Philip Yancey
Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.Collection: Christmas
Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.Collection: Prayer
The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.Collection: Grace
We, Jesus' followers, are the agents assigned to carry out God's will on earth. Too easily we expect God to do something for us when instead God wants to do it through us.Collection: Jesus
If we comprehend what Christ has done for us, then surely out of gratitude we will strive to live 'worthy' of such great love. We will strive for holiness not to make God love us but because He already does.Collection: Gratitude
Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.Collection: Prayer
Grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us. Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, "Be good." Jesus' stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, "Help!"Collection: Jesus
Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Jesus
Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us lessCollection: Mean
Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?Collection: Doubt
No one ever converted to Christianity because they lost the argument.Collection: Christian
The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me.Collection: Christian
Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.Collection: Easter
Jesus tended to honor the losers of this world, not the winners. Our modern culture extravagantly rewards beauty, athletic skill, wealth, and artistic achievement, qualities which seemed to impress Jesus not at all.Collection: Jesus
The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.Collection: People
God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.Collection: People
Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy.Collection: Suffering
For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.Collection: Genius
Jesus is the best clue we have as to what God is like and He is consistently gracious and merciful, especially to those who are failures. He is harsh to uptight, judgmental people, but merciful and gracious to the failures. He seems to draw out the smallest kernel of faith in each person that He's with. So, I presume that that's the way God is going to judge humanity.Collection: Jesus
I once heard a theologian remark that in the Gospels people approached Jesus with a question 183 times whereas he replied with a direct answer only three times. Instead, he responded with a different question, a story, or some other indirection. Evidently Jesus wants us to work out answers on our own, using the principles that he taught and lived.Collection: Jesus
Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?Collection: Father
What you and I think about Jesus and how we respond to Him will determine our destiny for all eternity.Collection: Jesus
One of the things I found is that the things we want to say for well-intentioned motives often cause more harm than good. People don't need our words. They mainly need our presence, they need our love. And if you come in too quickly with explanations, you may do more harm than good.Collection: People
A faithful person sees life from the perspective of trust, not fear. Bedrock faith allows me to believe that, despite the chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how worthless I may feel, I truly matter to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God's Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest.Collection: Faith
The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace.Collection: Pain
The bible never belittles disappointment, but it does add one key word: temporary - What we feel now, we will not always feel. Our disappointment is itself a sign, and aching, a hunger for something better. And faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness - for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for.Collection: Faith
We deserve punishment and get forgiveness; we deserve God’s wrath and get God’s love.Collection: Wrath
Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for people who live in comfort.Collection: Spiritual
It took time for the church to come to terms with the ignominy of the cross. Church fathers forbade its depiction in art until the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine.... Now, though, the symbol is everywhere: artists beat gold into the shape of the Roman execution device, baseball players cross themselves before batting, and cancy confectioners even make chocolate crosses for the faithful to eat during Holy Week. Strange as it may seem, Christianity has become a religion of the cross--the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber, in modern terms.Collection: Baseball
Be salt, and a little bit of salt keeps the whole society from going rancid.Collection: Salt
We should be asking: How do we respond to a post-Christian society?Collection: Christian
We should do whatever we can to cut through the scum that has grown on our understanding and rediscover freshness.Collection: Cutting
Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.Collection: Fall
All of the images of Jesus and of the kingdom are small things: be a light in the darkness.Collection: Jesus
Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Prayer
Capitalism rules worldwide, and a society whose economic fabric depends on constant growth requires that its citizens have ever-expanding needs and wants... In the West, it will take one with soul force equal to Gandhi's to change the prevailing dogma of ever increasing GNP. We may be forced to change our profligate ways some day, when the soil is depleted, the aquifers drained, the icecaps melted, and all the oil wells pumped dry. But the crisis will wait another fifty years or so; we'll leave those problems to a generation yet unborn.Collection: Years
You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of itCollection: Heart
The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.Collection: Christian
Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion. I sometimes wonder which have hurt worse.Collection: Hurt
... we need to reclaim the "goodnewness" of the gospel, and the best place to start is to rediscover the good news ourselves.Collection: Needs
We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the "real" world and the unseen world as the "unreal" world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite.Collection: Faith
The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure.Collection: Pain
The uncommitted share many of our core values, but if we do not live out those values in a compelling way, we will not awaken a thirst for their ultimate Source.Collection: Way
When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.Collection: Suffering
...to see that God does answer, in great things as well as small, the prayers of those who put their trust in Him will strengthen the faith of multitudes.Collection: Prayer
I have found that lived out, the hardest place to be a Christian is to be in a nice prosperous country with a lot of entertainment options because there's so many distractions.Collection: Christian