evangelical 360°
A timely and relevant new podcast that dives into the contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life and witness around the world. Guests include leaders, writers, and influencers, all exploring faith from different perspectives and persuasions. Inviting lively discussion and asking tough questions, evangelical 360° is hosted by Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. Our hope is that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and inspired!
evangelical 360°
Ep. 29 / From Religious Trauma to Spiritual Liberation ► Philip Yancey (Part 1)
Philip Yancey opens his heart and shares the painful journey that shaped his spiritual life in this riveting conversation about his memoir "When the Light Fell." With unflinching honesty, he recounts growing up in a fundamentalist community that opposed movies, bowling alleys, roller skating—and openly preached racism from the pulpit during the civil rights era.
The raw vulnerability of Yancey's story emerges as he describes his father's death from polio after being removed from an iron lung against medical advice, based on misguided faith expectations. This tragedy left his mother a struggling widow who placed enormous spiritual pressure on her sons to fulfill her dashed missionary dreams—eventually leading to a 52-year estrangement between her and Philip's brother.
What makes this conversation particularly powerful is Yancey's explanation of how he emerged from these wounds not as a cynical critic of Christianity, but as one of its most thoughtful voices. He shares a supernatural vision that unexpectedly transformed his perspective during his most skeptical period, revealing how grace broke through his intellectual barriers. "I wasn't trying to really meet God at the time," Yancey confesses, "I happened to be in the middle of a Bible college which I was scornful of...and God met me."
The heart of this episode explores how healthy faith communities foster healing while toxic ones create wounds. Yancey draws from his decades of writing about suffering and grace to explain how church communities should function as extensions of "the God of all comfort and the Father of compassion." For those struggling with religious trauma, his journey offers hope that even the harshest religious upbringing need not determine one's spiritual future.
This conversation invites listeners to examine their own understanding of grace—what Yancey describes as the recognition that, "there's nothing I can do to make God love me more...and nothing I can do to make God love me less." His story demonstrates how God often woos us through unexpected channels like natural beauty, music, and love rather than through fear and judgment.
You can learn more from Philip Yancey through his website and books and you can find him on Facebook.
And don't forget to share this episode using hashtag #Evangelical360 and join the conversation online!
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Hello and welcome to Evangelical 360. I'm your host, brian Stiller, and I'm pleased to share with you another conversation with leaders, changemakers and influencers having an impact on Christian life around the world. Makers and influencers having an impact on Christian life around the world. We'd love for you to be a part of the podcast by sharing this episode using hashtag Evangelical360 and by joining the conversation on YouTube in the comments below. My guest today is Philip Yancey, author of some 25 books with over 15 million copies worldwide. His recent memoir, titled when the Life Fell, shares the experience of a painful upbringing, one I'd have thought would shut anyone out from an inclination to faith, and yet it didn't. This raw and honest account of a troubled childhood is a powerful testimony of how, in growing up, the past need not be the final definer of our future. This episode is the first of a two-part conversation, so be sure to join us for the next episode. Philip, so wonderful to have you today on Evangelical 360.
Philip Yancey:That's great, and I brought my Commonwealth mug as solidarity. It'll keep me awake. It's still early morning here.
Brian Stiller:Well, Philip, as I was driving in this morning, I remembered when I first met you I was in the mid-70s, I guess, at the Youth for Christ office in the US in Wheaton, and I went downstairs and I saw this frizzy-haired kid who was on Campus Life staff and that's where we first met and over these years we've so appreciated your insights, your writing, and your book when the Light Fell is a remarkable account of your own personal journey that many, many will identify with, and so today, thank you for this opportunity of engaging with you on this account, this memoir that you put together looking on your life and how faith shaped it. It's a pretty raw account of your life and I cringed as I read it and wondered how in the world you were able to survive that intense fundamentalism of your upbringing.
Philip Yancey:Well, I waited a long time.
