Quotes from Philip Yancey

Jesus gave us a model for the work of the church at the Last Supper. While his disciples kept proposing more organization ? Hey, let's elect officers, establish hierarchy, set standards of professionalism ? Jesus quietly picked up a towel and basin of water and began to wash their feet.

Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing.

Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.

God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.

On a small scale, person-to-person, Jesus encountered the kinds of suffering common to all of us. And how did he respond? Avoiding philosophical theories and theological lessons, he reached out with healing and compassion. He forgave sin, healed the afflicted, cast out evil, and even overcame death.

Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.

As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can handle my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need God's correction - but only by taking those feelings to God will I have the opportunity for correction and healing.

The first step in helping a suffering person is to acknowledge that the pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.

Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

We dare not invest so much in the kingdom of this world that we neglect our main task of introducing people to a different kind of kingdom, one based solely on God's grace and forgiveness. Passing laws to enforce morality serves a necessary function, to dam up evil, but it never solves human problems.

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no opportunity for faith either.

What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.

prayer, and only prayer, restores my vision to one that more resembles God's. i awake from blindness to see that wealth lurks as a terrible danger, not a goal worth striving for; that value depends not on race or status but on the image of God every person bears; that no amount of effort to improve physical beauty has much relevance for the world beyond.

Be careful," warned Nietzsche, "lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon." I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.

Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God's laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration.

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.

Many churches offer more entertainment than worship, more uniformity than diversity, more exclusivity than outreach, more law than grace.

Life with God is an individual matter, and general formulas do not easily apply.

The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.

To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?

We are all trophies of God's grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls who you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe. (pp.88)