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Discover grace as you've never known it before: the most powerful force in the universe and our only hope for love and forgiveness.
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's 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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"As Yancy usually does, he tackles the hard issues, especially "ungrace" among Christians. He quotes a prostitute about church, "Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse." The first section is a beautiful exposition of grace. Yancy uses "Babette's Feast" as a model of grace. C.S. Lewis overheard a debate about Christianity's unique contribution to the world and he responded, "That's easy: Grace." This book establishes the uniqueness of the Christian teaching of grace and the need of the world for this message. Philip Yancy has had the experience of being the target of hate mail from Christians. He makes the point that grace should be the strongest witness of our behavior -- he urges us to imagine feminists who, while disagreeing with the Scriptural teaching of the roles of men and women, would have to grudgingly admit that Christian men love their wives like no one else, or gays who reject Christian teaching regarding homosexuality would concede that the best AIDS-HIV care was lovingly provided by Christians. This book also contains an on-target assessment of why law can never do what the gospel can -- the law can close stores, but not make you worship; it can make divorce difficult but cannot make a husband love his wife, etc.
I also enjoyed the analogy in Chapter 19, "Patches of Green," where after a forest fire, the first patches of new growth were seen where an elk / moose died. Where Christians once thrived there will be elements of grace that show themselves. Another interesting observation was on Matthew 7 where Jesus says, "I never knew you," on the Last Day, we would expect Him to tell unbelievers, "You never knew Me." But their hearts were closed to Him -- they never admitted their evil thoughts and sins. Yancy uses Romans 6-7 to deal with the objection "Why be good, if you get forgiven?" (pages 183-191)
A good book to reread regularly, so we grow in grace!"
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Jim (5 out of 5 stars)