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What's So Amazing About Grace? (Hardcover) (Hardcover)
by Philip Yancey
| Category:
Religion, Christianity, Grace, Jesus |
| Market price: ¥ 218.00
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¥ 208.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Yancey's writing captures the essence of what is unique about Christianity: Grace. |
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Author: Philip Yancey
Publisher: Zondervan
Pub. in: October, 1997
ISBN: 0310213274
Pages: 304
Measurements: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00918
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0310213277
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- Awards & Credential -
National best-sellers appearing on both the Publisher's Weekly and ECPA lists, also won the Gold Medallion Book of the Year Award. |
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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.
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.
Target readers:
General readers, especially the people worship the God.
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Philip Yancey serves as editor at Large for Christianity Today magazine. His books The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace? were national best-sellers appearing on both the Publisher's Weekly and ECPA lists. Both books also won the Gold Medallion Book of the Year Award. Yancey has written eight Gold Medallion Award-winning books, including Where Is God When it Hurts? Disappointment with God, and The Gift of Pain. He co-edited The Student Bible, which also won a Gold Medallion Award. He and his wife live in Colorado.
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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?
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Chapter One
The Last Best Word
I told a story in my book The Jesus I Never Knew, a true story that long afterward continued to haunt me. I heard it from a friend who works with the down-and-out in Chicago:
A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year-old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told me she had been renting out her daughter — two years old! — to men interested in kinky sex. She made more renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit. I could hardly bear hearing her sordid story. For one thing, it made me legally liable — I'm required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea what to say to this woman.
At last I asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. I will never forget the look of pure, naive shock that crossed her face. "Church!" she cried. "Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse."
What struck me about my friend's story is that women much like this prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift? Evidently the down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome among his followers. What has happened?
The more I pondered this question, the more I felt drawn to one word as the key. All that follows uncoils from that one word.
As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside. I've found that words tend to spoil over the years, like old meat. Their meaning rots away.
Consider the word "charity," for instance. When King James translators contemplated the highest form of love they settled on the word "charity" to convey it. Nowadays we hear the scornful protest, "I don’t want your charity!"
Perhaps I keep circling back to grace because it is one grand theological word that has not spoiled. I call it "the last best word" because every English usage I can find retains some of the glory of the original. Like a vast aquifer, the word underlies our proud civilization, reminding us that good things come not from our own efforts, rather by the grace of God. Even now, despite our secular drift, taproots still stretch toward grace. Listen to how we use the word.
Many people "say grace" before meals, acknowledging daily bread as a gift from God. We are grateful for someone's kindness, gratified by good news, congratulated when successful, gracious in hosting friends. When a person's service pleases us, we leave a gratuity. In each of these uses I hear a pang of childlike delight in the undeserved.
A composer of music may add grace notes to the score. Though not essential to the melody — they are gratuitous — these notes add a flourish whose presence would be missed. When I first attempt a piano sonata by Beethoven or Schubert I play it through a few times without the grace notes. The sonata carries along, but oh what a difference it makes when I am able to add in the grace notes, which season the piece like savory spices.
In England, some uses hint loudly at the word's theological source. British subjects address royalty as "Your grace." Students at Oxford and Cambridge may "receive a grace" exempting them from certain academic requirements. Parliament declares an "act of grace" to pardon a criminal.
New York publishers also suggest the theological meaning with their policy of gracing. If I sign up for twelve issues of a magazine, I may receive a few extra copies even after my subscription has expired. These are :"grace issues," sent free of charge (or, gratis) to tempt me to resubscribe. Credit cards, rental car agencies, and mortgage companies likewise extend to customers an undeserved "grace period."
I also learn about a word from its opposite. Newspapers speak of communism's "fall from grace,' a phrase similarly applied to Jimmy Swaggart, Richard Nixon, and O. J. Simpson. We insult a person by pointing out the dearth of grace: "You ingrate! " we say, or worse, "You're a disgrace! " A truly despicable person has no "saving grace" about him. My favorite use of the root word grace occurs in the mellifluous phrase persona non grata: a person who offends the U.S. government by some act of treachery is officially proclaimed a "person without grace."
The many uses of the word in English convince me that grace is indeed amazing — truly our last best word. It contains the essence of the gospel as a drop of water can contain the image of the sun. The world thirsts for grace in ways it does not even recognize; little wonder the hymn "Amazing Grace" edged its way onto the Top Ten charts two hundred years after composition. For a society that seems adrift, without moorings, I know of no better place to drop an anchor of faith.
Like grace notes in music, though, the state of grace proves fleeting. The Berlin Wall falls in a night of euphoria; South African blacks queue up in long, exuberant lines to cast their first votes ever; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands in the Rose Garden — for a moment, grace descends. And then Eastern Europe sullenly settles into the long task of rebuilding, South Africa tries to figure out how to run a country, Arafat dodges bullets and Rabin is felled by one. Like a dying star, grace dissipates in a final burst of pale light, and is then engulfed by the black hole of "ungrace."
"The great Christian revolutions," said H. Richard Niebuhr, "come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there." Oddly, I sometimes find a shortage of grace within the church, an institution founded to proclaim, in Paul's phrase, "the gospel of God's grace."
