Quotes from Philip Yancey

If reduced to a single phrase, the Bible's message would be something like this: God gets his family back. The Bible tells the story of how God, wanting to live in harmony with all that he had made, set out to win a rebellious world back to himself.

We sometimes use the term "savior complex" to describe an unhealthy syndrome of obsession over curing others' problems. The true Savior, however, seemed remarkably free of such a complex. He had no compulsion to convert the entire world in his lifetime or to cure people who were not ready to be cured.

God does not seek the people most outwardly capable, nor the most naturally "good." He works with the most unlikely material so that everyone can see the glory is his and his alone.

Jesus extended the privileges of God's chosen family to the whole world, regardless of race or nation. Thus an obscure Jewish sect became a new global faith, Christianity, open to all.

grace happens at unexpected moments. It stops us short, catches the breath, disarms. If we manipulate it, try to control it, somehow earn it, that would not be grace.

Moralism apart from grace solves little.

Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission, say something similar: "God has a plan to fight injustice, and that plan is us — ?his people. There is no Plan B.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8).

It is difficult, if not impossible, to communicate the message of grace from the corridors of power.

The resurrection and its victory over death brought a decisive new word to the vocabulary of pain and suffering: temporary. Jesus Christ holds out the startling promise of an afterlife without pain. Whatever anguish we feel now will not last.

Dr. Eric Cassell, an internist at Cornell University, concluded about his patients, "If I had to pick the aspect of illness that is most destructive to the sick, I would choose the loss of control.

The gospel transforms culture by permeating it like yeast, and long after the people abandon belief they tend to live by habits of the soul. Once salted and yeasted, society is difficult to un-salt and un-yeast.