Words matter. These are the best Philip Yancey Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.
I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.
When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I’m qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!
God endorses the confusion and even outrage that we feel when mysterious things happen.
Most of the great books on prayer are written by ‘experts’ – monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I’ve read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.
I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the wrong that you did that caused the guilt feelings.
In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.
The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.
Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.
Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness – and certainly not love.
For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of ‘keeping company with God.’
When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.
I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don’t have their hands open, there’s something they’re grasping because there’s a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country.
Much of the misgiving that Muslims feel for the West stems from our strong emphasis on freedom, always a risky enterprise. I’ve heard some say they would rather rear their children in a closely guarded Islamic society than in the United States, where freedom so often leads to decadence.
It’s too bad prayer comes bundled in a package of ‘spiritual disciplines.’ Really, we should see prayer as a spiritual privilege. We don’t do it as a callisthenic exercise to gain points with God; we do it, because it is good for us in every way.
In China, where you can be arrested and imprisoned for your faith, getting together with other Christians is a lifeline and you’ll risk anything for the privilege. No one attends church in China casually, or for a social advantage – quite the opposite.
The New Testament persistently presses us upward, toward higher motives for being good.
The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.
You are free to reject God. Make sure that you’re really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us to reject Him but includes the arguments we can use against Him in the Bible. I respect that.
People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.
