Quotes from Philip Yancey

Caught up in righteous—and wholly appropriate—revulsion over Serbian atrocities, the world overlooks one fact: the Serbs are simply following the terrible logic of unforgiveness.

How odd, that prayer seems foolish to some people who base their lives on media trends, superstition, instinct, hormones, social propriety, or even astrology.)

An institution cannot love; only people can love. As the proverb says, apart from love, giving becomes an insult.

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.

For Jesus, the person was more important than any category or label.

There is one major flaw in the law of revenge, however: it never settles the score.

God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves.

I know of only two alternatives to hypocrisy: perfection or honesty.

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

defects. I escape the force of gravity again when

God is present in the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, as Jesus claimed in Matthew 25, and we serve God when we serve them.

the descendants of today's raped and mutilated victims will arise to seek vengeance on the avengers.

conviction that God is good and that everything

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.

Be still and know that I am God." I read in this familiar verse from Psalm 46 two commands of equal importance. First, I must be still, something that modern life conspires against. Ten years ago I responded to letters within a couple of weeks and kept my correspondents happy. Five years ago I faxed a response in a couple of days and they seemed content. Now they want email responses the same day and berate me for not using instant messaging or a mobile phone.

it seems so unfair, to forgive injustice. I am caught between forgiveness and justice.

Vengeance is a passion to get even. It is a hot desire to give back as much pain as someone gave you. . . . The problem with revenge is that it never gets what it wants; it never evens the score. Fairness never comes.

Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.

Like a sudden thaw in the middle of winter, grace happens at unexpected moments. It stops us short, catches the breath, disarms. If we manipulate it, try to control it, somehow earn it, that would not be grace. Yet not everyone has tasted of that amazing grace, and not everyone believes in it.

Jacob the trickster gets his due. After pulling off the ruse, he has to run for his life and spends 20 years in exile with his uncle. Uncle Laban then gives Jacob a dose of his own medicine by planting an unwanted sister in his wedding bed and by repeatedly changing his wages as head shepherd.

Jesus proclaimed unmistakably that God's law is so perfect and absolute that no one can achieve righteousness. Yet God's grace is so great that we do not have to.

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative. Instead of waiting for his neighbor to make the first move

Forgiveness may be unfair—it is, by definition—but at least it provides a way to halt the juggernaut of retribution.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.