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The rewards of freedom are always sweet, but its demands are stern, for at its heart is the paradox that the greatest enemy of freedom is freedom.

Os Guinness

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Os Guinness
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: September 30
Author
University Teacher
China
Enemy
Freedom
Stern
Heart
Paradox
Always
Demands
Rewards
Demand
Sweet
Greatest

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The United States is at a turning point because of a decreasing influence of faith .
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We may at times be unemployed, but no one ever becomes uncalled.
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Whereas our grandparents lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes, we think and act as if we have swallowed Gallup polls.
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In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
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People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.
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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.
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We human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.
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The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.
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Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.
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Too often we forget that the great men of faith reached the heights they did only by going through the depths.
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We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere we are called to Someone. We are not called first to special work but to God. The key to answering the call is to be devoted to no one and to nothing above God himself.
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We may be in the dark about what God is *doing*, but we are not in the dark about God.
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Freedom is not the permission to do what you like. It's the power to do what you ought.
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Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health.
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In working out our callings, we are to perform for one audience, the audience of One.
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Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.
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What is undeniable is that when comforts and convenience sap our energies and idealism, inactivity secretes sloth in to our minds like a poison in the blood.
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If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt....There is no believing without some doubting, and believing is all the stronger for understanding and resolving doubt.
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Negative freedom is freedom from - freedom from oppression, whether it's a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that's what's routinely ignored today.
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Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to break in the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.
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