Philip Yancey:Some of those stories I had not told, even though I've been writing for 50 years, and part of the reason was you hurt people when you write about them, and I had some stories from the past.
Philip Yancey:And then finally, I decided the time has come and I need to explain, because there are a lot of people, as you know, brian, who carry wounds from the church.
Philip Yancey:The church doesn't always do it right, and sometimes I'll run into people and they'll tell me oh yeah, I used to be in young life, I used to go to summer camps. And then they'll tell me a story about how the church handled their parents when they went through a divorce or maybe a homosexual son or daughter, and I experienced a church that was usually, in almost every case, much more severe and wounding than their church. And I'll explain my story and say what I learned was you don't want to forfeit an opportunity to have a relationship with the God of the universe, the God who created this planet, because of the way some church treated your parents 30 years ago. That's not a good trait, and so God has blessed me with. There were dark times in the past, but then there have been many bright times and a time of healing, and I felt it was finally time for me to try to put that together.
Brian Stiller:As you were beginning the process of writing when the Light Fell. What was your expectation that this book would produce? This memoir? Was it a way for you working through the upbringing of your life and how that resolves itself into a fairly mature faith? Or was it an explanation to others who were also experiencing the sharp edge of fundamentalism?
Philip Yancey:It started, Brian, because I was reading a lot of memoirs and they were fascinating. So some great books like Angela's.
Philip Yancey:Ashes tells the story of a young boy growing up in poverty in the west coast of Ireland, or the books by Chaim Potok tells about growing up Orthodox Jewish. The books by Chaim Potok tell us about growing up Orthodox Jewish and I was part of a subculture that was just as empowering and just as overwhelming and that was in my case. It was Southern fundamentalism and you and I both shared kind of the broader evangelical subculture. I had a very harsh niche in it and I wanted to capture what that was like, because people today, when I talk about a church that opposed all movies, that opposed going to bowling because it might serve alcohol, that opposed roller skating because it looked like dancing, you know, they would say what are you talking?
Philip Yancey:about. And yet it was there and we lived through it, and not only were those kind of trivial things, there were some big things like racism. The church I went to was just openly racist, from the pulpit they would call. I lived in Atlanta and our main citizen, our major citizen, was Martin Luther King Jr. Main citizen, our major citizen, was Martin Luther King Jr, and they would call him Martin Lucifer Kuhn derogatory remark.
Philip Yancey:And so I had to go through a period of sorting out what is worth keeping from that church because there were many good things and what do I need to discard and grow through, and that's really what I wanted to do. You run into people all the time these days who talk about deconstructing their faith, and I guess that's what I was doing. You run into people all the time these days who talk about deconstructing their faith, and I guess that's what I was doing. Although we didn't use the word at the time, it was bit by bit, trying to take apart my faith and ask myself, as I do in my books, that's what I have been doing for 50 years what is worth keeping, what is the essential, what do we need to cling to, and what are these little cultural things that we let kind of accrete onto us, and how can I grow out of that?
Brian Stiller:It seems that your mother had enormous expectations for you, in terms of both how you behaved and what you believed, as you recall. How did you sort that out so that you weren't caught in the vice of her own demands?
Philip Yancey:Oh, family systems. We all have them, don't we?
Philip Yancey:And my mother had a raw deal. She had a rough start. She married a sailor in World War II. In fact he was sailing through the Panama Canal when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and within days armistice with Japan and the Pacific was finally declared. And he came back and they were devout Christians. They wanted to be missionaries in Africa. They raised support. They had several thousand people back in the 1950s on their mailing list.
