503 Quotes by Philip Yancey

What would it look like if a Christian took literally Jesus’ sweeping commands and acted on them. What would a Good Samaritan look like today, in urban America?

Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. – Mahatma Gandhi.

The people who related to God best – Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah – treated him with startling familiarity. They talked to God as if he were sitting in a chair beside them, as one might talk to a counselor, a boss, a parent, or a lover. They treated him like a person.

C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

Religious faith – for all its problems, despite its maddening tendency to replicate ungrace – lives on because we sense the numinous beauty of a gift undeserved that comes at unexpected moments from Outside. Refusing to believe that our lives of guilt and shame lead to nothing but annihilation, we hope against hope for another place run by different rules. We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

Politics deals with externals: borders, wealth, crimes. Authentic forgiveness deals with the evil in a person’s heart, something for which politics has no cure.

Prayer is – keeping company with God.

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.

Does prayer change God or change me?