Quotes from Philip Yancey

Those who mourn sense the rupture of a world severed from God and thus edge closer to the Father who promises to make all things new.

Some Christians respond to the divide by making harsh judgments about the people they disagree with — ?one of the main reasons evangelicals have an unsavory reputation. I cringe when I hear such words, and respond by keeping mostly quiet about my faith. Neither approach is healthy.

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten—a principle that applies to nations as well as individuals.

The novelist Reynolds Price says there is one sentence above all that people crave from stories: The Maker of all things loves and wants me. Christians still believe in that truth.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you," he said.

What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is "on tap

The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem [...] how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing." The disciples had proposed that Jesus call down fire on unrepentant cities; in contrast, Jesus uttered a cry of helplessness, an astonishing "if only" from the lips of the Son of God. He would not force himself on those who were not willing.

Though forgiveness is never easy, and may take generations, what else can break the chains that enslave people to their historical past?

I can view prayer as a way of asking a timeless God to intervene more directly in our time-bound life on earth. (Indeed, I do so all the time, praying for the sick, for the victims of tragedy, for the safety of the persecuted church.)

Our society arbitrarily defines health as the capacity for work and the capacity for enjoyment, but "true health is something quite different. True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die. Health is not a condition of my body; it is the power of my soul to cope with the varying condition of that body.

Prayer is a subversive act performed in a world that constantly calls faith into question.

the hospital seemed perfectly designed to immobilize not only his body but his spirit. "The will to live is not a theoretical abstraction, but a physiological reality with therapeutic characteristics," he wrote in Anatomy of an Illness. But the hospital environment tended to stifle that will to live.

My feelings of God's presence — or God's absence — are not the presence or the absence.

Grace has its own power, even in international politics.

Fear is the universal primal response to suffering. And yet beyond doubt it is also the single greatest "enemy of recovery.

The Christian sees the world as a transitional home badly in need of rehab, and we are active agents in that project.

As the noted physiologist Harold G. Wolf puts it, "Hope, faith and a purpose in life, is medicinal. This is not merely a statement of belief but a conclusion proved by meticulously controlled scientific experiment.

Afraid salvation is a vaccination that will not take

I do "good works" for my wife not in order to earn credit but to express my love for her. Likewise, God wants me to serve "in the new way of the Spirit": not out of compulsion but out of desire.

And God's infinite greatness, which we would expect to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire.

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten

circumstances, whether fortunate or unfortunate, are morally neutral. They simply are what they are; what matters is how we respond to them. Good and evil, in the moral sense, do not reside in things, but always in persons.

In order to be prepared to hope in what does not deceive, we must first lose hope in everything that deceives. —Georges Bernanos (in Reason for Being by Jacques Ellul)