, a hunger for something better. And faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness - for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for.”

— Philip Yancey

“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

“The giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.”

— Philip Yancey

“Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.”

— Philip Yancey

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

— Philip Yancey

“Jesus is the best clue we have as to what God is like and He is consistently gracious and merciful, especially to those who are failures. He is harsh to uptight, judgmental people, but merciful and gracious to the failures. He seems to draw out the smallest kernel of faith in each person that He's with. So, I presume that that's the way God is going to judge humanity.”

— Philip Yancey

“Curiously, the righteous Pharisees had little historical impact, save for a brief time in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. But Jesus' disciples - an ornery, undependable, and hopelessly flawed group of men - became drunk with the power of a gospel that offered free forgiveness to the worst sinners and traitors. Those men managed to change the world.”

— Philip Yancey

“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

“We should be asking: How do we respond to a post-Christian society?”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

“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

“It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you've heard everything before and that you have nothing left to learn.”

— Philip Yancey

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

— Philip Yancey

“O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice”

— Philip Yancey

“Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.”

— Philip Yancey