Inspirational Quotes by Philip Yancey
“When my turn came to speak, I said that the man I follow, a Palestinian Jew from the first century, had also been involved in a culture war. He went up against a rigid religious establishment and a pagan empire. The two powers, often at odds, conspired together to eliminate him. His response? Not to fight, but to give his life for these his enemies, and to point to that gift as proof of his love. Among the last words he spoke before death were these: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” After the panel, a television celebrity came up to me whose name every reader would recognize. “I’ve got to tell you, what you said stabbed me right in the heart,” he said. “I was prepared to dislike you because I dislike all right-wing Christians and I assumed you were one. You can’t imagine the mail I get from right-wingers. I don’t follow Jesus—I’m a Jew. But when you told about Jesus forgiving his enemies, I realized how far from that spirit I am. I fight my enemies, especially the right-wingers. I don’t forgive them. I have much to learn from the spirit of Jesus.”
“At first glance legalism seems hard, but actually freedom in Christ is the harder way. It is relatively easy not to murder, hard to reach out in love; easy to avoid a neighbor’s bed, hard to keep a marriage alive; easy to pay taxes, hard to serve the poor. When living in freedom, I must remain open to the Spirit for guidance. I am more aware of what I have neglected than what I have achieved. I cannot hide behind a mask of behavior, like the hypocrites, nor can I hide behind facile comparisons with other Christians.”
“God shattered the inexorable law of sin and retribution by invading earth, absorbing the worst we had to offer, crucifixion, and then fashioning from that cruel deed the remedy for the human condition. Calvary broke up the logjam between justice and forgiveness. By accepting onto his innocent self all the severe demands of justice, Jesus broke forever the chain of ungrace.”
“a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”
“What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as “the one Jesus loves”? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day?”
“The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?”
“Every institution, it seems, runs on ungrace and its insistence that we earn our way.”
“God took a great risk by announcing forgiveness in advance, and the scandal of grace involves a transfer of that risk to us.”
“the down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome among his followers. What has happened?”
“When God looks upon my life graph, he sees not jagged swerves toward good and bad but rather a steady line of good: the goodness of God’s Son captured in a moment of time and applied for all eternity.”
“Truly it is an evil to be full of faults,” said Pascal, “but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.”
“Christians tend to be Augustinian in theory but Pelagian in practice. They work obsessively to please other people and even God.”
“You cannot earn God’s acceptance by climbing; you must receive it as a gift.”
“Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate. Sadly, to a world desperate for this grace the church sometimes presents one more form of ungrace.”
“Dr. Paul Tournier expresses this pattern in the language of psychiatry: “God blots out conscious guilt, but He brings to consciousness repressed guilt.”
“How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible’s astounding words about God’s love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?”
“grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”
“Apart from forgiveness, the monstrous past may awake at any time from hibernation to devour the present. And also the future.”
“I can only advance in the kingdom if I become like that woman: trembling, humbled, without excuse, my palms open to receive God’s grace.”
“grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less.”
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Philip Yancey is an American Christian author. Fourteen million of his books have been sold worldwide, making him one of the best-selling evangelical Christian authors. Two of his books have won the ECPA's Christian Book of the Year Award: The Jesus I Never Knew in 1996, What's So Amazing About Grace in 1998. He is published by Zondervan Publishing.
Yancey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. When Yancey was one year old, his father, stricken with polio, died after his church elders suggested he go off life support in faith that God would heal him. This was one of the reasons he had lost his faith at one point of time. Yancey earned his MA with highest honors from the graduate school of Wheaton College. His two graduate degrees in Communications and English were earned from Wheaton College Graduate School and the University of Chicago.
Yancey moved to Chicago, Illinois, and in 1971 joined the staff of Campus Life magazine--a sister publication of Christianity Today directed towards high school and college students--where he served as editor for eight years. Yancey was for many years an editor for Christianity Today and wrote articles for Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Eternity, Moody Monthly, and National Wildlife, among others. He now lives in Colorado, working as a columnist and editor-at-large for Christianity Today. He is a member of the editorial board of Books and Culture, another magazine affiliated with Christianity Today, and travels around the world for speaking engagements.