Philip Yancey:And then my father came down overnight with polio and was completely paralyzed. He spent the next two months in an iron lung at a charity hospital in Atlanta and it was the only hospital really that had iron lungs. But they didn't give good care. You could yell all day and a nurse may or may not appear. He couldn't do anything. He couldn't read, he couldn't hold a book. His arms were paralyzed inside the iron lung. Somebody had to feed him. He couldn't even feed himself. So I mentioned doing that for two months just staring at the ceiling. And my mother, of course, was desperate. She had two young children I was the younger one and people thought, well, if they're going to be missionaries in Africa, surely God wouldn't take them at a time like this? And so they believed that God would heal my father from polio and, against all medical advice, they removed him from the iron lung and he lived for about nine days more and then finally died.
Philip Yancey:And I grew up with the result of that, the consequences of that act of faith. They wanted God to heal him, but what I learned looking back, Brian, is that not everyone who claims to speak for God does so. These were people who weren't against him. They were for him.
Philip Yancey:They wanted him to be healed.
Philip Yancey:But they took a prerogative that we don't have to decide who's going to be healed miraculously and who is not. That's really God's domain and God's decision. But it left her with a history of poverty. She had no real education, a few I think. She had a year of Bible college, but nothing more than that, had never written a check, didn't know how to drive a car, and we started moving around from place to place because many times somebody will offer you a deal the first year and then raise the rent the second year and then raise the rent the second year, and she would just bounce from one to the other until finally we lived in a trailer, a mobile home, a very small thing, not a pleasant environment, and she wanted us to kind of redeem that loss, the loss of her husband, and literally to replace him as a missionary in Africa, and she staked everything on that.
Philip Yancey:The advantage I had, I guess you would say, is that I could see my mother and brother kind of duking it out because he was feisty and they would get into all sorts of arguments and fights, and I learned not to do that but just to kind of stay on the side and watch what was going on Not to do that, but just to kind of stay on the side and watch what was going on, and that stance of being on the side observing others did well for me later as a writer. That's what we do we just watch life going on and write about it and learn from it, and it became a toxic environment. In fact, at one point during the 1960s, when my brother was rebelling, dropped out of school, started using LSD and there was a confrontation and she said something like I never want to see you again as long as I live, and she didn't. For 52 years after that they never saw each other.
Philip Yancey:And they only heard each other's voice during that last year when I got them on a three-way phone call Unhealthy environment for sure. And part of it came from her intense devotion. She believed, like Hannah, in the Bible. She believed my son is going to be a priest, my son is going to be a missionary. And she was wrong. My brother never did. And she was wrong, my brother never did. And she didn't really acknowledge what I do, writing about my faith, as replacing that. You know, I would tell her well, I've been to Africa my books are there right now and many other countries as well. But she didn't take that. She had her own assumption about what God's will was for me and wouldn't butch from that. That's what it was for me.
Philip Yancey:It wouldn't budge from that.
Brian Stiller:What is there about faith, Philip, that can lead to such harsh fundamentalism?
Philip Yancey:I think it's the story of the Pharisees. When I wrote the book the Jesus, I Never Knew. I did a lot of research and as I studied the Pharisees I thought, you know they are always cast in kind of a negative light in the Gospels, but actually they were good people. They studied the law, they were upright, they were moral. You know they didn't fall for a lot of the problems that the church has over the years, but yet Jesus was always angry with them.
Philip Yancey:If you look at passages like Matthew 23 or Luke 11, you'll never see.
Philip Yancey:Jesus more angry. What was he so upset about? And I think what he was upset was that they were grace deniers. Jesus told the story of the Pharisee and the publican. And the Pharisee had this great prayer, saying oh, thank you, lord, that I'm not like that publican over there, the tax collector. And then the tax collector had one little simple prayer God, help me, be merciful to me, I'm a sinner. And Jesus said which prayer will God answer? And it's pretty clear what the answer was to that riddle the person who comes admitting a need.
