We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of acknowledging the mystery in our understanding of divine matters.
Os Guinness emphasizes the modern tendency to approach spirituality and God's actions with arrogance and certainty, neglecting the profound mysteries that are inherently part of faith. He suggests that by doing so, we fail to grasp the complexities and deeper truths of our relationship with the divine, advocating for a more humble perspective that embraces the unknown.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the complexities of faith, this quote can illustrate the importance of humility.
By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching committment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful, but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine outselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant
The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.
In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.
Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.
At the supreme moment of his dying Jesus so identified himself with men and the depths of their predicament and agony that no man can now sink so low that God has not gone lower.
At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them - even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past.
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.
The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy
Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.
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