One of my favorite contemporary Christian authors, Philip Yancey, has a wonderful way of communicating deep spiritual issues especially on the topics of grace and prayer.
He has written many modern-day Christian classics such as, Disappointment with God, Where is God When it Hurts, The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace? and Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?
According to his website: “His books have garnered 13 Gold Medallion Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than 17 million books in print, published in over 50 languages worldwide.”1
Some of the most profound insights on grace and prayer can be found in his many quotes below.2
“I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.”
“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.”
“The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.”
“… 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.”
“The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.”
“The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace.”
“Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people… Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God.”
“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.”
“Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.”
“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.”
“Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.”
“Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.”
“Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.”
“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.”
“I would far rather convey grace than explain it.”
“Often, it seems, we’re [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.”
“Grace is heartfelt, tinged with love, a spillover gift of the God who extended undeserved favor toward us.”
“We are all trophies of God’s grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls who you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe.”
“Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands.”
“Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.”
“Christians fail to communicate to others because we ignore basic principles in relationship. When we make condescending judgments or proclaim lofty words that don’t translate into action, or simply speak without first listening, we fail to love – and thus deter a thirsty world from Living Water. The good news about God’s grace goes unheard.”
“Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God’s point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God’s will, the work of the kingdom. We are God’s fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.”
“The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.”
“If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer.”
“If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.”
“If God doesn’t want something for me, I shouldn’t want it either. Spending time in meditative prayer, getting to know God, helps align my desires with God’s.”
“Some who attempt prayer never have the sense of anyone listening on the other end. They blame themselves for doing it wrong…. Prayer requires the faith to believe that God listens.”
“Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.”
“Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.”
“Prayer unfolds in the stillness of the soul.”
“If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it’s likely not a place where grace is on tap.”
1 About Philip – Philip YanceyPhilip Yancey
2 All of the following quotes are from the website:
TOP 25 QUOTES BY PHILIP YANCEY (of 257) | A-Z Quotes (azquotes.com)