Philip Yancey Quotes - Page 7

I would say my being disheartened has more to do with American culture than anything else. We are becoming a very shallow culture. My goodness, the celebrity ethos has taken over completely. Turn on the television and you see that over and over. There's very little substance. And so, everything gets shorter. Everything is entertainment oriented. Our churches reflect that. A thirty-five minute sermon without a Power Point or video clips is rare these days. That's not true in other countries so much.

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

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.

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.

God does not accept me conditionally, on the basis of my performance, but bestows his love and forgiveness freely, despite my innumerable failures.

Prayer is a place where God and humans meet.

A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.

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

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.

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

We need faith and the mind of the Lord Jesus to recognize something of lasting value in even our most ordinary tasks.

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

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

[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.

The shift in American society from admiring Christians to fearing and criticizing them provides an opportunity for self-reflection. How have we been presenting the message we believe in? Might there be a more grace-filled way?

When he lived on earth, [Jesus] surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren.

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.

Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.

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.

Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.

Charles Williams has said of the Lord's Prayer, "No word in English carries a greater possibility of terror than the little word 'as' in that clause." What makes the 'as' so terrifying? The fact that Jesus plainly links our forgiven-ness by the Father with our forgiving-ness of fellow human beings. Jesus' next remark could not be more explicit: 'If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.'

If God doesn't want something for me, then I shouldn't want it either.

Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.

[...]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?

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.