Quotes from Philip Yancey

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.

Faith is not simply a private matter, or something we practice once a week at church. Rather, it should have a contagious effect on the broader world. Jesus used these images to illustrate his kingdom: a sprinkle of yeast causing the whole loaf to rise, a pinch of salt preserving a slab of meat, the smallest seed in the garden growing into a great tree in which birds of the air come to nest.

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!

Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)

Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving—God's self-giving and human self-giving—and not about self-imposing.

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.

In God's presence I feel small because I am small.

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.

If we cannot detect God's presence in the world, it may be that we have been looking in the wrong places.

Jesus honored the dignity of people, whether he agreed with them or not. He would not found his kingdom on the basis of race or class or other such divisions.