Quotes from Philip Yancey

The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God's grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply.

Ironically, (the church's) respect in the world declines in proportion to how vigorously we attempt to force others to adopt our point of view.

Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. —Mahatma Gandhi

Today, each time an election rolls around Christians debate whether this or that candidate is "God's man" for the White House. Projecting myself back into Jesus' time, I had difficulty imagining him pondering whether Tiberius, Octavius, or Julius Caesar was "God's man" for the empire.

According to Jesus, what I think about him and how I respond will determine my destiny for all eternity.

Religious faith—for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace—lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

One prominent spiritual leader insists, "The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform." Could he have that backwards?

The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.

The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people -- people just like me -- who make shockingly bad choices and yet still find themselves pursued by God. As they receive grace and forgiveness, naturally they want to give it to others, and a thread of hope and transformation weaves its way throughout the Bible's accounts.

I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!

What we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God—we change in the very act of rebellion—and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later, especially if it involves repentance?

I do not know if that theory is correct, but I do know that singling out one behavior as "sin" and emphasizing it over others provides a convenient way of dodging our own need for grace. High-minded moralism and shrill pronouncements of judgment may help fundraising, but they undermine a gospel of grace.

Stanley Hauerwas, named "America's best theologian" by Time magazine, summed up the problem: "I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world.

There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to. We are judged by the righteousness of the Christ who lives within, not our own.

It seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for His entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.

Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of

I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues—in short, our lack of grace—may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs.

My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.

Health and life, I would say, in the full and final sense of those words, are not what we die out of, but what we die into

Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.

We, Jesus' followers, are the agents assigned to carry out God's will on earth. Too easily we expect God to do something for us when instead God wants to do it through us.

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.

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.

Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.