The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
Philip YanceyRead
God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of community in embodying a divine image, suggesting that individual efforts are insufficient without collective unity.
Philip Yancey's quote highlights the profound idea that the divine image of God is reflected through the collective existence of ordinary people. Each individual's representation is limited and flawed, akin to a single fragment of a mirror; only when we come together as a diverse community can we form a complete and true image of God, showcasing the beauty of unity in diversity and the shared responsibility of believers to manifest this higher truth in the world.
Themes
CommunityDiversityImageGodCollectiveBelievers
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a sermon about the importance of fellowship in a church community.
More from Philip Yancey
All quotes →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.
Philip YanceyRead
In the stories of extravagant grace given to us by Jesus, there are no loopholes disqualifying us from God's love.
Philip YanceyRead
Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.
Philip YanceyRead
Prayer is to the skeptic a delusion, a waste of time. To the believer it represents perhaps the most important use of time.
Philip YanceyRead
We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.
Philip YanceyRead
Similar quotes
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
E. M. ForsterRead
I believe we face the question: if not now, then when? And if we are grasped by this vision, we may also hear the question: If not us, then who? And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?
N. T. WrightRead
At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Marcel DuchampRead
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
Jacob BronowskiRead
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe, but look only and surely at what are the facts.
Bertrand RussellRead