Os Guinness Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Os Guinness (2008). “Rising to the Call”, p.40, Harper Collins

  68 Copy quote

• 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, Ought

  66 Copy quote

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

  Os Guinness

  Audience Of One, Gains, Nothing To Lose

  Os Guinness (2003). “The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life”, p.74, Thomas Nelson Inc

  76 Copy quote

• 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 all our seeking will fall short unless God starts and finishes the search. The decisive part of our seeking is not our human ascent to God, but His descent to us. Without God's descent there is no human ascent. The secret of the quest lies not in our brilliance but in His grace.

  Os Guinness

  Lying, Fall, Grace

  33 Copy quote

• Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.

  Os Guinness

  Desire, Conform

  Os Guinness (2002). “Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin”, Baker Books

  63 Copy quote

• American views today are weak, confused, and divided. On one side, many progressive liberals still think that we humans are essentially good and getting better and better. On the other side, many postmoderns actually think it is worse to judge evil than to do evil. And in the middle, many ordinary folk plaster life with rainbows and smile buttons and wander through life on the basis of sentiment and clichés.

  Os Guinness

  Confused, Thinking, Views

  44 Copy quote

• In our day it's worse to judge evil than to do evil.

  Os Guinness

  Evil, Judging

  45 Copy quote

• Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.

  Os Guinness

  Evil, Bears, Scar

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  "Os Guinness Calls for a New Christian Renaissance". Interview with Ginny Mooney, www.christianpost.com. June 18, 2011.

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  59 Copy quote

• 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

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  "Have a Drink of Guinness". Interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, www.nationalreview.com. November 5, 2012.

  37 Copy quote

• We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone.

  Os Guinness

  Os Guinness (2008). “Rising to the Call”, p.40, Thomas Nelson Inc

  36 Copy quote

• Too often we forget that the great men of faith reached the heights they did only by going through the depths.

  Os Guinness

  Men, Depth, Height

  Os Guinness (1976). “In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt & how to Resolve it”, IVP Books

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  "Os Guinness Calls for a New Christian Renaissance". Interview with Ginny Mooney, www.christianpost.com. June 18, 2011.

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  Os Guinness (2003). “The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life”, p.142, Thomas Nelson Inc

  44 Copy quote

• 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

  37 Copy quote

• 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

  36 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Judging, Heaven

  2 Copy quote

• 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

  Calling, Matter, Becoming

  Os Guinness (2003). “The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life”, p.30, Thomas Nelson Inc

  29 Copy quote

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

  Os Guinness

  Dark, May

  2 Copy quote

• 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

  Os Guinness (2003). “The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life”, p.46, Thomas Nelson Inc

  26 Copy quote

• In working out our callings, we are to perform for one audience, the audience of One.

  Os Guinness

  Audience Of One, Work Out, Calling

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  26 Copy quote

• People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.

  Os Guinness

  People, World, Littles

  Os Guinness (2010). “The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy's Plot to Undermine the Church”, p.225, Gospel Light Publications

  14 Copy quote

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