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In the presence of the Great Physician, my most appropriate contribution may be my wounds.
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Philip Yancey |
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The female runner still lags behind the male, and blame rests on the pelvis. The projections on the man's pelvis allow for more powerful muscles, but a woman equipped with them could not bear a child. Similarly, a man's hip sockets are closer together, nearer the center of gravity, which enables more efficient movement. If a woman's were similarly designed, there would be no room for the baby's head to extrude. So the odd pelvic bone repres..
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Philip Yancey |
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Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving--God's self-giving and human self-giving--and not about self-imposing.
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Philip Yancey |
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In God's presence I feel small because I am small.
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Philip Yancey |
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All of us in the church need "grace-healed eyes" to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us."
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grace
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Philip Yancey |
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I interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is Prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often to you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes - well, maybe seven. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often. Many of those I talked to experienced prayer more as a burden than as a pleasure. They regarded it as important, even paramount, and felt guilty about their fa..
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prayer
faith
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Philip Yancey |
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They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.
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Philip Yancey |
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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."
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Philip Yancey |
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Grace is shockingly personal. As Henri Nouwen points out, 'God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.
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Philip Yancey |
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Never 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.
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Philip Yancey |
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recall Gandhi's remark that if you take the principle "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" to its logical conclusion, eventually the whole world will go blind and toothless."
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Philip Yancey |
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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."
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Philip Yancey |
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Virtually every passage on suffering in the New Testament deflects the emphasis from cause to response. Although we cannot grasp the master plan of the universe, which allows for so much evil and pain (the Why? question), we can nevertheless respond in two important ways. First, we can find meaning in the midst of suffering. Second, we can offer real and practical help to those in need.
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Philip Yancey |
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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
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Philip Yancey |
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But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we'll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty which is forever.
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Philip Yancey |
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According to Jesus, what I think about him and how I respond will determine my destiny for all eternity.
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Philip Yancey |
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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 stren'th we didn't know we had.
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Philip Yancey |
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I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like "What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything?" Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we."
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Philip Yancey |
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Sometimes the only meaning we can offer a suffering person is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has a meaning for us.
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Philip Yancey |
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The poor, the hungry, the mourners, and the oppressed truly are blessed. Not because of their miserable states, of course--Jesus spent much of his life trying to remedy those miseries. Rather, they are blessed because of an innate advantage they hold over those more comfortable and self-sufficient. People who are rich, successful, and beautiful may well go through life relying on their natural gifts. People who lack such natural advantages,..
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Philip Yancey |
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If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!
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Philip Yancey |
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Could it be that Christians, eager to point out how good we are, neglect the basic fact that the gospel sounds like good news only to bad people?
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good-news
christians
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Philip Yancey |
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If we cannot detect God's presence in the world, it may be that we have been looking in the wrong places.
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Philip Yancey |
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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?
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Philip Yancey |
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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.
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Philip Yancey |
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To judge God solely by the present world would be a tragic mistake. At one time, it may have been "the best of all possible worlds," but surely it is not now. The Bible communicates no message with more certainty than God's displeasure with the state of creation and the state of humanity. Imagine this scenario: vandals break into a museum displaying works from Picasso's Blue Period. Motivated by sheer destructiveness, they splash red paint ..
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Philip Yancey |
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Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job, the Lord of the universe has many things to manage, and in the midst of my self-pity I would do well to contemplate for a moment God's own point of view.
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Philip Yancey |
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Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.
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Philip Yancey |
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Does prayer change God or change me?
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Philip Yancey |
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We whine about things we have little control over; we lament what we believe ought to be changed.
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whine
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Philip Yancey |
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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.
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Philip Yancey |
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Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist says, 'Oh dear, things can't possibly get any worse.' An optimist says, 'Don't be so sad. Things can always get worse.
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Philip Yancey |
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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. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God's grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply."
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Philip Yancey |
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It is dangerous and perhaps even unscriptural to torture ourselves by looking for his message in a specific throb of pain, a specific instance of suffering. The message may simply be that we live in a world with fixed laws, like everyone else. But from the larger view, from the view of all history, yes, God speaks to us through suffering--or perhaps in spite of suffering. The symphony he is composing includes minor chords, dissonance, and t..
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Philip Yancey |
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Faith, I've concluded, means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
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Philip Yancey |
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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.
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Philip Yancey |
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we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." And "he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all -- how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?"
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Philip Yancey |
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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 ou..
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Philip Yancey |
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Don't judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name.
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Philip Yancey |
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Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, "Well isn't that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff."
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Philip Yancey |
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Stanley Hauerwas, named "America's best theologian" by Time magazine, summed up the problem: "I have come to think that the challenge confronting Christians is not that we do not believe what we say, though that can be a problem, but that what we say we believe does not seem to make any difference for either the church or the world."
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Philip Yancey |
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My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and divis..
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Philip Yancey |
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The only hope for any of us, regardless of our particular sins, lies in a ruthless trust in a God who inexplicably loves sinners, including those who sin differently than we do.
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Philip Yancey |
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Health and life, I would say, in the full and final sense of those words, are not what we die out of, but what we die into
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Philip Yancey |