Quotes from Philip Yancey

The first step in helping a suffering person (or in accepting our own pain) is to acknowledge that pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.

In the study of scientific atheism, there was the idea that religion divides people. Now we see the opposite: love for God can only unite.

Cuál es el significado de la vida?», le preguntó el estudiante al rabino. El rabino respondió: «Esa es una pregunta maravillosa, ¿por qué la quiere cambiar por una respuesta?»

Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that really did not belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self.

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me.

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.

I need God more than anything I might get from God.

Instead, in a stunning reversal, Jesus instructed us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." At the center of the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus taught us to recite, lurks the unnatural act of forgiveness.

Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame and loosens the stranglehold of guilt. It accomplishes these two things through a remarkable linkage, placing the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong.

Jesus was able to love men because he loved them right through the layer of mud.

No matter how capable we are, we need God every day, living in us and acting through us. We need his courage and his hope, his love and his companionship. We need his salvation. We can't live without God.

It takes great effort, and considerable faith, to keep the Big Picture in mind. In some ways it makes me feel utterly insignificant, in some ways eternally significant

Grace is Christianity's best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate.

He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself. GEORGE HERBERT

Jesus requires—no, demands—a response of forgiveness.

At the heart of sin lies a lack of trust that God intends the best for us.

We're all bastards but God loves us anyway.

At times, God's history seems to operate on an entirely different plane than ours...Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses' life, but it does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt (an omission that has baffled scholars ever since).

The role of a doctor may be the most revealing image in thinking about God and sin. What a doctor does for me physically - guide me toward health - God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view sins not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs - for our own sakes.

Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Christians' votes to Ronald Reagan, the only U.S. president to have been divorced and who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, mainly because Reagan supported many of the favorite causes of the religious Right.

a long period of struggle and effort precedes nearly all worthwhile human accomplishments.

Faith like Job's cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.

La vida es difícil».

The church works best as a force of resistance, a counterbalance to the consuming power of the state.