Quotes from Philip Yancey

for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness

The key is this: the main benefit of giving is in its effect on the giver. Yes, people in Africa and India need my financial help, as the fund-raising appeals urgently remind me. But in truth my need to give is every bit as desperate as their need to receive.

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative.

Forgiveness has its own extraordinary power which reaches beyond law and beyond justice.

Forgiveness is achingly difficult, and long after you've forgiven, the wound—my dastardly deeds—lives on in memory.

One of the most important things we can do for a suffering person is to restore a sense of meaning or significance to the experience.

grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us.

Then the question becomes, "How do we treat sinners?

the healthiest body is the one that feels the pain of its weakest parts. In

Self-sufficiency, which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet away from God.

Only he who is helpless can truly pray.

According to Barna surveys, 61 percent of today's youth had been churched at one point during their teen years but are now spiritually disengaged.

Justice has a good and righteous and rational kind of power. The power of grace is different: unworldly, transforming, supernatural.

forgiveness must be taught and practiced, as one would practice any difficult craft.

Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago that the path toward cure involves more than a quick-fix solution based on increased knowledge. In fact, it involves a change that seems more theological than educational. Somehow the "victim" of addictive behavior must regain an underlying sense of human dignity and choice, a profound reawakening that usually requires much time, attention, and love.

unless we learn dependence we will never experience grace.

When I ask, "Tell me the first word that comes to your mind when I say Christian," not one time has someone suggested the word love. Yet without question that is the proper biblical answer.

the sound of a man forgiving.

forgiveness, and only forgiveness, can begin the thaw in the guilty party.

Despite a hundred sermons on forgiveness, we do not forgive easily, nor find ourselves easily forgiven.

Forgiveness—undeserved, unearned—can cut the cords and let the oppressive burden of guilt roll away.

persons with AIDS, and they hear a very clear message from the church: "You get no sympathy from me. You deserve your suffering as God's punishment. Keep away." I cannot think of a more terrifying disease than AIDS, or one that provokes a less compassionate response.

what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to "out-grace" its rivals.

Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be