What's So Amazing About Grace? Author: Philip Yancey | Language: English | ISBN:
B000FCJYGO | Format: EPUB
What's So Amazing About Grace? Description
In 1987, an IRA bomb buried Gordon Wilson and his twenty-year-old daughter beneath five feet of rubble. Gordon alone survived. And forgave. He said of the bombers, ' I have lost my daughter, but I bear no grudge . . . I shall pray, tonight and every night, that God will forgive them.' His words caught the media's ears -- and out of one man's grief, the world got a glimpse of grace. Grace is the church's great distinctive. It's the one thing the world cannot duplicate, and the one thing it craves above all else -- for only grace can bring hope and transformation to a jaded world. In What's So Amazing About Grace? award-winning author Philip Yancey explores grace at street level. If grace is God's love for the undeserving, he asks, then what does it look like in action? And if Christians are its sole dispensers, then how are we doing at lavishing grace on a world that knows far more of cruelty and unforgiveness than it does of mercy? Yancey sets grace in the midst of life's stark images, tests its mettle against horrific 'ungrace.' Can grace survive in the midst of such atrocities as the Nazi holocaust? Can it triumph over the brutality of the Ku Klux Klan? Should any grace at all be shown to the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and cannibalized seventeen young men? Grace does not excuse sin, says Yancey, but it treasures the sinner. True grace is shocking, scandalous. It shakes our conventions with its insistence on getting close to sinners and touching them with mercy and hope. It forgives the unfaithful spouse, the racist, the child abuser. It loves today's AIDS-ridden addict as much as the tax collector of Jesus' day. In his most personal and provocative book ever, Yancey offers compelling, true portraits of grace's life-changing power. He searches for its presence in his own life and in the church. He asks, How can Christians contend graciously with moral issues that threaten all they hold dear? And he challenges us to become living answers to a world that desperately wants to know, What's So Amazing About Grace?
- File Size: 650 KB
- Print Length: 304 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0310213274
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
- Publisher: Zondervan (September 9, 2008)
- Sold by: HarperCollins Publishing
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000FCJYGO
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,706 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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In this book, Philip Yancey writes candidly and passionately about the issue of grace. He focuses on God's grace, and what a grace filled Christian life should look like. In the process, he unapologetically points out examples of ungrace in the attitudes and behaviors of Christians, and talks about some of these people by name. Clearly, this is a book that was written not in pursuit of winning a popularity contest, but to squarely challenge the church on a number of fronts. For the most part, I think Yancey succeeds.
The strength of the book is clearly Yancey's treatment of both the grace of God and living a grace filled life. Yancey recounts personal experiences that stretch across a wide array of circumstances and episodes to bring home the point that our culture is desperately in a mood to find grace, and that this represents an enormous opportunity for the church. One of the key premises of the book is Yancey's belief that the Christian church is the only entity or system with the ability to offer grace to people, since God's grace, when Biblically practiced, turns many societal norms upside down. Yancey is therefore imploring the church to return to a grace system that no other system outside the church can offer, so that the masses in search of grace will find it in the church, rather than not finding it at all. I found this line of reasoning to be quite persuasive.
I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because I felt that Yancey lost control of his subject matter a bit when discussing the relationship between the church and the state.
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