Quotes from Philip Yancey

La pregunta final estuvo preocupando a los judíos por siglos después que Malaquías y los otros profetas desaparecieron de la escena. No veían milagros, ni intervenciones espectaculares, y no habían escuchado nuevos mensajes del Señor. ¿Se había olvidado Dios de ser misericordioso? ¿Se había tapado los oídos a sus gemidos? El Antiguo Testamento termina con una nota de desilusión, anhelos no cumplidos, y remota esperanza.

Humility is the real Christian virtue," says Nouwen. "When we come to realize that . . . only God saves, then we are free to serve, then we can live truly humble lives.

that God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

Seventy-five thousand people a day become Christians, two-thirds of whom live in Africa.

Unfortunately, most of my secular friends would agree with Bill Gates, who considers religion a waste of time: "There's a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning," he told an interviewer. They view the church not as a change agent that can affect all of society but as a place where like-minded people go to feel better about themselves.

25He jammed[27] the wheels of their chariots so that they had difficulty driving. And the Egyptians said, "Let's get away from the Israelites! The LORD is fighting for them against Egypt.

The more Christians focus on tangential issues, the less we will be heard on matters of true moral significance.

A church that lives by power dies by power.

20Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though[35] every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.

Christianity offers the further insight that true fulfillment comes, not through ego satisfaction, but through service to others.

Según el rabino Kushner, Dios se siente tan frustrado, incluso tan indignado con la injusticia de este planeta como cualquier otro, pero carece del poder necesario para cambiar las cosas. Millones de lectores han encontrado consuelo en la descripción que hace Kushner de un Dios que parece compasivo, aunque sea débil.

The One who had the right to destroy the world—and had nearly done so once in Noah's day—chose instead to love the world, at any cost.

Jesus' kingdom calls us to another way, one that depends not on our performance but his own. We do not have to achieve but merely follow.

Why are we here? God wants us to flourish, and paradoxically we flourish best by obeying rather than rebelling, by giving more than receiving, by serving rather than being served.

To gain the hearing of a post-Christian society already skeptical about religion will require careful strategy. We must, in Jesus' words, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our stridency — ?in short, our lack of grace — ?has proved so damaging that society will no longer look to us for the guidance it needs.

I remind myself that prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.

H. L. Mencken described a Puritan as a person with a haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy; today, many people would apply the same caricature to evangelicals or fundamentalists.

Los seres humanos crecemos al luchar, trabajar y extendernos; en cierto sentido, la naturaleza humana tiene más necesidad de problemas que de soluciones.

He transforms pain, using it to teach and strengthen us, if we allow it to turn us toward him.

Although Jesus' prayers do not offer a foolproof formula, they do give clues as to how God works — and does not work — on this planet. Especially when trouble strikes, we want God to intervene more decisively, but Jesus' prayers underscore God's style of restraint out of respect for human freedom.

What greater gift could Christians give to the world than the forming of a culture that upholds grace and forgiveness?

The free offer of grace extends not just to the undeserving but to those who in fact deserve the opposite: to Ku Klux Klanners as well as civil rights marchers, to P.

Where did our sense of beauty and pleasure come from? That seems to me a huge question—the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. The Teacher's answer is clear: A good and loving God naturally would want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment. G. K. Chesterton credits pleasure, or eternity in his heart, as the signpost that eventually directed him to God:

Jesus' prayers for Peter — and perhaps for Judas as well — express God's unfathomable respect for human freedom.