Grace Notes Quotes

“Some things just have to be believed to be seen.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim

“We do well to remember that the Bible has far more to say about how to live during the journey than about the ultimate destination.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim

“A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim

“Don’t judge Christ by those of us who imperfectly bear his name.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Some people worry that prayer may lead to passivity, that we will retreat to prayer as a substitute for action. Jesus saw no contradiction between the two: he spent long hours in prayer and then long hours meeting human needs.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim

“Any Greek scholar will tell you the word "blessed" is far too sedate and beatific to carry the percussive force Jesus intended. The Greek word conveys something like a short cry of joy, "Oh, you lucky person!”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim

“All through the Bible, especially in the Prophets, we see a conflict raging within God. On the one hand God passionately loved the people he had made; on the other hand, God had a terrible urge to destroy the evil that enslaved them. On the cross, God resolved that inner conflict, for there God’s Son absorbed the destructive force and transformed it into love. Disappointment with God”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, ‘I am human and you are God.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Only he who is helpless can truly pray.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders from a higher power than Rome or Jerusalem. What would a subversive church look like in the modern United States?”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“I have written about the “toxic church” I grew up in: a legalistic, angry, racist church in the South. I joke about being “in recovery” from that church, learning along the way that much presented as absolute truth was in fact wrong. As a result, when I began writing I saw myself as someone on the edge, more comfortable asking questions than proposing answers. My early book titles (Where Is God When It Hurts, Disappointment with God) betray what I struggled with and how I”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“MARCH 16 Ordeal of Shame In a memoir of the years before World War II, Pierre Van Paassen tells of an act of humiliation by Nazi storm troopers who had seized an elderly Jewish rabbi and dragged him to headquarters. In the far end of the same room, two colleagues were beating another Jew to death. They stripped the rabbi naked and commanded that he preach the sermon he had prepared for the coming Sabbath in the synagogue. The rabbi asked if he could wear his yarmulke, and the Nazis, grinning, agreed. It added to the joke. The trembling rabbi proceeded to deliver in a raspy voice his sermon on what it means to walk humbly before God, all the while being poked and prodded by the hooting Nazis, and all the while hearing the last cries of his neighbor at the end of the room. When I read the Gospel accounts of the imprisonment, torture, and execution of Jesus, I think of that naked rabbi standing humiliated in a police station. I still cannot fathom the indignity, the shame endured by God’s Son on earth, stripped naked, flogged, spat on, struck in the face, garlanded with thorns. Jewish leaders as well as Romans intended the mockery to parody the crime for which the victim had been condemned. Messiah, huh? Great, let’s hear a prophecy.Wham. Who hit you, huh? Thunk. C’mon, tell us, spit it out, Mr. Prophet. For a Messiah, you don’t know much, do you? It went like that all day long, from the bullying game of Blind Man’s Bluff in the high priest’s courtyard, to the professional thuggery of Pilate’s and Herod’s guards, to the catcalls of spectators up the long road to Calvary, and finally to the cross itself where Jesus heard a stream of taunts. I have marveled at, and sometimes openly questioned, the self-restraint God has shown throughout history, allowing the Genghis Khans and the Hitlers and the Stalins to have their way. But nothing—nothing—compares to the self-restraint shown that dark Friday in Jerusalem. With every lash of the whip, every fibrous crunch of fist against flesh, Jesus must have mentally replayed the temptation in the wilderness and in Gethsemane. Legions of angels awaited his command. One word, and the ordeal would end. The Jesus I Never Knew(199 - 200)”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ. In the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem, God who knows no before or after entered time and space. One who knows no boundaries at all took them on: the shocking confines of a baby’s skin, the ominous restraints of mortality. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” an apostle would later say; “he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“DECEMBER 22 Parallel Universes Doubt, for me, tends to come in an overwhelming package, all at once. I don’t worry much about nuances of particular doctrines, but every so often I catch myself wondering about the whole grand scheme of faith. I stand in the futuristic airport in Denver, for example, watching important-looking people in business suits, briefcases clutched to their sides like weapons, pause at an espresso bar before scurrying off to another concourse. Do any of them ever think about God? I wonder. Christians share an odd belief in parallel universes. One universe consists of glass and steel and wool clothes and leather briefcases and the smell of freshly ground coffee. The other consists of angels and sinister spiritual forces and somewhere out there places called Heaven and Hell. We palpably inhabit the material world; it takes faith to consider oneself a citizen of the other, invisible world. Occasionally the two worlds merge for me, and these rare moments are anchors for my faith. The time I snorkeled on a coral reef and suddenly the flashes of color and abstract design flitting around me became a window to a Creator who exults in life and beauty. The time my wife forgave me for something that did not merit forgiveness—that too became a window, allowing a startling glimpse of divine grace. I have these moments, but soon toxic fumes from the material world seep in. Sex appeal! Power! Money! Military might! These are what matter most in life, I’m told, not the simpering platitudes of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. For me, living in a fallen world, doubt seems more like forgetfulness than disbelief. I, a citizen of the visible world, know well the struggle involved in clinging to belief in another, invisible world. Christmas turns the tables and hints at the struggle involved when the Lord of both worlds descends to live by the rules of the one. In Bethlehem, the two worlds came together, realigned; what Jesus went on to accomplish on planet Earth made it possible for God someday to resolve all disharmonies in both worlds. No wonder a choir of angels broke out in spontaneous song, disturbing not only a few shepherds but the entire universe. Finding God in Unexpected Places (34 – 35)”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Jeremiah affected me more than any other book. The image of a wounded lover in Jeremiah is an awesome one that I cannot comprehend. Why would the God who created all that exists willingly become subject to such humiliation from creation? I was haunted by the reality of a God who lets our response matter that much.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“How can Christians uphold moral values in a secular society while at the same time conveying a spirit of grace and love? As the psalmist expressed it, “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Behind the gruffness of many Christians with strong opinions, I’m sure, lies a deep and proper concern for a world that has little place for God. Yet I also know that, as Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees, a concern for moral values alone is not nearly enough. Moralism apart from grace solves little.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Allen Yuan had served a term of twenty-two years at hard labor for holding unauthorized church meetings in China.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Anderson draws from the experience of Judas a key principle about prayer: “Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“The Bible schools us to pray with blistering honesty.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“The quieter the mind,” said Meister Eckhart, “the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“God is already present, in the most unexpected places. We just need to make God visible.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“I remind myself that prayer means keeping company with God who is already present.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“True followers of God quietly humble themselves and rise again courageously.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Most importantly, he countered violence with nonviolence, and hatred with love. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he exhorted his followers. “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“He had not come primarily to heal the world’s cells, but to heal its souls.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“Love, too, is why I believe. At the end of life, what else matters?”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey

“At the end of her story she said simply, “As I look back, this is what matters. I have loved and been loved, and all the rest is just background music.”
― Philip Yancey, Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey