Quotes from Philip Yancey

There's a cardinal rule in book publishing that applies equally to brain surgery and auto mechanics: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Since people are still buying the original Where Is God When It Hurts?

Revelation 12 presents Christmas from a cosmic perspective, adding a new set of images to the familiar scenes of manger and shepherds and the slaughter of the innocents.

The young church was nourished spiritually by apostles who set down their beliefs and messages in a series of letters. The first 13 such letters (Romans through Philemon) were written by the apostle Paul, who led the advance of Christianity through the non-Jewish world.

As Dorothy Day put it, "I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

Naturalist John Muir concluded sadly, "It is a great comfort … that vast multitudes of creatures, great and small and infinite in number, lived and had a good time in God's love before man was created.

Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it.

God is present in the Spirit, who groans wordlessly on our behalf and who speaks in a soft voice to all consciences attuned to him.

Fulfillment comes not in pursuit of happiness, but rather in pursuit of service.

We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him," said Abraham Joshua Heschel

Hebrews: No one knows who wrote Hebrews, but it probably first went to Christians in danger of slipping back into their old, rule-bound religion. It interprets the Old Testament, explaining many Jewish practices as symbols that prepared the way for Christ.

Knowledge is passive, intellectual; suffering is active, personal. No intellectual answer will solve suffering. Perhaps this is why God sent his own Son as one response to human pain, to experience it and absorb it into himself.

The church of my own childhood, as well as that of my present and my future, comprises deeply flawed human beings struggling toward an unattainable ideal.