Philip Yancey:I remember the day I spent a full day with Henry Nowlin up in La Arche in the Toronto area and he said to me grace is a free gift, absolutely free. There's nothing you can do to earn it, but you have to have your hands out. And if you hold your hands out you'll receive that gift. But so many people, like the Pharisees, would have their hands in a tight grasp like a fist and, as a result, grace falls to the ground. And that's what we tend to do. We want to look moral, we want to earn our way. We want God to like us. We want to look moral, we want to earn our way. We want God to like us. We want God to love us more. And so we come up with these rules that we're more strict than you are, we're more holy than you are.
Philip Yancey:And Jesus said you missed the whole point. You tied your kitchen spices, you know 10% of the salt and pepper and cumin and all that goes to the church, but you let these huge issues of racism and injustice and these things go unannounced. The world sees that. The world's not attracted to it. We need to demonstrate our care about the big things, the things that Jesus cared about. It's the old story of the prodigal son, brian, the prodigal son, did everything wrong, but he's the hero of the Pharaoh because he came back and admitted I have messed up my life. It's the elder brother who never let go. He had his fist closed tight because I'm superior to my brother. I did right, I didn't squander my life like that, and so I must be okay. This is how I got God to like me, and you miss the whole message of grace as soon as you go down that path and you miss the whole message of grace as soon as you go down that path.
Brian Stiller:But it amazes me that out of that, the strictures of that fundamentalism, you emerged, not cynical or angry but very much spiritually therapeutic to many people's lives by telling your story and by understanding the scriptures and people like Paul Brand and the discovery of leprosy. How did you emerge to where you are today, given those early days?
Philip Yancey:I wasn't trying to really meet God at the time. I happened to be in the middle of a Bible college which I was scornful of.
Philip Yancey:And I took delight in sitting in the patio in full view of a Bible college which I was scornful of, and I took the light, and sitting in the patio in full view of people reading books like why I'm Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell or the Secular City by Harvey Cox, just to kind of stick it to them, these happy-faced Christians around me. And God met me. I tell the story. The story I really haven't told much. It's the story of a supernatural vision that just changed my life in one night.
Philip Yancey:And then, gradually, there was a long process of healing. But God brought me first to my wife, the young woman who became my wife, who she's a social worker and I joke with her that I was her first project because she was willing to take me on and try to restore me to some semblance of health. And then I had great days at Youth for Christ. Right, I think you did too. It was just a swashbuckling organization that gave us probably more freedom than we deserve, but it was full of humor and fun and just a healthy kind of christianity.
Philip Yancey:And then I as a journalist, I started meeting people and profiling them and exploring their lives and god just brought me in contact with some of the healthiest people out there. And you mentioned dr paul and I've lectured several places in Canada on tours about him. I know he's loved by Canadians and here was a man who was brilliant as far as any man I know. He was offered the position to be head of orthopedics at Oxford University or at Stanford University and he turned them down to work among the lowest people on the entire planet and those would be people in India, in the lower castes. In his days they were called untouchables, the Dalits now, who had leprosy kicked out of their own village, kicked out of their home, just living off in a pile of rocks somewhere. And he discovered things about the leprosy that really remade them as human beings, restored their dignity.
Philip Yancey:And here I started off thinking oh, I think I'll be a reporter. That way I can write these articles about shysters and crooks and expose them. And this was the era of Watergate, when Woodard and Bernstein were showing us what investigative reporters could do. And instead I decided no, I really want to be around people who can teach me how I should be, what kind of person I should be.
Philip Yancey:And I had the example of my brother who was kind of the prodigal son who still hasn't come home yet, who was kind of the prodigal son who still hasn't come home yet, and he would rebel against the church we grew up in and try to break every rule that the church came up with and succeeded pretty well, became addicted to just about anything you can get addicted to, and I saw the self-destructive path that he was on. I didn't want to go there, I wasn't tempted, and then God graciously just brought these people into my life. That showed me what healthy Christianity looks like, and I often hear from parents and grandparents who say what can I do? I can't believe for my children. I tried my best, we tried to find a healthy church, and what?
Philip Yancey:can I do, and in terms of my brother.
