Quotes by Philip Yancey

Philip Yancey (b. 1949) — Christlicher Bestsellerautor und Journalist · evangelikal · USA

Philip Yancey (* 1949) ist ein US-amerikanischer christlicher Journalist und Buchautor, der lange als leitender Redakteur für das Magazin Christianity Today wirkte. Er wurde durch Bestseller über Leid, Zweifel und radikale Gnade bekannt, in denen er sich gegen religiösen Moralismus und fundamentalistische Engführungen wandte. Bibellesern bieten seine Schriften einen undogmatischen Zugang zu existentiellen Glaubenskrisen, wenngleich seine Positionen in konservativen Kreisen umstritten blieben und er sich 2026 nach einem eingestandenen Fehlverhalten aus dem öffentlichen Dienst zurückzog.

Era: Today

Recurring topics: Grace & Redemption, God, Jesus & the Holy Spirit, Love, Humility & Pride, Faith & Trust, Guilt & Forgiveness, Suffering & the Question of God, Church & Congregation

Quotes by Philip Yancey

Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.

Philip Yancey

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

Philip Yancey

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

Philip Yancey

Grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more, and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, am invited to take my place at the table in God's family.

Philip Yancey

I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

Philip Yancey

The test of spiritual maturity is not how pure we are, but how aware we are of our impurity. This awareness opens the door to God's grace.

Philip Yancey

The only hope for any of us, regardless of our particular sins, lies in a ruthless trust in a God who inexplicably loves sinners, including those who sin differently than we do.

Philip Yancey

God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love," said Augustine.

Philip Yancey

Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for “real” people over “good” people.

Philip Yancey

Un osado mensaje que encontramos en el libro de Job es que a Dios se le puede decir lo que se desee. Arroje ante él su angustia, su ira, sus dudas, su amargura, su dolor por sentirse traicionado, su desilusión.

Philip Yancey

The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness. And people write songs with titles like “Amazing Grace” for one reason: grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations. Grace alone melts ungrace.

Philip Yancey

The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann42 expresses in a single sentence the great span from Good Friday to Easter. It is, in fact, a summary of human history, past, present, and future: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.

Philip Yancey

If God’s kingdom had a “No Oddballs Allowed” sign posted, none of us could get in.

Philip Yancey

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

Philip Yancey

Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.” C.

Philip Yancey

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.

Philip Yancey

Jesus proclaimed unmistakably that God's law is so perfect and absolute that no one can achieve righteousness. Yet God's grace is so great that we do not have to.

Philip Yancey

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it.

Philip Yancey

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

Philip Yancey

When God looks upon my life graph, he sees not jagged swerves toward good and bad but rather a steady line of good: the goodness of God’s Son captured in a moment of time and applied for all eternity.

Philip Yancey

Dios no me envía a un aula vacía al fondo del pasillo cuando lo desobedezco. Al contrario. Los momentos en que me siento más apartado de Dios pueden producir una sensación de desespero que presenta un nuevo punto de partida para la gracia.

Philip Yancey

Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

Philip Yancey

I’ve yet to meet someone who found their way to faith by being criticized.

Philip Yancey

It makes all the difference in the world whether I view my neighbor as a potential convert or as someone whom God already loves.

Philip Yancey

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.

Philip Yancey

I used to worry about falling asleep during prayer. Now, as a parent, I understand. What parent wouldn’t want her child to fall asleep in her arms?

Philip Yancey

Suffering can never ultimately be meaningless, because God has shared it.

Philip Yancey

Yet as I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.

Philip Yancey

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Philip Yancey

Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.

Philip Yancey

When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward that person.

Philip Yancey

God loves people because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Philip Yancey

Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.

Philip Yancey

In a nutshell, the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 22 tells the story of a God reckless with desire to get his family back.

Philip Yancey

If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.

Philip Yancey

Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.

Philip Yancey

Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God.

Philip Yancey

Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.

Philip Yancey

Jesus did not give the parables to teach us how to live. He gave them, I believe, to correct our notions about who God is and who God loves.

Philip Yancey

Is God somehow responsible for the suffering of this world? In this indirect way, yes. But giving a child a pair of ice skates, knowing that he may fall, is a very different matter from knocking him down on the ice.

Philip Yancey

593 quotes in total — browse the collection.

Sources: premierchristianity.com, facebook.com, religionunplugged.com

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