Inspirational Quotes by Philip Yancey
“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.”
“The message of this book has the power to reform the church, one relationship at a time.”
“It has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the church blocked the way.”
“The free offer of grace extends not just to the undeserving but to those who in fact deserve the opposite: to Ku Klux Klanners as well as civil rights marchers, to P.”
“The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.”
“What greater gift could Christians give to the world than the forming of a culture that upholds grace and forgiveness?”
“Jesus’ kingdom calls us to another way, one that depends not on our performance but his own. We do not have to achieve but merely follow.”
“Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for “real” people over “good” people.”
“The gospel is not at all what we would come up with on our own.”
“Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.”
“Our only option, then, is honesty that leads to repentance. As the Bible shows, God’s grace can cover any sin, including murder, infidelity, or betrayal. Yet by definition grace must be received, and hypocrisy disguises our need to receive grace. When the masks fall, hypocrisy is exposed as an elaborate ruse to avoid grace.”
“somehow throughout history the church has managed to gain a reputation for its ungrace. As a little English girl prayed, “O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice.”
“The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state.”
“by denying forgiveness to others, we are in effect determining them unworthy of God’s forgiveness, and thus so are we.”
“Jesus requires—no, demands—a response of forgiveness.”
“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.”
“Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame and loosens the stranglehold of guilt. It accomplishes these two things through a remarkable linkage, placing the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong.”
“God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.”
“Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that really did not belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self.”
“what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to “out-grace” its rivals.”
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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.