Quotes from Philip Yancey

Nothing else — no learned "how-to" program, no expensive gift — is worth more to the sufferer than the comfortable assurance of your physical presence.

En nuestro interior existe una especie de juicio instintivo, según el cual la vida debería ser justa, y de alguna manera, Dios debería estar «haciendo mejor su trabajo" de gobernar este mundo.

and said, almost without thinking, "Well, of course, Philip, God was already present in the prison. I just had to make him visible." I have often thought of that line from Joanna, which would make a fine mission statement for all of us seeking to know and follow God. God is already present, in the most unexpected places. We just need to make God visible.

somehow throughout history the church has managed to gain a reputation for its ungrace. As a little English girl prayed, "O God, make the bad people good, and the good people nice.

As a Southerner, coming of age for me included a dawning awareness that we were living with a story that was self-deceiving, a lie. The resulting tension planted something deep in my soul, a nagging sense of betrayal.

It occurs to me, in fact, that laughter has much in common with prayer. In both acts, we stand on equal ground, freely acknowledging ourselves as fallen creatures. We take ourselves less seriously. We think of our creatureliness. Work divides and ranks; laughter and prayer unite. Finding God in Unexpected Places(245

the issue is not whether I agree with someone but rather how I treat someone with whom I profoundly disagree.

we in the body of Christ are called to show love when God seems not to.

Our only option, then, is honesty that leads to repentance. As the Bible shows, God's grace can cover any sin, including murder, infidelity, or betrayal. Yet by definition grace must be received, and hypocrisy disguises our need to receive grace. When the masks fall, hypocrisy is exposed as an elaborate ruse to avoid grace.

Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for

What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?

To the question Do I matter? Jesus is indeed the answer.

If God's kingdom had a "No Oddballs Allowed" sign posted, none of us could get in.

God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him. JÜRGEN MOLTMANN

Somehow Christians have gotten a reputation as anti-pleasure, and this despite the fact that they believe pleasure was an invention of the Creator himself. We Christians have a choice. We can present ourselves as uptight bores who sacrificially forfeit half the fun of life by limiting our indulgence in sex, food, and other sensual pleasures. Or we can set about enjoying pleasure to the fullest, which means enjoying it in the way the Creator intended.

La única sabiduría que podemos esperar adquirir es la sabiduría de la humildad. La humildad no tiene límite. —T. S. ELLIOT

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain biblical texts that represent an earlier stage of the transmission of the Hebrew text. They have been consulted, as have been the Samaritan Pentateuch and the ancient scribal traditions concerning deliberate textual changes. The translators also consulted the more important early versions—the Greek Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, the Latin vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, the Aramaic Targums and, for the Psalms, the Juxta Hebraica of Jerome.

Not even God, with all his power, can force a human being to love.

Indeed, how could we experience grace at all except through our defects?

C. S. Lewis once said that God sometimes shows grace by drawing us to himself while we kick and scream and pummel him with our fists. That is my story.

The gospel is not at all what we would come up with on our own.

The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings.

Cada vez que nos aferramos tenazmente a Dios en un momento de dificultad, o sencillamente cada vez que oramos, es posible que esté sucediendo más, mucho más de lo que habríamos podido soñar jamás.