Quotes from Philip Yancey

All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.

When I listened to public prayers in evangelical churches, I heard people telling God what to do, combined with thinly veiled hints on how others should behave. When

My publisher conducted a website poll, and of the 678 respondents only 23 felt satisfied with the time they were spending in prayer. That

To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, 'I am human and you are God.

We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him.

Lord, if you can't make me thin, then make my friends look fat," humorist Erma Bombeck once prayed.

What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse

by denying forgiveness to others, we are in effect determining them unworthy of God's forgiveness, and thus so are we.

No te olvides en las tinieblas de lo que aprendiste en la luz»

We pray because we can't help it. The

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

Un osado mensaje que encontramos en el libro de Job es que a Dios se le puede decir lo que se desee. Arroje ante él su angustia, su ira, sus dudas, su amargura, su dolor por sentirse traicionado, su desilusión.

The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.

God is the ultimate judge of hypocrisy in the church, I decided; I would leave such judgment in God's capable hands. I began to relax and grow softer, more forgiving of others. After all, who has a perfect spouse, or perfect parents or children? We do not give up on the institution of family because of its imperfections—why give up on the church?

La fidelidad implica aprender a confiar que, más allá del perímetro de la oscuridad, Dios aún reina y no nos ha abandonado, no importa lo que parezca.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for "real" people over "good" people.

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." When a poll of college students asked

How differently will I relate to the uncommitted if I view them not as evil or unsaved but rather as lost.

We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not "What did I get out of it?" but rather "Was God pleased with what happened?

The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

Any Greek scholar will tell you the word blessed is far too sedate and beatific to carry the percussive force Jesus intended. The Greek word conveys something like a short cry of joy, Oh, you lucky person!

Taken as a whole, the Bible clearly puts the emphasis on what pleases God—the point of worship, after all. To worship, says Walter Wink, is to remember Who owns the house.

Jesus, who said little about how believers should behave when we gather together and much about how we can affect the world around us.