Philip Yancey Quotes

       Philip Yancey
       1949-
      
       Philip Yancey is an American Christian author. Fourteen million of his books have been sold worldwide, making him one of the best-selling evangelical Christian authors. Two of his books have won the ECPA's Christian Book of the Year Award: The Jesus I Never Knew in 1996, What's So Amazing About Grace in 1998. He is published by Zondervan Publishing.
      
       Yancey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. When Yancey was one year old, his father, stricken with polio, died after his church elders suggested he go off life support in faith that God would heal him. This was one of the reasons he had lost his faith at one point of time. Yancey earned his MA with highest honors from the graduate school of Wheaton College. His two graduate degrees in Communications and English were earned from Wheaton College Graduate School and the University of Chicago.
      
       Yancey moved to Chicago, Illinois, and in 1971 joined the staff of Campus Life magazine--a sister publication of Christianity Today directed towards high school and college students--where he served as editor for eight years. Yancey was for many years an editor for Christianity Today and wrote articles for Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Eternity, Moody Monthly, and National Wildlife, among others. He now lives in Colorado, working as a columnist and editor-at-large for Christianity Today. He is a member of the editorial board of Books and Culture, another magazine affiliated with Christianity Today, and travels around the world for speaking engagements.

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?     Topics: Change     Source: What's So Amazing About Grace? Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.     Topics: Christians All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.     Topics: Church, Carnality     Source: What's So Amazing About Grace? Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.     Topics: Endurance I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.     Topics: Faith Faith is not an insurance policy. Or as Eddie Askew suggests, maybe it is: insurance does not prevent accidents, but rather gives a secure base from which to face their consequences.     Topics: Faith     Source: The Jesus I Never Knew God's terrible insistence on human freedom is so absolute that he granted us the power to live as though He did not exist, to spit in His face, to crucify Him.     Topics: Freedom     Source: The Jesus I Never Knew God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God's requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell... In the bottom line realm of ungrace, some workers deserve more than others; in the realm of grace the word 'deserve' does not even apply.     Topics: Gifts     Source: What's So Amazing About Grace? We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life - by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.     Topics: God, Life Everyone has an image of God distorted in some way--we must, of course, since God transcends our capacities to imagine him.     Topics: God Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.     Topics: Grace 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.     Topics: Grace     Source: What's So Amazing About Grace?