The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.
Philip YanceySomeone asked the Swiss physician & author Paul Tournier how he helped his patients get rid of their fears. He replied, 'I don't. Everything that's worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids--all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.'
Philip YanceyThe 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.
Philip YanceyGrace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.
Philip Yanceyprayer, 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.
Philip YanceyThe 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.
Philip YanceyJesus reserved his hardest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed and legalism.
Philip YanceyJesus 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.
Philip YanceyAll of the images of Jesus and of the kingdom are small things: be a light in the darkness.
Philip YanceyDependence, 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.
Philip YanceyNever do I see Jesus lecturing people on the need to accept blindness or lameness as an expression of God's secret will; rather, he healed them.
Philip YanceyJesus represents a point of common ground an esteemed rabbi to the Jew, a god to the Hindu, an enlightened one to the Buddhist, a great prophet to the Muslim. Even to the New Age guru, Jesus is the pinnacle of God-consciousness. At the same time, Jesus is the divider. None but Christians see Him as a member of the Godhead on an exclusive mission to repair the broken world.
Philip YanceyI have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will make sense only in reverse.
Philip YanceyWe 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.
Philip YanceyWhen 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.
Philip YanceyMisunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.
Philip Yancey... the approach of admitting our errors, besides being most true to a gospel of grace, is also most effective at expressing who we are. Propaganda turns people off; humbly admitting mistakes disarms.
Philip YanceyTrue healing, of deep connective tissue, takes place in community. Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are.
Philip Yancey... the issue is not whether I agree with someone but rather how I treat someone with whom I profoundly disagree. We Christians are called to use the "weapons of grace," which means treating even our opponents with love and respect.
Philip YanceyOur confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.
Philip YanceyI have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.
Philip YanceyGrace 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 less
Philip YanceyWhatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority, that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.
Philip YanceyWe're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.
Philip YanceyPeople 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.
Philip YanceyCuriously, the righteous Pharisees had little historical impact, save for a brief time in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. But Jesus' disciples - an ornery, undependable, and hopelessly flawed group of men - became drunk with the power of a gospel that offered free forgiveness to the worst sinners and traitors. Those men managed to change the world.
Philip YanceyA philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
Philip YanceyWhen 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.
Philip YanceyIndividuals and societies are not helpless victims of heredity. We have the power to change - not by looking "down" to nature but "up" to God, who consistently calls us forward to become the people we were designed to be. A confused world urgently needs a model of what that looks like. If Christians fail to provide that model, who will?
Philip YanceyThe things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labour for', as Sir Thomas More expressed it. The inner voice of prayer expresses itself naturally in action, just as the inner voice of my brain guides all my bodily actions.
Philip YanceyWhat would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from noisy media, that actively resisted our consumer culture? What would worship look like if we directed it more toward God than toward our own amusement?
Philip YanceyAs Ecclesiastes tells it, a wholesale devotion to pleasure will, paradoxically, lead to a state of utter despair.
Philip YanceyThe giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.
Philip Yancey[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?
Philip YanceyI never seeย God. I seldom run into visual clues that remind me of God unless I am looking. The act of looking, the pursuit itself, makes possible the encounter. For this reason, Christianity has always insisted that trust and obedience come first, and knowledge follows.
Philip YanceyI begin with confession not in order to feel miserable, rather to call to mind a reality I often ignore. When I acknowledge where I stand before a perfect God, it restores the true state of the universe. Confession simply establishes the proper ground rules of creatures relating to their creator.
Philip YanceyPeople instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.
Philip YanceyIn no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square
Philip YanceySociologists 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?
Philip Yancey