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All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.

Philip Yancey

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Philip Yancey
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: November 4
Author
Journalist
Publisher
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Often
Revealing
Around
Holds
Back
Mirror
Different
Mirrors
Way
Window
Church
Society
Rather
Reflecting

More quotes by Philip Yancey

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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
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Jesus' response to suffering people and to nobodies provides a glimpse into the heart of God. God is not the unmoved Absolute, but rather the Loving One who draws near.
Philip Yancey
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Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
Philip Yancey
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Homeless people bear God's image too.
Philip Yancey
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I say this with care, but I wonder if a fierce, insistent desire for a miracle - even a physical healing - sometimes betrays a lack of faith rather than an abundance of it. When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether he reveals himself yet again in the seen world?
Philip Yancey
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The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.
Philip Yancey
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Some things just have to be believed to be seen.
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
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The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure.
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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Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.
Philip Yancey
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Prayer may seem at first like disengagement, a reflective time to consider God's point of view. But that vantage presses us back to accomplish God's will, the work of the kingdom. We are God's fellow workers, and as such we turn to prayer to equip us for the partnership.
Philip Yancey
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At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.
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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Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.
Philip Yancey
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By striving to prove how much they deserve God's love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don't deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.
Philip Yancey
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Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least deserving in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.
Philip Yancey
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I begin with confession not in order to feel miserable, rather to call to mind a reality I often ignore. When I acknowledge where I stand before a perfect God, it restores the true state of the universe. Confession simply establishes the proper ground rules of creatures relating to their creator.
Philip Yancey
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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
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We're concerned with how things turn out God seems more concerned with how we turn out.
Philip Yancey