Philip Yancey:What I do is just pray, dear God, bring into my brother's life healthy Christians so that he can't deny that they care about him. He doesn't know why they care about him, but they do, and of course we know why. Because Jesus said, said go out and find people like that and show them God's care, god's love. And that's been happening in my brother's life. He is surrounded by healthy Christians who he can call at any hour of the day or night when a problem comes up. He's disabled and he needs help from the outside. He hasn't come back to God. That's his choice. But what we can do is pray. Surround my son, my daughter, my grandchild, surround them with people who truly do show something of the healthy side of the life that you brought. Jesus said I came to bring abundant life, life to the fullest Not a half-life, but a full life. And the people I've grown to know and admire and have written about are people who have that full life.
Brian Stiller:Let me just cycle back to something you said a moment ago that there was a particular moment in your life where you had this visitation from God, some kind of supernatural moment, and I'm wondering what that was and how critical that was for the emergence of your life out of your childhood.
Philip Yancey:Yes, I told it in detail, and I hadn't done that before in my writing, because whenever you give a personal testimony, then people will say well, that never happened to me.
Philip Yancey:And it's true, I had an unexpected and even unsought and undesired encounter with God. That was a kind of vision. I was on this team where we were supposed to go to a university and witness about our faith and I was in that cynical period of my life and I would go and watch basketball games on the student lounge. I didn't witness about my faith, I didn't really have faith at the time, but I was with a group of people who were fairly supportive. They could have turned me in, you know, and got me in trouble with the deans, but they didn't do that.
Philip Yancey:We had a prayer meeting every week and Joe and Chris and Craig would take turns praying. They would pause about five seconds to see, you know, to give me a time if I wanted to say something. Of course, I never did. I didn't really believe in prayer and then one day I started. I have no idea why. I just started praying. I said God, and the tension rose in the room because I had not done this before. And I said God, you know, we're supposed to care about these 10,000 students going to hell.
Philip Yancey:And.
Philip Yancey:I don't really care if they go to hell. And the tension really rose in the room and I said I don't care if I go to hell. And then I had a vision. I had a vision. It was the Good Samaritan story that Jesus taught. So here is a person lying in the ditch who had been beaten up, you know, accosted, robbed, and then there was a kind Good Samaritan who's leaning over that person. And I'd seen movies about Jesus, you know, we have these images in our mind.
Philip Yancey:And then as I stared at this kind of inner vision, I saw the face of Jesus in the one bending down and I was the person in the ditch and every time Jesus would bend down to help me I would spit in his face and it was kind of a shocking thing and I was talking about it aloud and I didn't know what to do with it.
Philip Yancey:And then, finally, I said Amen, amen and got up and left the room. But I couldn't get that vision out of my mind, and what it exposed to me was here.
Philip Yancey:I thought I was superior, intellectually superior to these, you know, these half-brained Christians around me. I was just a snob and that vision said no. Actually, philip, you're the neediest one of all and, as I learned from Henry Dow and years later, grace is free. God's grace is absolutely free. Powerful can cover everything, anything we've done, but to receive it you have to have your hands open. And for the first time, I saw myself as a needy beggar, the one who had hands open, ready to receive that forgiveness and God's grace that I desperately needed.
Brian Stiller:Philip, you have delved a lot into issues of pain and suffering and the overriding grace of the Lord. But for people who are in the midst of their own suffering, their own pain today, and look on to faith as maybe something of a cultural being, more cultural than personal, how does the gospel speak into their lives?
Philip Yancey:Yeah, that's a great question and the church is key there. I have a friend down at Duke University, harold Koenig is his name. He's a physician and he's been doing these surveys for years and he finds out that being attached to a church community and it doesn't necessarily have to be a Christian church, even it could be a strong Muslim community or Hindu or something else but being attached to that community truly increases your speed of recovery from an accident or from surgery and it actually lengthens your life and there's been a lot of research about that and it's just inescapable. It helps you live longer. How does that happen?
