Quotes from Philip Yancey

A grace-full Christian is one who looks at the world through "grace-tinted lenses.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day

The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of adversarial power. In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square. Somehow the paramount command to love—even to love our enemies—gets lost.

when we appeal to God's grace and compassion the fearsome God soon disappears.

Author Stephen Brown notes that a veterinarian can learn a lot about a dog owner he has never met just by observing the dog. What does the world learn about God by watching us his followers

Those who suffer rest their security not on things, which often cannot be enjoyed and may soon be taken away, but rather on people.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

There is a simple cure for people who doubt God's love and question God's grace: to turn to the Bible and examine the kind of people God loves.

I relish the sense of being alone with nature, knowing that of all people in the world only I am hearing these sounds in this place. The tranquil mood feels vaguely religious, what I should be feeling in church but rarely do. In

I yearn for a grace-abounding church that rewards rather than punishes honesty, and that, in Jesus' words, exists for the sinners and not the righteous, the sick and not the healthy.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion," cautioned T. S. Eliot.

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counter-culture of ordinary pilgrims who insist on living a different way. We can make the world stop and think before pulling a trigger, or exacting revenge, or neglecting the vulnerable, or practising euthanasia on those it deems 'devoid of value'.