Quotes from Os Guinness

Our life-purpose therefore comes from two sources at once—who we are created to be and who we are called to be. Not

As it happens, the differences are clear between the major answers to the search for purpose in life, and they lead in entirely different directions.

There are striking examples of the same thing in our own day. For example, 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.

A striking symptom of the church's problems in the West today is the fact that in a country such as the United States, Christians are still the overwhelming majority of citizens, but the American way of life has moved far from the way of life of Jesus—which means simply that the Christians who are the majority are living a way of life closer to the world than to the way of Jesus. In a word, they are worldly and therefore incapable of shaping their culture.

You can judge a culture by what it talks about and what it refuses to talk about, and talk of "spiritual warfare" would be a useful litmus test today.

we Christians are not practicing what we preach, we cannot expect our society to enjoy the fruits of the way of life of Jesus, and our Christian faith is likely to be implausible and off-putting to the wider world.

Again, the heart of apologetics is the apologetics of the heart.

Or of the fact that in the United States, where Evangelicals, the people of the good news, are still strong numerically, they have become one of the shallowest, noisiest and most corrupt parts of the Christian Church, bringing down an unprecedented avalanche of disdain on their heads—almost none of which has anything to do with Jesus?

Today's liberal democracy, with its culture of transgression, its drive to liberate anything and everything done by and between consenting adults, and its mania for management by metrics, appears bent on adding to history's examples of societies that failed to manage vice and the crooked timber of our humanity.

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.

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.

Christians," as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, "would sooner die than think—in fact they do.

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.

Love is "the alpha and the omega of apologetics," in the sense that all we say must come from love, and it must lead to love and to the One who is love—in other words, Christian advocacy must move from our love for God and his truth and beauty, to our love for the people we talk to and work right up to their love for God and his truth and beauty in their turn.

Outrage is appropriate in response to genuine wrong, tears in response to grief, shock in response to unexpected disaster. We mustn't force ourselves to thank God for these things or we will be harder on ourselves and softer on evil than God is. It is not that even Christians need not give thanks for these things, but that Christians especially should not give thanks for them. We should always be as human as God made us.

The philosopher Marar writes, "As our hearts can't stop pumping blood, so our minds can't stop pumping illusions.

For at the heart of freedom lies a grand paradox: the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

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.

As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are.

The called-out assembly of God's people, which is subordinated to Christ as its head and coordinated with its fellow members of the body, lives its life by its practical obedience to God's call in Christ.

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.

We are spokespersons for our Lord, and advocacy is in our genes.

To believe in Jesus is to bow twice and then to obey forever

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.