Top 100 Os Guinness Quotes
#1. Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we. Every single person is unique and individual and deserves an approach that respects that uniqueness.
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#2. For a consumer society thrives by stoking unquenchable desires into unsustainable cravings and fanning them with an inflated rage for rights. The restlessness it creates by providing false satisfactions and deadening true desires simultaneously fuels the economy and destroys happiness.
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#3. We may at times be unemployed, but no one ever becomes uncalled.
Os Guinness
#4. Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.
Os Guinness
#5. Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern.
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#6. We must also and always be discerning about the spirit of the age in any generation, which today means squarely facing the seductions of technique.
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#7. Culturally, one of the best arguments we can make is, wait and see.
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#8. As I understand the American Founders, the most brilliant and daring idea they had was that it's possible to create a free society that could stay free forever.
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#9. Somehow we human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.
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#10. There are no foolproof methods of persuasion, and those that come closest are coercive and dangerous because they override the will rather than convince the mind.
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#11. There is no question that the Four Spiritual Laws have been remarkably fruitful as a way of evangelism, but they are not good for everyone.
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#12. A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
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#13. 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
#14. We may be in the dark about what God is *doing*, but we are not in the dark about God.
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#15. Balaam's ass is the patron saint of apologists. Madness, as we shall see, is an appropriate term for the unreality of unbelief.
Os Guinness
#16. When a friend told Francis Bacon that he would prefer not to have an eternal soul than to live in eternal torment, the painter replied with a grim realism that people are so attracted to their egos that they'd probably rather have the torment than simple annihilation.
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#17. Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.
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#18. Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.
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#19. God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.
Os Guinness
#20. If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.
Os Guinness
#21. Like a precious family heirloom, freedom is not just ours to enjoy, but to treasure, protect, and pass on to future generations.
Os Guinness
#22. 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
#23. Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God's (primary) calling.
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#24. In working out our callings, we are to perform for one audience, the audience of One.
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#25. In a post-Christian era many of our friends, neighbors, and colleague will reject God for a score of reasons, but we must live and speak that they reject God for God's sake and not because of what we have said or done that has framed God wrongly.
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#26. One overall conclusion is plain: under the weight of the combined impact of exploding pluralism, the expansion of the state, and emerging separationism, the early American settlement, so brilliantly described by Tocqueville, is gone, and gone for good.
Os Guinness
#27. Followers of Jesus who count the cost and are willing to take up their crosses after him must have broad shoulders.
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#29. 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
#30. The age of the Internet, it is said, is the age of the self and the selfie. The world is full of people full of themselves. In such an age, I post, therefore I am.
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#31. 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. Still
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#32. Whereas our grandparents lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed Gallup polls.
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#33. The United States is at a turning point because of a decreasing influence of faith .
Os Guinness
#34. All human beings are alike in seeking happiness. Where they differ is in the objects from which they seek it and the strength they have to reach the objects they desire.
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#35. In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, "It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be." His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: "Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama."6 That
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#36. We are spokespersons for our Lord, and advocacy is in our genes.
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#37. Idolatry is huge in the Bible, dominant in our personal lives, and irrelevant in our mistaken estimations
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#38. I'm obviously not an advocate of Christian America or a simplistic view of America as 'a city on a hill.'
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#39. The American 'unum' has been lost since the Sixties. If this continues, there will soon be no unifying American identity and vision to balance the 'pluribus,' and the days of the Republic will be numbered.
Os Guinness
#40. 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
#41. apologetics is pre-evangelism in that it addresses those who do not realize they are in a bad situation, and therefore do not see the gospel as the good news that it is.
Os Guinness
#42. Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply.
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#43. 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
#44. 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.
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#45. People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.
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#46. There is no problem with the wider culture that you cannot see in the spades in the Christian Church. The rot is in us, and not simple out there. And Christians are making a great mistake by turning everything into culture wars. It's a much deeper crisis.
Os Guinness
#47. The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life.
Os Guinness
#48. 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.
