Quotes from Os Guinness

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

All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it?

As followers of Jesus, we must not duck the enormity of a simple but shattering fact: with relatively few exceptions, such as some branches of Buddhism, almost all the most militantly secularist societies in history have been the product of Christian societies. The church is a leading spawning ground for atheists.

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.

To most people at the time it was unthinkable that religion might ever not be what it was then. However, Bryce mused, if religion in America were ever to lose its strength and authority, the result would be "the completest revolution of all." The strongest bonding in American society would have gone, and unbounded freedom would run amok and work to cause its own undoing.

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.

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.

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.

The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness.

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.

Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.