Quotes about Power
Politics deals with externals: borders, wealth, crimes. Authentic forgiveness deals with the evil in a person's heart, something for which politics has no cure.
— Philip Yancey
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
Can we live now "as if " God is loving, gracious, merciful, and all-powerful, even while the blinders of time are obscuring our vision? The prophets proclaim that history will be determined not by the past or present, but by the future.
— Philip Yancey
When the church joined with the state, it tended to wield power rather than dispense grace.
— Philip Yancey
When the church has occasion to set the rules for all society, it often veers toward the extremism
— Philip Yancey
sacrificial love is one of the most powerful weapons in the Christian's arsenal of grace.
— Philip Yancey
She did not question God's supernatural power, but how to go about convincing God of her sincerity? Faith wasn't like a muscle that could be enlarged through rehabilitation exercises.
— Philip Yancey
many such episodes it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Christian experiments with church-state blending, whether in Geneva under Calvin or in Spain and Latin America under the Inquisition, may have worked for a time but inevitably provoked a backlash against the church, such as that seen in secular Europe today.*
— Philip Yancey
It is difficult, if not impossible, to communicate the message of grace from the corridors of power.
— Philip Yancey
Our society arbitrarily defines health as the capacity for work and the capacity for enjoyment, but "true health is something quite different. True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die. Health is not a condition of my body; it is the power of my soul to cope with the varying condition of that body.
— Philip Yancey
Grace has its own power, even in international politics.
— Philip Yancey
The church has allowed itself to get so swept up in political issues that it plays by the rules of adversarial power. In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square. Somehow the paramount command to love—even to love our enemies—gets lost.
— Philip Yancey