What's So Amazing About Grace? (Paperback)

~ (Author) "I told a story in my book The Jesus I Never Knew, a true story that long afterward continued to haunt me..." (more)
Key Phrases: grace avoidance, lovesick father, amazing about grace, Big Harold, United States, South Africa (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mention the word "grace" and what immediately comes to mind for most of us is a bagpipe wailing the solemn notes of "Amazing Grace."

The grace of which Philip Yancey writes is the freely given and unmerited favor and love of God. This grace seems a remote, almost sentimental concept, without a place in our lives or our society. It is a vague, slippery thing to us, probably because we seem to experience grace so rarely and have managed to leech the word of meaning. But Philip Yancey has set about to rescue grace in his book What's So Amazing About Grace?

This grace is the true message of Jesus. All faiths have virtues and creeds and justice and truth, but Jesus speaks merely of receiving the love that God has for us. Accepting it, not earning it or making ourselves worthy of it. And frankly, accepting something we have not earned or are not worthy of is not an easy thing for most of us.

In truth, grace is both utterly simple and utterly confounding. Little by little, Yancey guides us into a clearer understanding of grace by using stories, in much the same way Jesus did. We read stories of both grace and ungrace at work in people's lives. Sadly, it is stories of ungrace that are more prevalent today, the current culture wars painful acknowledgments of ungrace in our lives as Christians in this country. Yancey helps us understand that ungrace is that state of being in which self-righteousness and pride are a result of thinking that we have somehow earned God's approval and may now stand in judgment in his behalf.

Philip Yancey was awarded the Gold Medallion Christian Book of the Year award for this book in 1998 by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Readers concurred with this decision, making this book an immediate bestseller. Believers and nonbelievers alike should accept Yancey's challenge to become agents of grace rather than agents of vengeance or judgment or anger. In truth, we are each starving for grace, ready to grasp it tightly. And it is through grace that all other hungers--for justice, for righteousness, for love--are satisfied. Yancey opens his book by telling us that "grace" is the last best word, and in What's So Amazing About Grace?, he proves that he's right. --Patricia Klein --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

On the heels of Philip Yancey's bestselling The Jesus I Never Knew comes his equally insightful exploration of grace, the most powerful force in the universe and our only hope for love and forgiveness. Now available in softcover. Winner of the Gold Medallion Book Award, the Christian Book of the Year Award, and the Retailers Choice Award.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310245656
• ISBN-13: 978-0310245650
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (217 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,893 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

120 of 124 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Sweet the Sound, April 26, 2000

By	Bethany McKinney (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What's So Amazing About Grace? (Hardcover)

I have found myself telling people stories and quotes from this book so often that I figured it was time for me to throw my two cents out there. Philip Yancey has almost surpassed C.S. Lewis as the most insightful Christian writer I have read. And while as a philosopher I greatly appreciate the idea-based insight that Lewis provides, Yancey's works seem to offer more practical advice and help to answer the question: "How then should we live?" After reading this book, I can't see Grace anymore as just one of those things that's meant to make us feel warm and fuzzy inside. I mean, Yancey's depictions often do bring those warm and fuzzy feelings, but more than that, it shows the unquestionable POWER and STRENGTH that is contained within grace. It's not just a nice, sweet little virtue that we do because it's easy. This book showed me that Grace is life changing and necessary. And when I read the part where the civil rights worker looks out the window and through laughter and tears first understands what grace really is, that was the moment when I truly began to understand what grace really is. And it truly is amazing.

70 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What's So Amazing About This Book, September 28, 2000

By	Michael Janke "www.xanga.com/mikeknaj" (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What's So Amazing About Grace? (Hardcover)

Book of the Year winner, this is the best book, outside of the Bible, that I have ever read. Period. Here Yancey presents a radical picture of what Grace, the last good word, really is. As usual, his writing style is very down to earth, real, empathetic, and insightful. How do we deal with the idea of Grace combined with things like Nazi Germany, the KKK, and Columbine high school? Can we reconcile the two in our minds? We must, if we are to view Grace as it is truely presented in the Bible. Grace is scandelous. But scandelous Grace is what God demands of His church. Real Grace forgives the unforgiveable, loves the unloveable, and reaches even to the undesirable. And when true Grace is emparted, the world sees Christ, for Christ's Grace given to us is just as amazing. Yancey's words here are sometimes shocking, as it is difficult for the rational human mind to empart Grace when we automatically demand justice. But none the less, his words are Biblically true and so the challenge is for the church to apply these lessons. Read this book. Open your heart. Accept the Grace that God emparts to you and then empart Grace to those in your life. Learning to empart Grace, and in the process destroying the cycle of un-grace, will utterly change your world. There is no other book that I can recommend more to a Christian searching to be and love like Jesus. Five stars.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Controversial, Thought Provoking Book, April 2, 2002

By	J. F Foster - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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. Yancey feels very strongly that evangelicalism's preoccupation (as he sees it) with political issues like abortion and homosexuality have greatly tarnished the reputation of the church among those looking for forgiveness and grace, but not seeing much of it in evangelical circles due to their political activism in these areas. I felt that Yancey was being both unbalanced and inconsistent in this area. First of all, such an assertion makes the false assumption that everybody who has a problem with Christianity or Christians feels the way they do for legitimate reasons that can be traced back to the behavior of Christians, with no ulterior motives. This is not universally true, and should not be assumed as such. Secondly, there are times in this section when Yancey applauds (properly so, in my view) Christian activism in the areas of abolition, civil rights, medical care, and education. But these affirmations come within a section of the book that is generally hostile to Christian activism in political matters. Further, Yancey believes that evangelicalism seems more concerned with more trivial things than major things, and that this is a problem. Maybe so, but as even he says in this book, no sin is trivial to God. So the question Yancey creates for himself is who exactly is going to decide which things are trivial and which aren't? By making this assertion, Yancey is bending dangerously close to appointing himself as the gatekeeper of the exact kind of rule making legalism he writes in such strong opposition to. The bottom line, which Yancey is less than lucid about here, is that Christians have the right and the duty to take their faith beyond the church walls and allow God to use them to change the culture, which includes the political and social culture. This, however, must be done Biblically, which means as Christians, we must conduct ourselves with dignity and love. Yancey, unfortunately, spends about 5 chapters decrying the methods used by some Christians to impact the culture, without sufficiently making a balanced distinction between the Christian's duty to Biblically live out their faith in all spheres of life, versus the mistake of putting the political cause we champion above the spiritual Cause that motivates us, thus tainting our motives and techniques. In his section on the political arena, Yancey greatly emphasizes the latter, but mostly ignores the former, thus generating a perspective that I found imbalanced.

But overall, I think this is a challenging book that hits on many good points and identifies several areas where the church is in need of improvement. In that light, this book is a valuable resource.