Quotes from Philip Yancey

when we appeal to God's grace and compassion the fearsome God soon disappears.

Author Stephen Brown notes that a veterinarian can learn a lot about a dog owner he has never met just by observing the dog. What does the world learn about God by watching us his followers

Those who suffer rest their security not on things, which often cannot be enjoyed and may soon be taken away, but rather on people.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

There is a simple cure for people who doubt God's love and question God's grace: to turn to the Bible and examine the kind of people God loves.

I relish the sense of being alone with nature, knowing that of all people in the world only I am hearing these sounds in this place. The tranquil mood feels vaguely religious, what I should be feeling in church but rarely do. In

I yearn for a grace-abounding church that rewards rather than punishes honesty, and that, in Jesus' words, exists for the sinners and not the righteous, the sick and not the healthy.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion," cautioned T. S. Eliot.

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counter-culture of ordinary pilgrims who insist on living a different way. We can make the world stop and think before pulling a trigger, or exacting revenge, or neglecting the vulnerable, or practising euthanasia on those it deems 'devoid of value'.

Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

Those who suffer can respond to the call of the gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything.

He lambastes Catholics. He opposes the J. B. Phillips version of the Bible because Phillips had a friendship with C. S. Lewis, who drank beer and smoked a pipe.

There's something unique about having only God to lean on in times of trial.

C. S. Lewis said, "If you read history you will find out that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next… Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional.

some of the most inspiring stories of faith come from those often considered "losers" by the rest of the world.

Jesus says in effect, 'Do you want to know what it feels like to be God? When one of those two-legged humans pays attention to me, it feels like I just reclaimed my most valuable possession, which I had given up for lost.' To God himself, it feels like the discovery of a lifetime.

Believing there is no God does not make the thirst go away.

God welcomes home anyone who will have him and, in fact, has made the first move already.

The phrase "the body of Christ," expresses well what we are called to do: to represent in flesh what Christ is like, especially to those in need. The

Ungrace plays like the background static of life for families, nations, and institutions. It is, sadly, our natural human state.

When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You disengage that person from his hurtful act.

The quieter the mind," said Meister Eckhart, "the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is.

Forgiveness is not the same as pardon, he advises: you may forgive one who wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong.