Home > Work > Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion QUOTES

Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion QUOTES

1 " Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

2 " The age of the Internet, it is said, is the age of the self and the selfie. The world is full of people full of themselves. In such an age, “I post, therefore I am. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

3 " Just as to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail, so in the age of science and technology, everything is a scientific and technical matter to be solved by scientific and technical means. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

4 " Once when the great slaver turned abolitionist John Newton was praised for what he had achieved, he responded quickly: “Sir, the devil already told me that.” In a similar situation, when the eminent Scottish preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne was congratulated by a parishioner for his saintliness, he replied sharply, “Madame, if you could see in my heart, you would spit in my face.” In each case, they refused to let others think that they were what they weren’t. They resisted hypocrisy by exposing the gap that was its essence—the gap between the inner and the outer, appearance and reality. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

5 " To follow Jesus is to pay the cost of discipleship, and then to die to ourselves, to our own interests, our own agendas and reputations. It is to pick up our crosses and count the cost of losing all that contradicts his will and his way—including our reputations before the world, and our standing with the people and in the communities that we once held dear. It is to live before one audience, the audience of One, and therefore to die to all other conflicting opinions and assessments. There is no room here for such contemporary ideas as the looking-glass self, and no consideration here for trivial contemporary obsessions such as one’s legacy. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

6 " Balaam’s ass is the patron saint of apologists. Madness, as we shall see, is an appropriate term for the unreality of unbelief. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

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

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

8 " far too much Christian evangelism and apologetics is based on the assumption that almost everyone is open, interested and needy—when most people most of the time are quite simply not. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

9 " nowhere is the modern church more worldly than in its breathless idolizing of such modern notions as change, relevance, innovation and being on the right side of history. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

10 " This challenge means that each of us as apologists must examine our own hearts. Have we loved enough to listen, or is it that we love to hear the sound of our own answers? Are we really arguing for Christ, or are we expressing our need always to be right? "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

11 " Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

12 " If the Christian faith is true, it is true even if no one believes it, and if it is not true, it is false even if everyone believes it. The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

13 " Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we. Every single person is unique and individual and deserves an approach that respects that uniqueness. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

14 " As the early church boasted rightly, the message of Jesus is both simple enough for a child to paddle in and deep enough for an elephant to swim in. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

15 " In the biblical view the issue is not modern versus postmodern. Both these views are partly right, and both are finally wrong. Nor is it rational argument versus story, or reason versus imagination. In fact it is not either-or at all. 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. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

16 " Needless to say, the dynamic of the resurrection and a God who cannot be buried for long is the dynamic of a child’s jack-in-the-box writ large in golden cosmic letters. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

17 " the story of Issa, the eighteenth-century Haiku poet from Japan. Through a succession of sad events, his wife and all his five children died. Grieving each time, he went to the Zen Master and received the same consolation: “Remember the world is dew.” Dew is transient and ephemeral. The sun rises and the dew is gone. So too is suffering and death in this world of illusion, so the mistake is to become too engaged. Remember the world is dew. Be more detached, and transcend the engagement of mourning that prolongs the grief. After one of his children died, Issa went home unconsoled, and wrote one of his most famous poems. Translated into English it reads,      The world is dew.      The world is dew.      And yet.      And yet. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

18 " apologists we are never out simply to establish an idea or to prove a theory. We stand as witnesses to a Person who is love, and out of our own love for him we are introducing others to being known and loved by him, so that they can know and love him in their turn. Without love, as St. Paul has told us, apologists too are only noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

19 " Yale philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes, “One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

20 " For a consumer society thrives by stoking unquenchable desires into unsustainable cravings and fanning them with an inflated rage for rights. The restlessness it creates by providing false satisfactions and deadening true desires simultaneously fuels the economy and destroys happiness. "

― Os Guinness , Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion