Quotes from Philip Yancey

The healthiest body is the one that feels the pain of its weakest parts.

Our best efforts at changing society will fall short unless the church can teach the world how to love.

God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it?

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten—a principle that applies to nations as well as individuals.

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.

The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.

One prominent spiritual leader insists, "The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform." Could he have that backwards?

Sometimes God seemed as close as his wife or children. Sometimes he had no sense of God's presence, no faith to lean on. God is wild, you know, he wrote. We're not in charge.

He lambastes Catholics. He opposes the J. B. Phillips version of the Bible because Phillips had a friendship with C. S. Lewis, who drank beer and smoked a pipe.

For people who have long-term disabilities, one of the best things we can do is to provide tools that allow them to resume "normal" activity.

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?

Who helped you most? Most often they (suffering people) answer by describing a quiet, unassuming person. Someone who was there whenever needed, who listened more than talked, who didn't keep glancing down at a watch, who hugged and touched, and cried. In short, someone who was available, and came on the sufferer's terms and not their own.