What's So Amazing About Grace?

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If we’re not always on our street-smart toes, as the semi-divine Hercules was, the fates have a way of rising up in a massed battalion against our own personal but picayune dreams and values. I've been a Christian for some forty years and have found much 'religious' writing unbearable, particularly that written over the past century (with certain notable exceptions). In an age glutted with so-called 'Christian' politics, posturing, and propaganda, Yancey looks around with compassionate eyes and quietly, gently, just tells stories -- one after another after another. He draws on his life and travels, on his reading, on his not-always-kind reader responses, on his many conversations with both the famous and the decidedly not, and on history recent or remote. What we SEE through his eyes is the healing grace through which God takes the world into His arms -- not the self-righteous and arrogant, but those weighed down with pain and struggle, shame and regret, weariness and disappointment -- a world of deep longing and near despair. The author was further prompted to write about grace when a friend told him about encountering a homeless prostitute in Chicago who began to cry as she told him that she had raised money for drugs by prostituting her two-year-old child. When Yancey's friend asked the woman if she had sought help at a local church, she answered, "Church? Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse." [5] This story convinced Yancey that Christians are doing a poor job of communicating the message that God is willing to accept people, regardless of what they have done; the story haunted him, he said, because the woman was "the type of person who would have gone to Jesus. The more unrighteous a person was, the more comfortable they felt around Jesus". [5] It's the most powerful force in the universe, our only hope for love and forgiveness, and a foretaste of eternal life: amazing, radical, life-changing grace.

Life's Passions Deserve Much More Than Mere Lip Service". The Scotsman. Edinburgh. April 3, 2000. p.13 . Retrieved August 11, 2015. Mousley, Andy (2007). Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-2318-1. I was just escaping from a shark-infested swimming pool and I was mighty glad to be free. And NOW there was peace in my life as well.Now, twenty-five years later, we need this message more than ever, in a world hungry for meaning and restoration. The revised and updated edition contains fresh material, including a new preface, current anecdotes, and cultural insights for our fast-changing times, along with a carefully crafted reflection guide that individuals or groups can use to apply “amazing grace” to their own lives. ( Zondervan, 2023)

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

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If we truly grasped the wonder of God’s love for us, the devious question that prompted Romans 6 and 7 — What can I get away with? — would never even occur to us. We would spend our days trying to fathom, not exploit, God’s grace.

As the band played, the words of the hymn immediately came to mind, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me; I once was lost but now am found, Was blind but now I see.” Most people, including born again believers, do not think of themselves as wretches, but the author of “Amazing Grace” did. Though I have found some disagreement as to exactly when John Newton wrote the hymn (1748 or 1779), it was written after a close encounter with death on the high seas. On the heels of Philip Yancey’s best-selling The Jesus I Never Knew comes this equally insightful exploration of grace, the most powerful force in the universe and our only hope for love and forgiveness.” Cristian philosophy got a bad wrap during the medieval period after Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas published their writings, several of which remain the most turgid acts of sophistry in all of human history. In so doing, Augustine and Aquinas sought to rectify the divinely revealed precepts of Christianity with the well-developed classical thought of Plato and Aristotle. The result was reams of utterly useless, hyper-technical proofs regarding the nature of god's being. No one cares about their work today (other than philosophy profs) because most of it is so profoundly unpractical that reading it is a waste of time. This book gloriously reverses that trend. Yancy argues that "grace", which he defines as forgiveness (albeit more thoroughly), is the salvation not only of humans as individuals, but of communities and civilizations as well. He offers countless examples of how our human instinct for vengeance (and justice?) poisons and destroys humanity, whereas an enlightened preference for forgiveness preempts the cycle of "ungrace" and leads to peace and, one is tempted to infer, the aforementioned round of kumbaya (though Yancy is too humble to say it himself). In Galatians chapter 5, Paul lists love and kindness as two of the fruits that should be seen in a believer’s life through the influence of the Holy Spirit. Kindness, mercy, and love are part of what it means to be a Christian; they are part of the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in a person’s life. This is Yancey’s indictment of the Christian church—that it too little embodies these kinds of virtues. The church needs to be less judgmental, less negative, more loving. We should pause here to admit that it is exceedingly dangerous to say anything in opposition to an argument like that. One cross word about it, and the reviewer unwittingly condemns himself as a judgmental, unloving negativist, and legitimizes the complaint of the book. So I suppose we must begin with the premise that pointing out error, and that even with some gusto, is not necessarily a bad thing. Jesus, the Apostle Paul, and even Philip Yancey all do it quite frequently.We may be abominations, but we are still God’s pride and joy. All of us in church need “grace-healed eyes” to see the potential in others for the same grace that God has lavishly bestowed on us. Apart from grace, we are all on the same road. Some people just slide into the ditch and stay for a while. Others slide in, drag others in with them, and set up house. a b c Olson, Ray (July 1997). "The Great House of God/What's So Amazing About Grace?". Booklist. 93 (21): 1772.