Os Guinness Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

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
Calling means that everyone, everywhere, and in everything fulfills his or her (secondary) callings in response to God's (primary) calling.

Os Guinness
We human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.

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

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

Os Guinness
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.

Os Guinness
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
Calling is a 'yes' to God that carries a 'no' to the chaos of modern demands. Calling is the key to tracing the story line of our lives and unriddling the meaning of our existence in a chaotic world.

Os Guinness
As soon as we ask what faith is and what sort of mistreatment of faith causes doubt, we are led to the first major misconception about doubt-the idea that doubt is always wrong because it is the opposite of faith and the same thing as unbelief. What this error leads to is a view of faith that is unrealistic and a view of doubt that is unfair.

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

Os Guinness
Followers of Jesus who count the cost and are willing to take up their crosses after him must have broad shoulders.

Os Guinness
To come to faith on the basis of experience alone is unwise, though not so foolish as to reject faith altogether because of lack of experience... the quality of a Christian's experience depends on the quality of his faith, just as the quality of his faith depends in turn on the quality of his understanding of God's truth.

Os Guinness
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
We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.

Os Guinness
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
In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.

Os Guinness
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
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