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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.
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Philip Yancey |
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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.
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Philip Yancey |
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Christians should not compromise in hating sin, says Lewis. Rather we should hate the sins in others in the same way we hate them in ourselves: being sorry the person has done such things and hoping that somehow, sometime, somewhere, that person will be cured.
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Philip Yancey |
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Some people find no comfort in the prophets' vision of a future world. "The church has used that line for centuries to justify slavery, oppression, and all manner of injustice," they say. The criticism sticks because the church has abused the prophets' vision. But you will never find that "pie in the sky" rationale in the prophets themselves. They have scathing words about the need to care for widows and orphans and aliens, and to clean up ..
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Philip Yancey |
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Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.
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Philip Yancey |
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drkt ny knt aty l~ llh mthl shkhS mryD km lw kn lkhlq ydyr mktb llshkwy knt t'lm w'`ny lmasy wl'mrD wlmZlm bynm knt tGDy Twl lwqt `n l'mwr lSlH@ lkthyr@ lty tHyT by fy l`lm
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Philip Yancey |
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The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.
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Philip Yancey |
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the average American household is in more danger from chemical germ-killers than from germs.
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Philip Yancey |
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The main purpose of prayer is not to make life easier, nor to gain magical powers, but to know God.
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Philip Yancey |
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we persevere because we believe rewards will come.
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reward
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Philip Yancey |
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Grace dispensers give out of their own bounty, in gratitude (a word with the same root as grace) for what we have received from God. We serve others not with some hidden scheme of making converts, rather to contribute to the common good, to help humans flourish as God intended.
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Philip Yancey |
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Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.
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Philip Yancey |
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The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people -- people just like me -- who make shockingly bad choices and yet still find themselves pursued by God. As they receive grace and forgiveness, naturally they want to give it to others, and a thread of hope and transformation weaves its way throughout the Bible's accounts.
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inspirational
christian
forgiveness
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Philip Yancey |
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88abdef
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I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues--in short, our lack of grace--may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs.
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Philip Yancey |
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Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.
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Philip Yancey |
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9c80abf
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Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.
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Philip Yancey |
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I was quick to pounce on his moral flaws and slow to recognize my own blind sin. But because he stayed faithful, by offering his body as a target but never as a weapon, he broke through my moral calluses. The real goal, King used to say, was not to defeat the white man, but "to awaken a sense149 of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority.... The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the cre..
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Philip Yancey |
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Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.
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Philip Yancey |
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A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer's own scars may fade away.
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Philip Yancey |
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Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude.
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Philip Yancey |
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Frankly, I have seen even more graceless, not to say scurrilous, responses to Barack Obama from Christians. The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of adversarial power. In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square. Somehow the paramount command to love--even to love our enemies--gets lost. Seeing this, the watching world often finds i..
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Philip Yancey |
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One prominent spiritual leader insists, "The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform." Could he have that backwards?"
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Philip Yancey |
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The apostle Paul had much to say about the immorality of individual church members, but little to say about the immorality of pagan Rome. He did not rail against the abuses in Rome--slavery, idolatry, gladiator games, political oppression, greed--even though such abuses surely offended Christians of that day every bit as much as our deteriorating society offends Christians today.
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Philip Yancey |
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Indeed,"wrote C. S. Lewis142, "if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by ..
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Philip Yancey |
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Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.
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Philip Yancey |
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Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering."
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Philip Yancey |
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That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus' word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human father.
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Philip Yancey |
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God is already present in my life and all around me; prayer offers the chance to attend and respond to that presence.
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Philip Yancey |
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Jesus' story makes no economic sense, and that was his intent. He was giving us a parable about grace, which cannot be calculated like a day's wages. Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.
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Philip Yancey |
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Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.
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Philip Yancey |
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A human being is not someone who once in a while makes a mistake, and God is not someone who now and then forgives. No, human beings are sinners and God is love.
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Philip Yancey |
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When I listened to public prayers in evangelical churches, I heard people telling God what to do, combined with thinly veiled hints on how others should behave. When
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Philip Yancey |
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My publisher conducted a website poll, and of the 678 respondents only 23 felt satisfied with the time they were spending in prayer. That
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Philip Yancey |
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Prosperity may dilute prayer too. In my travels I have noticed that Christians in developing countries spend less time pondering the effectiveness of prayer and more time actually praying. The
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Philip Yancey |
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We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.
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Philip Yancey |
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Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about -- like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.
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Philip Yancey |
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Eugene Peterson hace un contraste entre Agustin y Pelagio, dos teologos del siglo IV opuestos entre si. Pelagio era educado, cortes, convincente y le caia bien a todo el mundo. Agustin habia derrochado su juventud en la inmoralidad, tenia una extrana relacion con su madre y se conseguia muchos enemigos. Sin embargo, hizo de la gracia su punto de partida y las cosas le salieron bien, mientras que Pelagio comenzaba por el esfuerzo humano y se..
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Philip Yancey |
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7e42386
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We truly live only one day at a time. It doesn't really help to worry about the future, which we can't control, or the past, which we can't change.
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Philip Yancey |
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341c131
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Evil's greatest triumph may be its success in portraying religion as an enemy of pleasure when, in fact, religion accounts for its source: every good and enjoyable thing is the invention of a Creator who lavished gifts on the world.
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Philip Yancey |
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Prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.
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prayer
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Philip Yancey |
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1d00c8b
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Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce. For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil.
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Philip Yancey |
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We cannot simply pray and then wait for God to do the rest.
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prayer
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Philip Yancey |
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368ed97
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The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment forward.
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Philip Yancey |
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Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?
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Philip Yancey |