Philip Yancey:Well, we have these amazing healing properties built into our body. You know the doctors will tell you they're going to make you well, they don't make you well. Maybe they can put a bone back together so that you know this part fits that part, but the healing takes place in the bone itself. Your body is the one doing the healing and we've got some drugs and things that maybe help that along. But if your body's not healing, you're not going to heal.
Philip Yancey:And the best way to heal is to be free of the things that keep you from healing. And surveys will show if stress does that guilt, fear, anger. If you're lying there all day and hospitals kind of give the environment that encourage those things, you're afraid and angry and things aren't working right. But if you're in a church community that will surround you and say you know what, philip, don't worry about it. Taking care of your dog, we'll take care of your dog until you're back on your feet. Don't worry about meals. We've got this system in the church here where we can provide meals for you until you're feeling better. We can take you to the doctor and gradually all those things that I'm afraid of, that are causing stress, that are keeping me from healing, the church takes those away and that is the model that we're given in the gospel.
Philip Yancey:There's this beautiful phrase in 2 Corinthians 1, where Paul says he only uses two descriptions of God the God of all comfort and the Father of compassion.
Philip Yancey:I love those, the God of all comfort and the Father of compassion, and he says that we, we in the body of Christ that's the image he uses we are the ones who receive the comfort from God and take that comfort and spread it to other people.
Philip Yancey:We give it away and that's what we in the church should be doing. We should be looking around us in society, and especially in our own community, about people who are hurting, about people like my mother back when she didn't know where to turn. That's what the church should be doing and instead it's easy to think when things go wrong, well, that's God being against me. And I say just follow Jesus around If you want to know how God feels about what you're going through. Follow Jesus. Every time he was confronted with a person who needed healing, he responded with love and care and healing. And this business of God up there kind of sticking pins in us. I don't see that in the New Testament at all. God is the father of compassion, the God of all comfort, and we receive that comfort from him and then give it away to others in the body and outside the body as well.
Brian Stiller:Philip, as I've read most of your books and as I read when the Light Fell, it seems to me that one of your books what's so Amazing About Grace is a particular kind of insight that seems to flow out of your own life. That grace, applied into your own life, had marvelous therapy and healing for your own life. Take a moment to unwrap this notion of grace, how that affected your life and brought wholeness to your own growing up.
Philip Yancey:The original title for that book, Brian, was longer. It was what's so Amazing About Grace and why Don't Christians Show More of it? And my publisher said you know, a lot of books are given away as gifts and if somebody received that gift they might feel that's a targeted message. I said, well, that's all right.
Philip Yancey:And then they said well, yeah, but you can't get that many words on the spine of a book, Philip. I said okay, okay, we'll shorten it. And it became what somebody said about grace. But my concern was that Christians were not primarily known as people of grace. They were known as people of judgment and disapproving of you. And I start the book with this wrenching story of this prostitute who was in desperate need. She was telling me this story and I said well, did you ever think about going to church for help? And her shocked response was church. Why would I ever go by there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They would just make me feel worse, and that, unfortunately, is the image that a lot of people have of church. It's a place that makes you feel bad.
Philip Yancey:You're not measuring up.
Philip Yancey:And the story of grace is that foundationally. And the story of grace is that, foundationally, the reason there is a planet, the reason there are human beings, is because God is a God of love and God created us as objects of God's love, and that's one that I had missed.
Philip Yancey:So at one point I wrote in the book I can't really come up with a definition of grace that's easy to absorb, but there's something about it in these statements that there's nothing that I can do to make God love me more. No amount of I'm holier than thou or I'm stricter than that church down the road that doesn't make God love you more. God already loves you as much as an infant of God can do. God already loves you as much as an infant of God can do, and there's nothing that I can do to make God love me less. God already loves me and no matter what I do and the Bible is full of these examples people like Moses and David, who committed murder, and David also adultery, or, in the New Testament, peter and well, of course, judas betrayed, but Peter and betrayed Jesus as well, and Paul used to torture Christians.
