Os Guinness > Quotes

“The reason is that in the Christian view of life, there is always a vital tension between what is immediate and what is ultimate. The immediate, which is formed by our present circumstances and our short-term prospects, may sometimes be horrific. We may be suffering a job loss, a health crisis, a public scandal, the death of a child or a close friend, or a Job-like combination of disasters. But however bad the immediate, the ultimate is always hopeful, and in the tension between the immediate and the ultimate lies the possibility of the resilience of faith.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“The same understanding of desire blazes in St. Augustine, fanned by his own experience of passionately searching for God. The Christian life itself is “holy desire.” Commenting on the Epistle of John, he writes, That which you desire you do not yet see; but by desiring you become capable of being filled by that which you will see when it comes. For just as in filling a leather bag . . . one stretches the skin . . . and by stretching it becomes capable of more; so God by deferring that for which we long, stretched our desire; as desire increases it stretches the mind, and by stretching, makes it more capable of being filled.28”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“To believe in Jesus is to bow twice and then to obey forever,”
― Os Guinness, Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization

“But there is no McTheory when it comes to persuasion. There is no such thing as McApologetics, though it is significant that the nearest one-size-fits-all approach—the Four Spiritual Laws—was also created at the same time and in the same place as the first flourishing of McDonald’s as we know it and the first theme park run by Walt Disney: 1950s California.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“For example, a good deal of what appears as generous philanthropy is really the fruit of prideful self-love disguised as generosity and reaching out for the validation of public approval and social esteem—and in the process creating enormous social benefits.12 It “gives to get” as a matter of an unspoken contract, rather than “giving because given to,” which is the expression of true charity.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Man’s love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“There are striking examples of the same thing in our own day. For example, the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Today, we know that in the era of the Internet, focused attention has become the rarest commodity in the world. Everyone is speaking, no one is listening, and the resulting familiarity breeds inattention. It is therefore difficult to break through the many levels of resistance and make fresh sense to people.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Does meaning matter? Philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s cheap dismissal is often quoted, “Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians.)”2 But that of course is too cynical. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life,” Carl Gustav Jung claimed.3 Anthropologist Clifford Geertz agreed. “The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more biological needs.”4 But if meaning is so important, what accounts for the striking carelessness in pursuing it?”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“God is his own best apologist.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.”
― Os Guinness, A Free People's Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future

“Outrage is appropriate in response to genuine wrong, tears in response to grief, shock in response to unexpected disaster. We mustn’t force ourselves to thank God for these things or we will be harder on ourselves and softer on evil than God is. It is not that even Christians need not give thanks for these things, but that Christians especially should not give thanks for them. We should always be as human as God made us.”
― Os Guinness, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt

“one of the more unfortunate side effects is that much apologetics has lost touch with evangelism and come to be all about “arguments,” and in particular about winning arguments rather than winning hearts and minds and people. Our urgent need today is to reunite evangelism and apologetics, to make sure that our best arguments are directed toward winning people and not just winning arguments, and to seek to do all this in a manner that is true to the gospel itself.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Life, if only we attended to it more closely, raises prompts, pointers, clues, hints, epiphanies, all exclaiming that our here-and-now world is simply not all there is. There is a reality beyond the immediate that beckons toward a deeper and ultimate meaning of things, whatever it may be.”
― Os Guinness, The Great Quest: Invitation to an Examined Life and a Sure Path to Meaning

“A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.”
― Os Guinness

“Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.”
― Os Guinness

“The fact is that without God, we cannot know God. For a start, we are incapable of knowing God by ourselves, so he has to disclose himself—in revelation. But beyond that, God is a person and not an object, so if we are to know him, he must keep on showing himself to us—in relationship. Knowing God therefore begins and ends with God, and it is a gift whose name is grace.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“Disciples are not so much those who follow as those who must follow.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“To see apologetics only as technique is an insult to the gospel and to the high importance of what God is saying and doing in Jesus. From the humblest pun to the greatest double entendre of all time—the incarnation—the Bible is full of stories, parables, drama, ploys and jests that serve the ultimate purpose of the gospel and are shaped by the truth and logic of the message of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“As always, contrast is the mother of clarity, and the differences between the answers make a difference—and make a difference not only for individuals but for whole societies and civilizations.”
― Os Guinness, Carpe Diem Redeemed: Seizing the Day, Discerning the Times

“The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.”
― Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy's Plot to Undermine the Church

“Professionalism embodies the power to prescribe. Today it is the key to determining need, defining clients, delivering solutions, and deepening dependency—whether in healing identity, rebuilding inner cities, dispensing public opinion, or planting churches among baby boomers. The result, however, is not necessarily greater freedom and responsibility for ordinary people, because the dominance of the expert means the dependency of the client. All that has changed is the type of authority. Traditional authorities, such as the clergy, have been replaced by modern authorities—in this case, denominational leaders by church-growth experts. The outcome is what Christopher Lasch calls “paternalism without a father” and Ivan Illich “the age of disabling professions.”[1] The suggestion is that “The expert knows best,” so “we can do better.” But the “ministry of all believers” recedes once again. Even the dream of the “self-help” movement becomes a radical chic illusion that disguises the gold rush of experts in its wake. In most cases, all that has changed is the type of clergy. The old priesthood is dead! Long live the new power-pastors and pundit-priests!”
― Os Guinness, Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity

“On the one hand, for each of us, sin is the claim to the right to myself, and so to my way of seeing things, which—far more than class, gender, race and generation—is the ultimate source of human relativity. On the other hand, sin is the deliberate repudiation of God and the truth of his way of seeing things. If my way of seeing things is decisive, anyone who differs from me is wrong by definition—including God. No,”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“With the ability to produce more goods than people need, consumer capitalism has to make children into consumers earlier and keep them at it longer. Hence contemporary America, a culture of perennial adolescents.”
― Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy's Plot to Undermine the Church

“the Enlightenment’s belief in continuous improvement and advance is no longer credible. It has stalled, and it did nothing to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust, the world wars, and the genocides in the twentieth century. Whether the progress hoped for was for human advance in general or the dream of economic betterment in particular, the evident frustration and cynicism in the younger generation stem from their bitter conclusion: The promised future may not be better than the past, yet the term progressive is still flaunted as self-evident.”
― Os Guinness, Carpe Diem Redeemed: Seizing the Day, Discerning the Times

“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.”
― Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life

“Either we serve the unconditional / Or some Hitlerian monster will supply / An iron convention to do evil by.”
― Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

“we may observe several things in the early church that we have forgotten, distorted or misunderstood to our loss—supremely the position and power of the Holy Spirit—and we should always be quick to learn from them and gain from such rediscoveries. But as a period neither that age, nor any other age before our own, is the decisive model or standard for us. The only perfect model and the sole decisive standard is Jesus himself—his character, his teaching, his commands and his endorsement of the authority of the Scriptures to his followers.”
― Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

“The West is cutting off its Jewish and Christian roots and destroying the entire root system of its culture,”
― Os Guinness, Impossible People: Christian Courage and the Struggle for the Soul of Civilization