Os Guinness famous quotes

I live before the audience of One-before others I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to prove.
-- Os Guinness

#Gains #Nothing To Lose #Prove

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

#Blood #Sloth #Mind

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

#Hurt #Moving #Fall

Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.
-- Os Guinness

#Evil #Bears #Scar

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

#Jesus #Kingdoms #Made

Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.
-- Os Guinness

#Desire #Conform

Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.
-- Os Guinness

#You Like It #Permission

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

#Jesus #Men #Agony

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

#Christian #Prayer #People

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

#Christian #Bishops #Missionary

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

#Integrity #Sleep #Errors

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

#Christian #Understanding #Quality

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

#Becoming #Calling #Matter

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
-- Os Guinness

#Excellent #Humans

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

#Keys #Special #Firsts

Evangelicalism can only remain evangelical if it is passionately serious about truth and theology.
-- Os Guinness

#Serious #Theology #Evangelical

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

#Purpose #Asceticism #Emotion

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

#Agency #Perfect #Employment

We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
-- Os Guinness

#Arrogance #Mystery #Forget

Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.
-- Os Guinness

#Mind #Importance

The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.
-- Os Guinness

#Have Faith

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

#Christian #Block #People

Idolatry is huge in the Bible, dominant in our personal lives, and irrelevant in our mistaken estimations
-- Os Guinness

#Idolatry #Mistaken #Personal Life

The United States is at a turning point because of a decreasing influence of faith .
-- Os Guinness

#Christian #Religious #United States

We human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.
-- Os Guinness

#Humans

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

#Sweet #Heart #Enemy

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

#Christian #Heart #Light

We may be in the dark about what God is *doing*, but we are not in the dark about God.
-- Os Guinness

#Dark #May

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

#Distance #Father #Home

In our day it's worse to judge evil than to do evil.
-- Os Guinness

#Evil #Judging

God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.
-- Os Guinness

#Unstable #Source #Humans

The problem with Western Christians is not that they aren't where they should be but that they aren't what they should be where they are.
-- Os Guinness

#Christian #Problem #Should

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching committment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful, but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine outselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant
-- Os Guinness

#Irrelevance #Effort #Faithful

Culturally, one of the best arguments we can make is, wait and see.
-- Os Guinness

#Waiting #Argument

Atheism thrives on bad religion.
-- Os Guinness

#Atheism #Thrive

Negative freedom is freedom from - freedom from oppression, whether it's a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that's what's routinely ignored today.
-- Os Guinness

#Addiction #Alcohol #Today

We may at times be unemployed, but no one ever becomes uncalled.
-- Os Guinness

#May #Unemployed

One of the key places where sociology should be used is in analyzing 'the world' of our times, so that we can be more discerning. To resist the dangers of the world, you have to recognize the distortions and seductions of the world.
-- Os Guinness

#Keys #World #Analyzing

If Jesus Christ is the head of the church and hence the source and goal of its entire life, true growth is only possible in obedience to Him. Conversely, if the church becomes detached from Jesus Christ and His Word, it cannot grow however active and successful it may seem to be.
-- Os Guinness

#Jesus #Successful #Goal

We are not wise enough, pure enough, or strong enough to aim and sustain such a single motive over a lifetime. That way lies fanaticism or failure. But if the single motive is the master motivation of God's calling, the answer is yes. In any and all situations, both today and tomorrow's tomorrow, God's call to us is the unchanging and ultimate whence, what, why, and whither of our lives. Calling is a 'yes' to God that carries a 'no' to the chaos of modern demands. Calling is the key to tracing the story line of our lives and unriddling the meaning of our existence in a chaotic world.
-- Os Guinness

#Wise #Strong #Motivation

Christ is the only way to God, but there are as many ways to Christ as there are people who come to Him.
-- Os Guinness

#People #Way #Christ

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt....There is no believing without some doubting, and believing is all the stronger for understanding and resolving doubt.
-- Os Guinness

#Believe #Understanding #Doubt

What has happened to create this doubt is that a problem (such as a deep conflict or a bad experience) has been allowed to usurp God's place and become the controlling principle of life. Instead of viewing the problem from the vantage point of faith, the doubter views faith from the vantage point of the problem. Instead of faith sizing up the problem, the situation ends with the problem scaling down faith. The world of faith is upside down, and in the topsy-turvy reality of doubt, a problem has become god and God has become a problem.
-- Os Guinness

#Reality #Views #Doubt

Thus, for followers of Christ, calling neutralizes the fundamental position of choice in modern life. “I have chosen you,” Jesus said, “you have not chosen me.” We are not our own; we have been bought with a price. We have no rights, only responsibilities. Following Christ is not our initiative, merely our response, in obedience. Nothing works better to debunk the pretensions of choice than a conviction of calling. Once we have been called, we literally “have no choice.
-- Os Guinness

#Jesus #Responsibility #Rights

Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health.
-- Os Guinness

#Judging #People #Heaven