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| View all 10 comments |
Collins Maranga (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-06-21 00:00>
In his book, "What's So Amazing About Grace?" Philip Yancey brings grace into life by the use of true stories. 'Babette's Feast' is a story about "...a group of worshipers in an austere Lutheran sect" that is led by a Dean and later his two daughters. Using this story, Philip draws a picture of "A World without grace" and concludes that "Grace is Christianity's best gift to the world..."
Yancy tells another story 'Unbroken Chain' about a family which exhibits what he calls "Ungrace" for three generations; Daisy, Margaret - daisy's daughter, and Michael - Margaret's son. Using this story, Philip Yancey argues that grace is "... an unnatural act ..." and introduces forgiveness as a first step towards breaking this chain of ungrace. He concludes that "The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness." At this point, I can't help but say with Yancey, "The greatest argument in favor of grace is the alternative, a world of ungrace."
In this same book, Philip tells of his own struggles with grace, beginning with his wife Janet, and then Mel, his friend who turned out to be gay. Philip struggles to accept Mel as soon as he discovers Mel's hidden side. Although he hasn't settled down with this issue, he joins Fyodor Dostoevsky in saying that, "To love a person means to see him as God intended him to be," not as ugly as he is.
There are many good lessons I leant from this book and I would recommend it to every person living in this world today.
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Joseph Rutland (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-21 00:00>
I cannot fill enough space here with what Yancey's book did to help me in a real time of Christian struggle back in late 2000. A pastor friend of mine gave me a copy and ... well ... what I thought was all my neat, little "Jesus" beliefs already had been smashed to bits.
Yancey's book, along with Brennan Manning's "The Ragamuffin Gospel," helped begin to formulate, reshape and redefine a God of love, grace, mercy, compassion and acceptance of who I am as a human being today. No Promise Keepers lingo here, folks, in Yancey's book. No legalism. No "don't-do-this" list.
Yeah ... I recommend it. For those of the Christian faith, those of the spiritual journey, those looking for something to know inside that they are accepted and loved just as you are today.
Grace and peace to all.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-21 00:00>
I was attracted to this book by the long list of recommendation on the back cover and the stamp that said it's the 1996 book of the year by a publisher association. As a Chinese born and living in Hong Kong, I took them as sheer American style marketing gimmick. The fact is, I had been 100% wrong.
I had read tens if not over a hundred Christian books and this is by far the best I ever picked. It had corrected many of my misunderstandings or ignorance about Jesus, His Grace and His teachings. Say, I can disagree with homosexuality, adultery, communism but I still have to love patients, victims and sinners as Jesus did. Non violent protest can still mean a lot as what Martin Luther King did. Legalism and perfectionism can do more harm than good in evangelistic sense coz humans tend to break rules innately, and rule-breaking will haunt somebody from church and God, and that of one hundred men one read the Bible and the ninty nine read Christians etc etc.
Some reviewers criticized that the author had tried to preach his own secular view instead of Jesus's teachings, to replace God's high grace with low human love and care, to win the approval of men at the expense of God's holiness blah blah blah. I assure you that all of these criticisms were wrong, and I sincerely hope that you can read the book through and judge yourself. You wont be disappointed and you may even be moved into tears on some chapters. Below please find some copy and paste for your reference. Hope you like them.
Nowadays legalism has changed its focus. In a thoroughly secular culture, the church is more likely to show ungrace through a spirit of moral superiority or a fierce attitude toward opponents in the culture wars. The church also communicates ungrace through its lack of unity. Mark Twain used to say he put a dog and a cat in a cage together ...a bird, pig and goat. They, too, got along fine after a few adjustments. Then he put in a Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholics; soon there was not a living thing left. Pg 33
In one of his last acts before death, Jesus forgave a thief dangling on a cross, knowing full well the theif had converted out of plain fear. That theif would never study the Bibile, never attend synagogue or church, and never make amends to all those he had wronged. He simply said "Jesus, remember me," and Jesus promised, "Today you will be with me in paradise." It was another reminder that grace does not depend on what we have done for God but rather what God has done for us. Pg 54
Paul, the chief of sinners, he once called himself - knew beyond doubt that God loves people because who God is, not because of who we are. Pg67
Jesus declared that we should have one distinguishing mark: not political correctness or moral superiority, but love. Paul added that without love nothing will do - no miracle of faith, no theological brilliance, no flaming personal sacrifice - will avail.
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Joseph Dworak (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-21 00:00>
Phillip Yancey has written his masterpiece. This book will touch you to your core being, your soul, and your heart. I found myself so into reading this book, I could not put it down. Yancey is incredibly adept at showing how much love Christ has for all of his followers, and all of humanity. I have shared this book with numerous people, and I have never had a bad response to the message it puts forth.
We must learn how to show grace to each other. If you read the story of the father who is waiting for his runaway teenage prostitute daughter and do not cry, you are living in an alternate reality. This book was very challenging, and not afraid to tackle the issues of homosexuality and other tough issues that Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, refuse to deal with.
Thanks again to the author for an incredible book. I will read it again and enjoy it more, like a fine wine, Yancey gets better with age.
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