What's So Amazing About Grace?
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Publisher Description
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. What is grace? If grace is God's love for the undeserving, then what does it look like in action? If Christians are its sole dispensers, how are we doing at lavishing grace on a world that knows far more of cruelty and unforgiveness than it does of mercy? 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 challenges us to become living answers to a world that desperately wants to know What's So Amazing About Grace?
Winner of the Gold Medallion Book Award, the Christian Book of the Year Award, and the Retailers Choice Award.
Our Recommendation
What’s So Amazing About Grace was the first Yancey book I read. It had been recommended to me by the friend who said that although I tend to read more academic stuff, that I should really read this. He was right.
I tell people that Yancey is a frustrating person. He has a different way of looking at things, and that is his genius. He can get under your skin, but after a while you are thankful he is helping you see the truth more clearly than before.
Yancey gives us one of the best definitions of grace, or at least part of grace, that I have ever read. Grace means there is nothing you can do to make God love you more, and grace means there is nothing you can do to make God love you less (page 70). We live in a graceless world, and grace is the one thing that should set the church apart. And yet the church is so often the place of least grace. It should be the safest place on earth, and unfortunately often it is the most dangerous. Yancey pleads with us to extend grace, not law, to one another. And one of the main ways in which grace shows itself is in our forgiveness of others.
After a while you start wondering if Yancey believes there should be any consequences to sin. He finally does get to the topic, but spends only one chapter on it (chapter 14). I found myself asking why he doesn’t discuss consequences more, but I would guess that he would answer, “Bill, you have that part down; I don’t need to tell you more about consequences.” When I realized I was having this debate with myself, I recognized that I needed to hear this message of grace.
The book is also available in hardback.
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