Quotes from Philip Yancey

Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be

The first step in helping a suffering person (or in accepting our own pain) is to acknowledge that pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.

In the study of scientific atheism, there was the idea that religion divides people. Now we see the opposite: love for God can only unite.

Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that really did not belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self.

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me.

God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.

I need God more than anything I might get from God.

Instead, in a stunning reversal, Jesus instructed us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." At the center of the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus taught us to recite, lurks the unnatural act of forgiveness.

Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame and loosens the stranglehold of guilt. It accomplishes these two things through a remarkable linkage, placing the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong.

Jesus was able to love men because he loved them right through the layer of mud.

No matter how capable we are, we need God every day, living in us and acting through us. We need his courage and his hope, his love and his companionship. We need his salvation. We can't live without God.

It takes great effort, and considerable faith, to keep the Big Picture in mind. In some ways it makes me feel utterly insignificant, in some ways eternally significant