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If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.

Philip Yancey

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Philip Yancey
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: November 4
Author
Journalist
Publisher
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Would
Invent
Lived
Jesus
Able
Never

More quotes by Philip Yancey

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In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.
Philip Yancey
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The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.
Philip Yancey
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Goodness cannot be imposed externally, from the top down it must grow internally, from the bottom up.
Philip Yancey
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People want to go back to those old days, but it's probably not going to happen.
Philip Yancey
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Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.
Philip Yancey
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True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will.
Philip Yancey
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Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.
Philip Yancey
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Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.
Philip Yancey
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You can know the law by heart without knowing the heart of it
Philip Yancey
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Across time and generations, books carry the thoughts and feelings, the essence, of the human spirit.
Philip Yancey
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By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.
Philip Yancey
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As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.
Philip Yancey
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We should feel dissonance we are, after all, immortals trapped in mortal surroundings. We lack unity because long ago a gap fissured open between our mortal and immortal parts theologians trace the fault line back to the Fall.
Philip Yancey
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A philosophy may explain difficult things, but has no power to change them. The gospel, the story of Jesus' life, promises change.
Philip Yancey
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I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.
Philip Yancey
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God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it?
Philip Yancey
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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
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Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.
Philip Yancey
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If God doesn't want something for me, I shouldn't want it either. Spending time in meditative prayer, getting to know God, helps align my desires with God's.
Philip Yancey
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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.
Philip Yancey