Quotes from Os Guinness

Many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it aright. More often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it, we despair because our lives seem meaningless. The secret of a great life is often a man's success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them and so learning to walk in the true path.

Either we may seek to conform our desires to the truth, which leads to conviction, or we may seek to conform the truth to our desires, which leads to evasion.

We live in an age in which the overwhelming majority of people appear to be comfortable with their myopia.

If we truly know why we trust God—and that crucial if must be answered with full intellectual and spiritual assurance—if we truly know why we trust God, then God is greater than all, and God may be trusted in all situations, despite everyone and everything.

The only hope of success is the way of love as agape rather than eros. From this rival perspective, the secret of the search is not our "great ascent" but "the great descent" - of God toward us. Instead of the seeker finding love, love seeks out the seeker - not because the seeker is worthy of love but simply because love's nature is to love regardless of the worthiness or merit of the one loved.

Life is much more than reason, so it can never be captured and explained by reason alone—crucial and valuable though reason is. Apply reason as carefully and systematically as you like, and there will always be things it cannot explain, things that simply will not fit into its categories, however hard you push, press and pull.

Looking down from his editorial perch at the Manchester Guardian, he summed up the "dismal Thirties" as "a decade which began with the illusion of progress without tears and ended up in the reality of tears without progress.

For all of us, the time is short and the span of life is brief On top of that, our real human problem, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said in a direct rebuke to the modern illusion, is not just that life is short but that we waste so much of it-so that life ceases for us "just when we are getting ready for it."35 But

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.

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

A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.

The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

For any follower of Jesus Christ who follows this path on the quest for meaning, the statement is true: A Christian thinks in believing and believes in thinking.

With the deepest things in life, there is always more to knowing than knowing will ever know, so the deepest knowledge must be learned in life, from experience, and under a master.

The lights of the little café had signaled and called to his heart that, across the wasteland of the earth, there was home.

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians," W. H. Auden said in a sermon, "will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

As Simone Weil and others have established beyond question, only someone in touch with the eternal can hope to be eternally relevant—and faithful too.

The way of the disciple is a different and deeper way of learning.

As Pascal observed, when God addresses our human hearts, there is always enough light for those who desire to see, yet enough obscurity for those who do not wish to see. What makes the difference is the heart.

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.

Time and history have meaning. Under the twin truths of God's sovereignty and human significance, time and history are going somewhere, and each us is not only unique and significant in ourselves, but we have a unique and significant part to play in our own lives, in our own generation, and therefore in the overall sweep of history.

Without truth there is no freedom, and without truth there is no freedom from hypocrisy. No one has ever seriously accused Jesus of hypocrisy, no one has ever been more severe on hypocrisy than Jesus, and no one has ever offered a sterner but more gracious and effective cure to hypocrisy than Jesus.

As Origen stated in answer to Celsus long ago, the gospel is not a matter of natural religion. It is not about the ascent of man but about the descent of God.

This means that, bad though it is and dangerous though its slipway may prove, there is a sense in which hypocrisy may be preferable to wickedness. Hypocrisy still cares enough about virtue to want to pretend to be virtuous, or at least it recognizes that the society around still prizes virtue enough to make it worth flattering.