Philip Yancey Quotes

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

If we are to be ready for Jesus Christ, we have to stop being religious (that is, using religion as a higher kind of culture) and be spiritually real.

A truly religious man does not embrace a religion; and he who embraces one has no religion.

Religious people love to hide behind religion. They love the rules of religion more than they love Jesus. With practice, Condemners let rules become more important than the spiritual life.

There is no question but that if Jesus Christ, or a great prophet from another religion, were to come back today, he would find it virtually impossible to convince anyone of his credentials despite the fact that the vast evangelical machine on American television is predicated on His imminent return among us sinners.

I live in a country where 90 or 95 percent of the people profess to be religious, and maybe they are religious, though my experience of religion suggests that very few people are actually religious in more than a conventional sense.

You've been acting like Jesus owes you a favor, but he's a little smart for you to fool.

We are too ready to imagine that we are religious, because we know something of religion. We appropriate to ourselves the pious sentiments we read, and we talk as if the thoughts of other men's heads were really the feelings of our own hearts. But piety has not its seat in the memory, but in the affections, for which however the memory is an excellent purveyor, though a bad substitute.

The likeness we bear to Jesus is more essential than our notions of him.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

The Church can't be a religious theater where paid men perform for the religious amusement of the people who pay them.

The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He's pretty interested in the poor, he's pretty interested in selling your worldly goods and storing up riches in heaven. However, religious fundamentalists have made it all about sex, and that's like saying, "Look at the sex and we're just not going to talk about what you may be doing in a financial way that is sinful."

The rabbis, the Jewish religious people, the priests of the temple of Jerusalem, they were learned fools. They could not tolerate Jesus. The learned fools are always disturbed by the blessed fools. They had to murder him because his very presence was uncomfortable; his very presence was such a pinnacle of peace, love, compassion and light, that all the learned fools became aware that their whole being was at stake. If this man lived then they were fools, and the only way to get rid of this man was to destroy him so they could. again become the learned people of the race.

The greatest enemy to the movement of Jesus Christ is Christianity.

Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.

I love Jesus. I just don't like the Christians who don't believe in what he says.

The Christian Church overwhelmingly - there are exceptions - who choose to call Muhammad a terrorist. They could call Jesus a terrorist too. I mean, he was pretty tough on money lenders a time or two.

A week filled up with selfishness, and the Sabbath stuffed full of religious exercises, will make a good Pharisee, but a poor Christian. There are many persons who think Sunday is a sponge with which to wipe out the sins of the week. Now, God's altar stands from Sunday to Sunday, and the seventh day is no more for religion than any other. It is for rest. The whole seven are for religion, and one of them for rest.

We are to work after no set fashion of high endeavor; but to walk with Jesus, performing, as it were, a ministry on foot, that we may stop at the humblest matter, and prove our fidelity there.

Did Christ finish His work for us? Then there can be no doubt but He will also finish His work in us.

I am a Muslim, because it's a religion that teaches you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It teaches you to respect everybody, and treat everybody right. But it also teaches you if someone steps on your toe, chop off their foot. And I carry my religious axe with me all the time.

The Frier preached against stealing, and had a goose in his sleeve.

Why do those who keep insisting Jesus hung out with sinners also keep insisting there's no such thing as sin?

One would like to believe that people who think of themselves as devout Christians would also behave in a manner that is in according with Christian ethics. But pastorally and existentially, I know that this is not the case, and never has been.

E have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.