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Philip Yancey confesses affair, retires from ministry · The Daily Article

• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good morning, and welcome to Dinnison Forms Daily Article Podcast.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's Thursday, January 8th, 2026.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Connor Jones, co-host of the Culture Brief Podcast here at Dinnison Form, filling in for Chris Elkins and narrating today's daily article, authored by our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Jim Dinnison.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I close yesterday's daily article with Philopiante's quote, Grace like water flows to the lowest part.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had no idea at the time that his statement would be so relevant to his personal life.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have followed Nancy's work for years, and consider him one of the most thoughtful and authentic writers in the Evangelical world.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was therefore devastating to learn yesterday that he had engaged in an affair with a married woman for eight years and is now retiring from writing and speaking.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: In an emailed statement to Christianity today, an outlet for which he is written for decades, he confessed the affair and added, I am now focused on rebuilding trust and restoring my marriage of 55 years.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Having disqualified myself from Christian ministry, I'm therefore retiring from writing, speaking, and social media.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, I need to spend my remaining years living up to the words I have already written.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I pray for God's grace and forgiveness, as well as yours, and for healing in the lives of those I've wounded.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: His prayer highlights one side of the Christian life.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The amazing grace about witch antsy wrote so often.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tim Keller famously wrote in his book The Reason for God, belief in an age of skepticism that the Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Yancy's confession also points to a dangerous downside of evangelical faith as many understand it.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think of history as an hourglass laying on its side.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story begins with cosmos, expansive beyond our imagining, and created by the God who pronounced it very good in Genesis 131.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It narrows to the human race, then to one nation within that race, then to one surviving part of that nation, then to one teenage girl and her newborn child.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: When this child grows to adulthood, the story begins to expand again to 12 disciples, to 120 believers in an upper room, to 3,000 baptized souls.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: To a movement that expanded to include Samaritans in Acts 8, Gentiles in Acts 10, the West, as well as the East in Acts 16, and ultimately the ends of the Earth in Acts 28.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today, this movement numbers more than 2 billion believers living in virtually every nation on Earth.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a movement fueled by the divine grace that forgives all we confess and saves our souls for eternity.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: For many evangelicals, this is how the story ends.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now we try our best to do our best, and we confess our sins when we fail, all the while waiting for heaven and the day our struggle is done.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But God's ultimate purpose is not just that all people might be forgiven and granted eternal life with Him in heaven.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is that flourishing and beauty with which God began our story might become our story once more.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: To this end, he does not just part in our sins, he remakes our very nature.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: John 112 and 33 tell us that when we are born again, we become children of God.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second Corinthians 517 declares we are a new creation as the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: As God's recreated children, we are intended to demonstrate our father's spiritual genetics.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Galatians 522 through 23 tells us that his spirit works to manifest his fruit, the character of Christ, and our character.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not that we try harder to be more like Jesus.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is that Jesus makes us like himself.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a new concept.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Theosis, the belief that Christ is working to make us like himself, has been central to some theological worldviews for centuries.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oswald Chambers gave it full and practical expression when he asserted, quote, sanctification is an impartation, not an imitation.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The one secret of a holy life lies not an imitating Jesus, but in letting his perfections manifest themselves in my physical body.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jesus gives me His patience, His love, His holiness, His faith, His purity, and His godliness.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: All these are manifested in and through every sanctified soul.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sanctification isn't drawing the power to be holy from Jesus, and strongness is holiness from Him.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's having the very same holiness that was manifested in Him manifested in me, in quote.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I recently found a Him by the 19th century Irish Anglican priest George Crawley that gave me new insight.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: quote, Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, ween it from sin, though all its pulses move.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stoop to my weakness, mighty as you are, and make me love you as I ought to love.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had not thought about asking God to make me love you as I ought to love, since our father honors the free will with which he created us in his image, how can he make me love him or anyone else?
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: but then I realized.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If I exercise my free will to ask him to change my free will in my heart, he does not violate my freedom in answering my prayer.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Such a prayer is not only theologically permissible, it is spiritually essential.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Henry Newwind warned, quote, anyone who wants to fight his demon with his own weapons is a fool, end quote.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when we ask Jesus to change our hearts, He transforms us into our best selves as we fulfill His perfect will for our lives.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is because He now lives His life in and through ours as we experience the risen Christ Himself.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: As declared in Galatians 220, Colossians 127 and 1st John 1-1-4.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our father wants to be as real to us in this world as he will be in the next.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the greatest need of the human heart.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: To experience personally the God who made us and made us for himself.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, as St. Augustine testified personally, our hearts are restless until they rest in him.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than anything else, we want and need to know that God is real.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we learn that he is real when he becomes real in us.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Philip Eonsie can fall into sin that devastates his marriage and his ministry, so can I.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So can you.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's therefore use his confession as a call to seek the moral and spiritual transformation only Christ can affect in our lives.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's take time even now to pray.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Make me love you as I ought to love.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let's do whatever the Spirit leads us to do as we partner with Him in answering our prayer and manifesting the character of our Lord.
• 6:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Teach me to feel that you are always nigh.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Teach me the patience of unseizing prayer.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Teach me to love you as your angels love.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: One holy passion filling all my frame.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fullness of the heaven descended dove.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: My heart and altar, and your love, the flame.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is your heart his altar yet today?