Philip Yancey Grace Quotations

Grace is heartfelt, tinged with love, a spillover gift of the God who extended undeserved favor toward us.

If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.

Grace is a free gift of God, but to receive a gift you must have open hands.

... learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

Christians fail to communicate to others because we ignore basic principles in relationship. When we make condescending judgments or proclaim lofty words that don't translate into action, or simply speak without first listening, we fail to love - and thus deter a thirsty world from Living Water. The good news about God's grace goes unheard.

Often, it seems, we're [Christians] perceived more as guilt dispensers than as grace dispensers.

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more . . . And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less

Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away.

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

We respond to healing grace by giving it away.

Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God.

The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people... Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God.

Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.

Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.

Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.

The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others.

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.

The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

We are all trophies of God's grace, some more dramatically than others; Jesus came for the sick and not the well, for the sinner and not the righteous. He came to redeem and transform, to make all things new. May you go forth more committed than ever to nourish the souls who you touch, those tender lives who have sustained the enormous assaults of the universe. (pp.88)

I would far rather convey grace than explain it.

The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace.

Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.

Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.

Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.

Whatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority, that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.

... the core problem with Christians communicating faith: we do not always do so in love. That is an indispensable point to presenting faith in a grace-full way.

One who has been touched by grace will no longer look on those who stray as "those evil people" or "those poor people who need our help." Nor must we search for signs of "loveworthiness." Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.

In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

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.