One of my favorite contemporary Christian authors, Philip Yancey, has a wonderful way of communicating deep spiritual truths on a variety of issues. Below are some of my favorite Yancey quotes.1
“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.”
“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.”
“Why the delay? Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet?…He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the center of his plan…the motive behind all human history, is to develop us, not God. Our very existence announces to the powers in the universe that restoration is under way. Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, and a faith like Job’s reverberates throughout the universe.”
“No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.”
“In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: ‘God gets his family back.’ From the first book to the last the Bible tells of wayward children and the tortuous lengths to which God will go to bring them home. Indeed, the entire biblical drama ends with a huge family reunion in the book of Revelation.”
“I’m convinced that human beings instinctively seek two things. We long for meaning, a sense that our life somehow matters to the world around us. And we long for community, a sense of being loved.”
“One man told me the most helpful person during his long illness was an office colleague who called every day, just to check. His visits, usually twice a week, never exceeded fifteen minutes, but the consistency of his calls and visits became a fixed point, something he could count on when everything else in his life seemed unstable.”
“We are inconsistent, said Mother Teresa, to care about violence, and to care about hungry children in places like India and Africa, and yet not care about the millions who are killed by the deliberate choice of their own mothers.”
“But the Lord say he won’t put more on us than we can stand. If we can’t take it, he’ll be right there beside us giving strength we didn’t know we had.”
“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.”
“Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.”
“We should leave a worship service asking ourselves not ‘What did I get out of it?’ but rather ‘Was God pleased with what happened?’”
“Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.”
“Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”
“The sufferings of Jesus show us that pain comes to us not as punishment but rather as a testing ground for faith that transcends pain. In truth, pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed.”
“I find a simple answer in the Bible’s overarching theme that God is love. That quality, more than anything else, makes clear the reason behind all creation. Love cannot really exist without an object to receive it.”
“As Solzhenitsyn elegantly expressed it in his classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, faith in God may not get you out of the camp, but it is enough to see you through each day.”
“God can create roads where we see only obstacles.”
“God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.”
“A God wise enough to rule the universe is wise enough to watch over his child Job, regardless of how things seem in the bleakest moments.”
1 All of the quotes below are from the following website: