Philip Yancey Quotes
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Jesus gave us a model for the work of the church at the Last Supper. While his disciples kept proposing more organization - Hey, let's elect officers, establish hierarchy, set standards of professionalism - Jesus quietly picked up a towel and basin of water and began to wash their feet.
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The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.
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We deserve punishment and get forgiveness; we deserve God’s wrath and get God’s love.
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There is but one true Giver in the universe; all else are debtors.
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Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less
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Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.
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The uncommitted share many of our core values, but if we do not live out those values in a compelling way, we will not awaken a thirst for their ultimate Source.
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He (Job) did not seek the Giver because of His gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver.
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The promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.
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I am learning that mature faith, which encompasses both simple faith and fidelity, works the opposite of paranoia. It reassembles all the events of life around trust in a loving God. When good things happen, I accept them as gifts from God, worthy of thanksgiving. When bad things happen, I do not take them as necessarily sent by God -- I see evidence in the Bible to the contrary -- and I find in them no reason to divorce God. Rather, I trust that God can use even those bad things for my benefit.
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As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can "handle" my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need God's correction - but only by taking those feelings to God will I have the opportunity for correction and healing.
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The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.
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God formed an alliance based on the world as it is, full of flaws, whereas prayer calls God to account for the world as it should be.
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If we comprehend what Christ has done for us, then surely out of gratitude we will strive to live 'worthy' of such great love. We will strive for holiness not to make God love us but because He already does.
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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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At the heart of the gospel is a God who deliberately surrenders to the wild, irresistable power of love.
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Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.
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If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.
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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.
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Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.
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Eugene Peterson points out that "the root meaning in Hebrew of salvation is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge. It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined and cramped." God wants to set free, to make it possible for us to live open and loving lives with God and our neighbors. "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free," wrote the psalmist.
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God operates by different rules of time and space. And God's infinite greatness, which we would expect to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire. A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.
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Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.
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Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.
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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.
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Only in prayer can we learn to love God with all our heart, mind and soul.
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The giants of the faith all had one thing in common: neither victory nor success, but passion.
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It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you've heard everything before and that you have nothing left to learn.
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The Gospels and the rest of the New Testament reflect the life of Jesus, what it means for us & what it means for the world.
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Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.
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