Philip Yancey - What's So Amazing About Grace? (1997)

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[...]women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift?

Philip Yancey
By striving to prove how much they deserve God's love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don't deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.

Philip Yancey
One who has been touched by grace will no longer look on those who stray as "those evil people" or "those poor people who need our help." Nor must we search for signs of "loveworthiness." Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

Philip Yancey
C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

Philip Yancey
The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

Philip Yancey
All too often the church holds up a mirror
reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a
different way.

Philip Yancey
Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people... Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God.

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
Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.

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

Philip Yancey
Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.

Philip Yancey
Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

Philip Yancey
A God wise enough to create me and the world I live in is wise enough to watch out for me.

Philip Yancey
The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.

Philip Yancey
I fell in love. It felt exactly like a fall, a head-over-heels tumble into a state of unbearable lightness. The earth tilted on its axis. I did not believe in romantic love at the time, thinking it a human construct, an invention of fourteenth century Italian poets. I was as unprepared for love as I had been for goodness and beauty. Suddenly, my heart seemed swollen, too large for my chest.

Philip Yancey
Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

Philip Yancey
The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.

Philip Yancey
Grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us. Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, "Be good." Jesus' stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, "Help!"

Philip Yancey
In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square

Philip Yancey
Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more... And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less

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

Philip Yancey
Charles Williams has said of the Lord's Prayer, "No word in English carries a greater possibility of terror than the little word 'as' in that clause." What makes the 'as' so terrifying? The fact that Jesus plainly links our forgiven-ness by the Father with our forgiving-ness of fellow human beings. Jesus' next remark could not be more explicit: 'If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.'

Philip Yancey
If we comprehend what Christ has done for us, then surely out of gratitude we will strive to live 'worthy' of such great love. We will strive for holiness not to make God love us but because He already does.

Philip Yancey
Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.

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

Philip Yancey
The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

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

Philip Yancey
Having spent time around "sinners" and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus.

Philip Yancey