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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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Philip Yancey
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: November 4
Author
Journalist
Publisher
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Goodness
Bottom
Grow
Grows
Cannot
Must
Externally
Internally
Imposed

More quotes by Philip Yancey

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Jesus reserved his hardest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed and legalism.
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The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor.
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If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.
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Prayer enters the pool of God's love and widens outward.
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In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square
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God operates by different rules of time and space. And God's infinite greatness, which we would expect to diminish us, actually makes possible the very closeness that we desire. A God unbound by our rules of time has the ability to invest in every person on earth. God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.
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The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure.
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Prayer is - keeping company with God.
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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?
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Grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us. Ask people what they must do to get to heaven and most reply, Be good. Jesus' stories contradict that answer. All we must do is cry, Help!
Philip Yancey
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Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.
Philip Yancey
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God has, quite literally, all the time in the world for each one of us.
Philip Yancey
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Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands.
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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I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win God may indeed keep track of how well we 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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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
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If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.
Philip Yancey
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I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will make sense only in reverse.
Philip Yancey
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Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into alignment.
Philip Yancey