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.
Interpretation
Faith is only valuable when actively applied; otherwise, it becomes ineffective.
This quote by Os Guinness emphasizes the importance of actively using one's faith for it to have significance. Just as a boy cannot learn to ride a bicycle without practice and might give up if he faces challenges, faith requires engagement and effort to bear fruit. Merely possessing faith without action leads to stagnation and disappointment, likening faith to a bicycle that only serves its purpose when ridden.
In practice
In a motivational speech to inspire action among attendees.
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.
We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
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.
Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.
The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.
It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.
Anger is a poison. It eats us inside. We think when we hate someone we hurt them, but hatred is a curved blade, and the harm we do to others we also do to ourselves.
Sometimes one must try anything, it is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.