Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud
Philip Yancey
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.”
“Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.”
“Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”
“Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.”
“One bold message in the Book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contending with God. They prefer to go away limping, like Jacob, rather than to shut God out. In this respect, the Bible prefigures a tenet of modern psychology: you can’t really deny your feelings or make them disappear, so you might as well express them. God can deal with every human response save one. He cannot abide the response I fall back on instinctively: an attempt to ignore him or treat him as though he does not exist. That response never once occurred to Job.”
“Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no opportunity for faith either.”
“Why the delay? Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet?...He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the center of his plan...the motive behind all human history, is to develop us, not God. Our very existence announces to the powers in the universe that restoration is under way. Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, and a faith like Job's reverberates throughout the universe.”
“We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the “real” world and the unseen world as the “unreal” world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite.”
“True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will.”
“Some people find no comfort in the prophets’ vision of a future world. “The church has used that line for centuries to justify slavery, oppression, and all manner of injustice,” they say. The criticism sticks because the church has abused the prophets’ vision. But you will never find that “pie in the sky” rationale in the prophets themselves. They have scathing words about the need to care for widows and orphans and aliens, and to clean up corrupt courts and religious systems. The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.”
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Book Keywords:
philip-yancey, love, faith, disappointment, god, true-faith, good-versus-evil, job, faith-and-doubt, disappointments
