Philip Yancey
People who think they are free eventually end up slaves to their own desires, and those who give their freedom away to the only One you can trust with that freedom eventually get it back.Collection: Trust
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.Collection: Respect
What I see in the Bible, especially in the book of Psalms, which is a book of gratitude for the created world, is a recognition that all good things on Earth are God's, every good gift is from above. They are good if we recognize where they came from and if we treat them the way the Designer intended them to be treated.Collection: God
The world says you gain your life by getting more and more and more and more, but Jesus says, 'No, that leads to death. You get it back by giving it away and when you give it away you get it back.'Collection: Death
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.Collection: Society
Christian faith is... basically about love and being loved and reconciliation. These things are so important, they're foundational and they can transform individuals, families.Collection: Faith
When the world asks if there is any hope, we can say absolutely! No one is exempt from tragedy or disappointment- God himself was not exempt. Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of the unfairness, but rather a way through it to the other side.Collection: God
I do not get to know God and then do His will. I get to know Him by doing His will.Collection: Knowing God
We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.Collection: Spiritual
Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.Collection: Christian
I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will make sense only in reverse.Collection: Inspirational
When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward that person.Collection: Love
I have come to know a God who has a soft spot for rebels, who recruits people like the adulterer David, the whiner Jeremiah, the traitor Peter, and the human-rights abuser Saul of Tarsus. I have come to know a God whose Son made prodigals the heroes of his stories and the trophies of his ministry.Collection: Hero
Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.Collection: Christian
I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.Collection: Grace
C. S. Lewis observed 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.Collection: Christian
Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands.Collection: Hands
When I am tempted to complain about God's lack of presence, I remind myself that God has much more reason to complain about my lack of presence.Collection: Complaining
In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.Collection: Desire
We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.Collection: Journey
I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.Collection: Winning
Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.Collection: Prayer
Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.Collection: Prayer
We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.Collection: Hard Work
I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.Collection: Compassion
God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.Collection: World
Jesus announced a great reversal of values in His Sermon on the Mount, elevating not the rich or attractive, but rather the poor, the persecuted, and those who mourn.Collection: Jesus
One who has been touched by grace will no longer look on those who stray as "those evil people" or "those poor people who need our help." Nor must we search for signs of "loveworthiness." Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.Collection: Love Is
The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.Collection: Spiritual
The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.Collection: God
Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.Collection: Jesus
Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.Collection: Water
Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.Collection: Grace
Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.Collection: Prayer
God operates by different rules of time and space. And God's infinite greatness, which we would expect to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire. A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.Collection: Greatness
Prayer is - keeping company with God.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Jesus
In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.Collection: Jesus
God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.Collection: Faith
If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.Collection: Christian
O God, make the bad people good, and the good people niceCollection: Nice
The Bible never belittles human disappointment ... but it does add one key word: temporary.Collection: Disappointment
I go to church as an expression of my need for God and for God's family.Collection: Expression
We preach sermons, write books on apologetics, conduct city-wide evangelistic campaigns. For those alienated from the church, that approach no longer has the same drawing power. And for the truly needy, words alone don't satisfy; "A hungry person has no ears," as one relief worker told me. A skeptical world judges the truth of what we say by the proof of how we live.Collection: Book
Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.Collection: Mean
The giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.Collection: Passion
Jesus' response to suffering people and to "nobodies" provides a glimpse into the heart of God. God is not the unmoved Absolute, but rather the Loving One who draws near.Collection: Jesus
Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day.Collection: Religious
Forgiveness is the only way to break the cycle of blame-and pain-in a relationship...It does not settle all questions of blame and justice and fairness...But it does allow relationships to start over. In that way, said Solzhenitsyn, we differ from all animals. It is not our capacity to think that makes us different, but our capacity to repent, and to forgive.Collection: Forgiveness
The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.Collection: Fall