Quotes from Philip Yancey

It seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for His entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.

Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of

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.

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 division.

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

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.

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.

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.

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.

Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change—these are the gates to God's kingdom.

Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver.