Study Guides by
Philip Yancey
3 discussion guides available
Where Is God When It Hurts?
Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? is one of the most honest and searching books ever written about pain and suffering from a Christian perspective. First published in 1977, it does not offer easy answers or tidy formulas. Instead, Yancey walks alongside the reader through some of the hardest questions human beings ever ask: Why does a good God allow suffering? Is pain a punishment? Can faith survive the worst that life brings? Drawing on medical science, personal stories, theology, and Scripture, Yancey argues that pain is not God's enemy — it is, in a strange and difficult way, one of his most important gifts — and that the real question is not "Why do I hurt?" but "What do I do with this hurt, and where is God in the middle of it?"
View Discussion GuideThe Jesus I Never Knew
Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew (1995) is a landmark work of popular Christian nonfiction in which Yancey — a self-described skeptic who came to faith slowly and painfully — sets out to strip away the stained-glass sentimentality surrounding Jesus and meet the real person of the Gospels. Yancey structures the book in three movements: who Jesus was (his birth, background, and character), what Jesus did and said (the Sermon on the Mount, miracles, parables, and the mounting collision with religious authorities), and what Jesus accomplished (the cross, resurrection, and ongoing presence in the world). His central thesis is disarmingly simple: the Jesus of the Gospels is far more dangerous, surprising, and grace-filled than the domesticated figure many of us learned about in Sunday school — and encountering him honestly changes everything. Yancey draws on an extraordinarily wide range of sources, from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., from film portrayals of Jesus to modern Middle Eastern politics, to illuminate a figure who defies every category his contemporaries tried to place him in.
View Discussion GuideWhat's So Amazing About Grace?
Philip Yancey opens What's So Amazing About Grace? with a question a friend once posed to him: "Why is it that Christians are known more for what they are against than for what they are for?" That question haunts the entire book. Yancey's thesis is both simple and scandalous: grace — God's love freely given to the undeserving — is the church's one great distinctive, the thing the world cannot manufacture and craves more than anything else. Yet Christians, of all people, often dispense ungrace with more ease than grace. Drawing on stories ranging from a prostitute dying in a Chicago alley to Gordon Wilson forgiving the IRA bombers who killed his daughter, Yancey presses us to ask what grace actually looks like when it walks out of the sanctuary and into the street.
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