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#49. The Christian church in the U.S. is still strong numerically, but it has lost its decisive influence both in American public life and in American culture as a whole, especially in the major elite institutions of society.
Os Guinness
#50. American democracy in the past has always been known for its large middle class and its relatively few very wealthy people and very few very poor people, but that is gone to today and the middle class is shrinking.
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#51. Either we serve God and use money or we serve money and use God.
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#52. In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
Os Guinness
#53. Beyond any question, the way the American founders consistently linked faith and freedom, republicanism and religion, was not only deliberate and thoughtful, it was also surprising and anything but routine.
Os Guinness
#54. For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots - the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.
Os Guinness
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side's worst is truly all that it is. American political advertising is sinking slowly toward a level worthy of Soviet propaganda.
Os Guinness
#59. Calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.
Os Guinness
#60. The deep logic of God's truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.
Os Guinness
#62. When we learn the wrong lessons of history, evil is reinforced rather than restrained- particularly when we use the injuries of the past to serve the interests of the future and ignore the injustices of the present.
Os Guinness
#63. Making the world safe for diversity, is one of the greatest tasks we face in the global era ...
Os Guinness
#64. The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.
Os Guinness
#65. The inner, the real and the unseen are irrelevant in today's world. All that counts is appearance, and the world of consumerism has lost no time in catering to every need, and then creating even more, in this burgeoning market of the appearance.
Os Guinness
#66. I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.
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#67. Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.
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#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. as modern people, we have too much to live with and too little to live for.
Os Guinness
#71. We must never distinguish apologetics and evangelism too neatly. But in broad terms, evangelism is the sharing of the good news, and it addresses the needs and desires of those who know they are in a bad situation.
Os Guinness
#72. Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.
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#73. Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, so in the age of science and technology, everything is a scientific and technical matter to be solved by scientific and technical means.
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#74. We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God - which is another way of saying that our seeking will always fall short unless God's grace initiates the search and unless God's call draws us to him and completes the search.
Os Guinness
#75. Too often we forget that the great men of faith reached the heights they did only by going through the depths.
Os Guinness
#76. Evangelicalism can only remain evangelical if it is passionately serious about truth and theology.
Os Guinness
#77. Needless to say, the dynamic of the resurrection and a God who cannot be buried for long is the dynamic of a child's jack-in-the-box writ large in golden cosmic letters.
Os Guinness
#78. We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
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#79. The truth is this: We always have sure and sufficient reasons for knowing why we can trust God, but do not always know what God is doing and why.
Os Guinness
#80. If there is no Caller, there are no callings - only work.
Os Guinness
#81. I live before the audience of One-before others I have nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to prove.
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#82. Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.
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#83. We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone.
Os Guinness
#84. Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.
Os Guinness
#85. We Christians must show again that we are both people of the Word and people who believe in words. Words are never mere words for us,
Os Guinness
#86. 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
#87. The faithfulness principle (of the conservative) and the flexibility principle (of the liberal) are two sides of the same coin. They are both necessary if Christians are to follow their instructions and remain simultaneously "in" the world but not "of" it.
Os Guinness
#88. Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.
Os Guinness
#89. Everybody is born free. Not everybody is worthy of freedom.
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#90. What Socrates called the "unexamined life" that is "not worth living" now seems to be the life more people have slipped into than ever before.
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#91. 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.
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#92. There are lots of people depending on the government who are good, honest citizens who have worked all their lives.
Os Guinness
#93. 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.
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#94. Calling is more than purely cultural, but it is also more than purely personal. Discover the meaning of calling and you discover the heart of the gospel itself.
Os Guinness
#95. I give lectures on globalization. I have lived on three continents. I have no quarrel with a global consciousness.
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#96. All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it?
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#97. For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.
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#98. The key to changing the world is not simply being there, but an active, transforming engagement of a singularly robust and energetic kind.
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#99. The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, "Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?"4
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#100. In our day it's worse to judge evil than to do evil.
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