Quotes from Philip Yancey

God is already present, in the most unexpected places. We just need to make God visible.

President Bill Clinton tried to make that distinction. As a Christian, he said, he sought guidance on moral issues from the Bible. As president of the United States, though, he could not automatically propose that everything immoral should therefore be made illegal.

Consider earth, our home. Let your eyes savor the brilliant hues and delicate shadings of a summer sunset. Tunnel your toes into wet sand, stand still, and feel the dependable foam and spray of an ocean tide. Visit a butterfly garden and study the abstract designs: 10,000 variations, more imaginative than those of any abstract painter, all compressed into tiny swatches of flying fabric. Belief in a loving Creator is easy among these good things.

I've yet to meet someone who found their way to faith by being criticized.

When we ignore the world outside the walls we suffer—as does it.

God wants us to flourish, and paradoxically we flourish best by obeying rather than rebelling, by giving more than receiving, by serving rather than being served. Six times in the Gospels Jesus iterated the deeper truth that we succeed not by acquiring more and more but by "losing" life through service to God and others.

Amar la justicia es hacerla crecer, no vengarla

If it's not setting you free and enlarging life, then it's not Jesus' message. If it doesn't sound like good news, it's not the gospel.

At last I understood: in the final analysis, forgiveness is an act of faith. By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am. By forgiving, I release my own right to get even and leave all issues of fairness for God to work out. I leave in God's hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

As a Christian, my main concern is not to downgrade others' beliefs but to examine my own.

For the LORD your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you or forget the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them by oath.

So I'm trying, instead of shaming or pretending, to come to terms with my emotions, and bring them before God honestly. I have come to realize that I'm never going to stop having emotions, and probably strong emotions, because that is the way I'm wired.

When I betray the love and grace God has shown me, I fall back on the promise that Jesus prays for me... not that I would never face testing, nor ever fail, but that in the end I will allow God to use the testing and failure to mold me into someone more useful to the kingdom, someone more like Jesus.

many such episodes it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Christian experiments with church-state blending, whether in Geneva under Calvin or in Spain and Latin America under the Inquisition, may have worked for a time but inevitably provoked a backlash against the church, such as that seen in secular Europe today.*

What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver.

I leave in God's hands the scales that must balance justice and mercy.

until recently no one could know that the little blob of light marked the presence of another galaxy, one twice the size of the Milky Way and home to half a trillion stars. Or that these next-door neighbors were but two of 100 billion galaxies likewise swarming with stars.

Edward Gibbon said that in ancient Rome all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.

I do not get to know God, then do God's will; I get to know God by doing that will.

Let me see them as thirsty people, I pray, and teach me how best to present the Living Water.

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 church works best as a force of resistance, a conscience to society that keeps itself at arm's length from the state. The closer it gets, the less effectively it can challenge the surrounding culture and the more perilously it risks losing its central message.

At the end of her story she said simply, "As I look back, this is what matters. I have loved and been loved, and all the rest is just background music.

I'm simply amazed at how God worked in response to my prayers. I see a softening in my niece's husband, an agnostic. I see transformation in the members of my small group, and spiritual awakenings in my neighbors. I see growth in my own marriage.