Os Guinness Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“I live before the audience of One-before others I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to prove.”
-- Os Guinness -
“What is undeniable is that when comforts and convenience sap our energies and idealism, inactivity secretes sloth in to our minds like a poison in the blood.”
-- Os Guinness -
“The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.”
-- Os Guinness -
“At the supreme moment of his dying Jesus so identified himself with men and the depths of their predicament and agony that no man can now sink so low that God has not gone lower.”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone.”
-- Os Guinness -
“The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Feast of Patrick, Bishop of Armagh, Missionary, Patron of Ireland, c.460 The evidence for Christian truth is not exhaustive, but it is sufficient. Too often, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting--it has been found wanting, and not tried.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical.”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“To come to faith on the basis of experience alone is unwise, though not so foolish as to reject faith altogether because of lack of experience ... the quality of a Christian's experience depends on the quality of his faith, just as the quality of his faith depends in turn on the quality of his understanding of God's truth.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.”
-- Os Guinness -
“In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.”
-- Os Guinness -
“We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone. We are not called first to special work but to God. The key to answering the call is to be devoted to no one and to nothing above God himself.”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“Evangelicalism can only remain evangelical if it is passionately serious about truth and theology.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.”
-- Os Guinness -
“This is also why it is wrong to treat God as a grand employment agency, a celestial executive searcher to find perfect fits for our perfect gifts. The truth is not that God is finding a place for our gifts but that God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing – and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there.”
-- Os Guinness -
“We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.”
-- Os Guinness -
“The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.”
-- Os Guinness -
“At root, evangelical anti-intellectualism is both a scandal and a sin. It is a scandal in the sense of being an offense and a stumbling block that needlessly hinders serious people from considering the Christian faith and coming to Christ. It is a sin because it is a refusal, contrary to Jesus' two great commandments, to love the Lord our God with our minds. Anti-intellectualism is quite simply a sin. Evangelicals must address it as such, beyond all excuses, evasions, or rationalizations of false piety.”
-- Os Guinness -
“Idolatry is huge in the Bible, dominant in our personal lives, and irrelevant in our mistaken estimations”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“The United States is at a turning point because of a decreasing influence of faith .”
-- Os Guinness -
“We human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.”
-- Os Guinness -
“The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.”
-- Os Guinness -
“In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.”
-- Os Guinness -
-
“We may be in the dark about what God is *doing*, but we are not in the dark about God.”
-- Os Guinness -
“In terms of distance, the prodigal's pigsty is the farthest point from home; in terms of time, the pigsty is the shortest distance to the father's house.”
-- Os Guinness
You may also like:
-
Alister E. McGrath
Theologian -
Blaise Pascal
Mathematician -
Bob Goff
Author -
David F. Wells
Professor -
Edith Schaeffer
Author -
Eric Metaxas
Author -
Francis Schaeffer
Theologian -
Frank Schaeffer
Author -
John Calvin
Theologian -
John Lennox
Mathematician -
John Stott
Author -
Nancy Pearcey
Author -
Norman Geisler
Philosopher -
Ravi Zacharias
Author -
Timothy Keller
Author -
William Edgar
Apologist
