The Jesus I Never Knew Quotes

“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, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“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, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for people who live in comfort.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“When he lived on earth, [Jesus] surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Whatever else it is, the kingdom of God is decidedly not a call to violent revolution.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“We dare not invest so much in the kingdom of this world that we neglect our main task of introducing people to a different kind of kingdom, one based solely on God's grace and forgiveness. Passing laws to enforce morality serves a necessary function, to dam up evil, but it never solves human problems.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God's laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“To put the issue bluntly, are the Beatitudes true? If so, why doesn't the church encourage poverty and mourning and meekness and persecution instead of striving against them? What is the real meaning of the Beatitudes, this cryptic ethical core of Jesus' teaching?”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Jesus honored the dignity of people, whether he agreed with them or not. He would not found his kingdom on the basis of race or class or other such divisions.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Indeed,”wrote C. S. Lewis142, “if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“If we cannot detect God's presence in the world, it may be that we have been looking in the wrong places.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“I was quick to pounce on his moral flaws and slow to recognize my own blind sin. But because he stayed faithful, by offering his body as a target but never as a weapon, he broke through my moral calluses. The real goal, King used to say, was not to defeat the white man, but “to awaken a sense149 of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority…. The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” And that is what Martin Luther King Jr. finally set into motion, even in racists like me.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“The poor, the hungry, the mourners, and the oppressed truly are blessed. Not because of their miserable states, of course—Jesus spent much of his life trying to remedy those miseries. Rather, they are blessed because of an innate advantage they hold over those more comfortable and self-sufficient. People who are rich, successful, and beautiful may well go through life relying on their natural gifts. People who lack such natural advantages, hence underqualified for success in the kingdom of this world, just might turn to God in their time of need. Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like "What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything?" Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Ironically, (the church's) respect in the world declines in proportion to how vigorously we attempt to force others to adopt our point of view.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew by Phillip Yancey

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“It seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for His entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“According to Jesus, what I think about him and how I respond will determine my destiny for all eternity.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“For years I had thought of the Sermon on the Mount as a blueprint for human behavior that no one could possibly follow. Reading it again, I found that Jesus gave these words not to cumber us, but to tell us what God is like. The character of God is the urtext of the Sermon on the Mount. Why should we love our enemies? Because our clement Father causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good. Why be perfect? Because God is perfect. Why store up treasures in heaven? Because the Father lives there and will lavishly reward us. Why live without fear and worry? Because the same God who clothes the lilies and the grass of the field has promised to take care of us. Why pray? If an earthly father gives his son bread or fish, how much more will the Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“when I turn from church history and examine myself, I find that I too am vulnerable to the Temptation. I lack the willpower to resist shortcut solutions to human needs. I lack the patience to allow God to work in a slow, “gentlemanly” way. I want to seize control myself, to compel others to help accomplish the causes I believe in. I am willing to trade away certain freedoms for the guarantee of safety and protection. I am willing to trade away even more for the chance to realize my ambitions.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“Dependence, sorrow, repentance, a longing to change—these are the gates to God's kingdom.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew