Quotes & Sayings About Grace Philip Yancey

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

Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure. — 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

Like a sudden thaw in the middle of winter, grace happens at unexpected moments. It stops us short, catches the breath, disarms. If we manipulate it, try to control it, somehow earn it, that would not be grace. Yet not everyone has tasted of that amazing grace, and not everyone believes in it. — 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

We respond to healing grace by giving it away. — Philip Yancey

God. Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love. — Philip Yancey

I fear that our clumsy pronouncements, our name-calling, our hysteria about important issues - in short, our lack of grace - may in the end prove so damaging that society no longer looks to us for the guidance it needs. — Philip Yancey

Jesus gave a vivid object lesson his last night with the disciples by washing their feet, like a servant. Parents know the self-giving principle by instinct as they pour their energies into their self-absorbed children. Volunteers in soup kitchens and hospices and mission projects learn this lesson by doing.* What seems like sacrifice becomes instead a kind of nourishment because dispensing grace enriches the giver as well as the receiver. — 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

As a writer I have received my share of mixed reviews. Even so, as I read through stacks of vituperative letters, I got a strong sense for why the world does not automatically associate the word "grace" with evangelical Christians. Noxious — Philip Yancey

The issue is not whether I agree with someone but rather how I treat someone with whom I profoundly disagree. We Christians are called to use the "weapons of grace," which means treating even our opponents with love and respect. — Philip Yancey

Only Christianity dares to make God's love unconditional. — Philip Yancey

A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God. — Philip Yancey

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

What would it take for church to become known as a place where grace is "on tap"? — Philip Yancey

Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet. — Philip Yancey

We often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community. — Philip Yancey

Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and predictable 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

God welcomes home anyone who will have him and, in fact, has made the first move already. — Philip Yancey

Many churches offer more entertainment than worship, more uniformity than diversity, more exclusivity than outreach, more law than grace. — Philip Yancey

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world. (In His Image, Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand, p. 40) — Philip Yancey

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

I would far rather convey grace than explain it. — Philip Yancey

The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive. — Philip Yancey

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative. — Philip Yancey

The proof of spiritual maturity, Tolstoy contended, is not how "pure" you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace. — 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

The core problem with Christians communicating faith: we do not always do so in love. That is an indispensable point to presenting faith in a grace-full way. — Philip Yancey

I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don't have their hands open, there's something they're grasping because there's a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country. — Philip Yancey

I get mailings from Amnesty International, and as I look at their photos of men and women who have been beaten and cattle-prodded and jabbed and spit on and electrocuted, I ask myself, "What kind of human being could do that to another human being?" Then, I read the book of Acts and meet the kind of person who could do such a thing, now an apostle of grace, a servant of Jesus Christ, the greatest missionary history has ever known. If God can love that kind of person, maybe, just maybe, He can love the likes of me. — Philip Yancey

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative. — 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

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way. — Philip Yancey

Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God. — Philip Yancey

The essence of Christian faith has come to us in story form, the story of a God who will go to any lengths to get his family back. The Bible tells of flawed people
people just like me
who make shockingly bad choices and yet still find themselves pursued by God. As they receive grace and forgiveness, naturally they want to give it to others, and a thread of hope and transformation weaves its way throughout the Bible's accounts. — Philip Yancey

Grace is for the desperate, the needy, the broken, those who cannot make it on their own. Grace is for all of — Philip Yancey

The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others. — Philip Yancey

Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers. — Philip Yancey

On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka "nested dolls" that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside ... it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct ... (pp.80) — Philip Yancey

Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part. — Philip Yancey

Learning humility is a prerequisite for grace. — Philip Yancey

The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labour for', as
Sir Thomas More expressed it. The inner voice of prayer expresses itself naturally in action, just as the inner voice of my brain guides all my bodily actions. — Philip Yancey

In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love. — Philip Yancey

All of us in the church need "grace-healed eyes" to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has so lavishly bestowed on us. — Philip Yancey

Married, divorced or single here, it's one family that mingles here. Conservative or liberal here, we've all gotta give a little here. Big or small here, there's room for us all here. Doubt or believe here, we all can receive here. Gay or straight here, there's no hate here. Woman or man here, everyone can serve here. Whatever your race here, for all of us grace here. In imitation of the ridiculous love Almighty God has for each of us and all of us, let us live and love without labels. — 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