Philip Yancey:They did these terrible things, but God's grace can come. There's nothing that you could do to make God love you less. God already loves you and that's not a truth that most people walk around being aware of that. I'm here because God loves me and anytime I'm ready to turn to God, god is there, willing to receive me. That's the story of the prodigal son and it's all the way through the Bible.
Brian Stiller:Philip in your memoir when the Light Fell. That's a metaphor. How did that come to you and how can people find light falling in their own lives today, especially people who are caught in depression or suffering or fear? How can they discover the light falling in their own life?
Philip Yancey:Yes, it varies person by person. Now, in my case, I grew up in a completely religious society. That was just oppressively. We would go to church probably five different times a week. It was one of those you never can get away from God kind of environments and it wasn't working for me. I was looking at the hypocrisy between what was being said and taught and the way people lived, and I didn't want to be like those people. I didn't know what I wanted to be like.
Philip Yancey:Looking at the hypocrisy between what was being said and taught and the way people lived, and I didn't want to be like those people.
Philip Yancey:I didn't know what I wanted to be like and in my case, when they looked at me as kind of a rebellious person, they said God's going to break you one day. God's going to crush you, God's going to make you regret the kind of attitude that you're showing now. And I kind of expected that. Actually I believed in that God of judgment, that harsh policeman, God in the sky, and that's not how God approached me. God wooed me and I say there were three things that really brought me back to faith and they were the beauties of nature when I was lonely, when I was needy, I would take a walk in the woods and I write about how that affected me and the beauties of music classical music. My brother was a great musician. I had a little practice in the piano and violin.
Philip Yancey:And then romantic love, those three things. And as I experienced those things, coming out of a harsh background, I realized that actually the world's a pretty nice place. Those are great things. And I came across a statement that GK Chesterton used to quote. He said the worst moment for an atheist is when he has a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank. And that's how I felt I was experiencing these good things. The light fell on those things nature and music and romantic love and I realized that that image of God as a policeman in the sky just waiting to crush people, that was a lie, that was not the message. And God tenderly brought me to himself, first by showing me not.
Philip Yancey:I didn't need scripture lessons, I didn't need gospel tracks. I was up to hear with them. There's no way they could reach me. But God used other ways and I don't know what it would be for a lot of people. You know there are a lot of grandchildren, excuse me. There are a lot of grandparents who look at their grandchildren. I say, well, they have no faith and that concerns me. And then they watch as they get older.
Philip Yancey:And just the birth of a baby for many people, the birth of a baby, this astonishing act where a new human being comes out of another human being. That's something that just arrests their attention. Or when you try to impart some values to a young person. Once again, where do the values come from? How do you decide? And I would just say for a person who wants to just start trying to figure things out, start with Jesus. Just read the Gospels, a simple Gospel like Mark, or a profound Gospel, like John. Just read them and just see. This is what God sent to us, to give us an idea of what we should be like as human beings and what God is like. And if that doesn't correct your image, nothing will, because that was God's gift to us to come and show us in person what we should be like and what God is like.
Brian Stiller:Philip, it's been wonderful having you here today. Thanks again for joining us on Evangelical 360.
Philip Yancey:Well, I'm glad to hear you're doing a podcast like this that reaches around the world, Brian, and it's great to reconnect after all these years.
Brian Stiller:Thank you, Philip, for joining us today and for sharing your personal journey and the power of working out one's beliefs, and thank you for being part of the podcast. Be sure to share this episode using hashtag Evangelical360 and join the conversation on YouTube. If you'd like to learn more about today's guest, be sure to check the show notes for links and info, and if you haven't already received my free ebook and newsletter, please go to brianstillercom. Thanks again, until next time.
Brian Stiller:Thanks again, until next time.