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

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

Grace is heartfelt, tinged with love, a spillover gift of the God who extended undeserved favor toward us. — Philip Yancey

Like a dying star, grace dissipates in a final burst of pale light, and is then engulfed by the black hole of ungrace. — Philip Yancey

Whatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority, that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace. — Philip Yancey

Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands. — Philip Yancey

In the move The Last Emperor, the young child anointed as the last emperor of China lives a magical life of luxury with a thousand eunuch servants at his command. "What happens when you do wrong?" his brother asks. "When I do wrong, someone else is punished," the boy emperor replies. To demonstrate, he breaks a jar, and one of the servants is beaten. In Christian theology, Jesus reversed that ancient pattern: when the servants erred, the King was punished. Grace is free only because the giver himself has borned the cost. — Philip Yancey

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

A counselor, David Seamands, summed up his career this way: Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God's unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people. ... We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that's not the way we live. The good news of the Gospel of grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions. — Philip Yancey

The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace. — Philip Yancey

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

The gospel presents both high ideals and all-encompassing grace. Very often, however, the church tilts one direction or the other. Either it lowers the ideals, adjusting moral standards downward, softening Jesus' strong commands, rationalizing behavior; or else it pulls in the boundaries of grace, declaring some sins worse than others, some sinners beyond the pale. Few churches stay faithful both to the high ideals of gospel and its bottomless grace. — Philip Yancey

I do not know if that theory is correct, but I do know that singling out one behavior as "sin" and emphasizing it over others provides a convenient way of dodging our own need for grace. High-minded moralism and shrill pronouncements of judgment may help fundraising, but they undermine a gospel of grace. — Philip Yancey

Grace dispensers give out of their own bounty, in gratitude (a word with the same root as grace) for what we have received from God. We serve others not with some hidden scheme of making converts, rather to contribute to the common good, to help humans flourish as God intended. — Philip Yancey

The shift in American society from admiring Christians to fearing and criticizing them provides an opportunity for self-reflection. How have we been presenting the message we believe in? Might there be a more grace-filled way? — Philip Yancey

Henri Nouwen says, "When we come to realize that ... only God saves, then we are free to serve, then we can live truly humble lives." Nouwen changed his approach from "selling pearls," or peddling the good news, to "hunting for the treasure" already present in those he was called to love - a shift from dispensing religion to dispensing grace. 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

If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap. — Philip Yancey

I see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said 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. Those — Philip Yancey

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me. — Philip Yancey

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

Politics draws lines between people; in contrast, Jesus' love cuts across those lines and dispenses grace. That does not mean, of course, that Christians should not involve themselves in politics. It simply means that as we do so we must not let the rules of power displace the command to love. — Philip Yancey

The Quakers have a saying: "An enemy is one whose story we have not heard." To communicate to post-Christians, I must first listen to their stories for clues to how they view the world and how they view people like me. Those conversations are what led to the title of this book. Although God's grace is as amazing as ever, in my divided country it seems in vanishing supply. — Philip Yancey

John Wesley taught that the gospel of Christ involved more than saving souls. It should have an impact on all of society, and his followers worked to accomplish just that. They were dispensing grace to the broader world, and in the process their spirit helped change a nation, saving it from the revolutionary chaos that had spread across Europe. — Philip Yancey

The Italian novelist Ignazio Silone wrote about a revolutionary hunted by the police. In order to hide him, his comrades dressed him in the garb of a priest and sent him to a remote village in the foothills of the Alps. Word got out, and soon a long line of peasants appeared at his door, full of stories of their sins and broken lives. The "priest" protested and tried to turn them away, to no avail. He had no recourse but to sit and listen to the stories of people starving for grace. — Philip Yancey

The approach of admitting our errors, besides being most true to a gospel of grace, is also most effective at expressing who we are. Propaganda turns people off; humbly admitting mistakes disarms. — Philip Yancey

Jesus was a master of grace: he attracted sinners and moral outcasts even as he offended the religious and responsible people of his day. — Philip Yancey

Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away. — Philip Yancey

We are all trophies of God's grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls who you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe. (pp.88) — Philip Yancey