The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance »

Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries. His books include the bestsellers The Treasure Principle, Deadline, Dominion, Lord Foulgrin's Letters, and The Ishbane Conspiracy. He has written seven other nonfiction books. Randy and his wife, Nanci, live in Gresham, Oregon, and have two grown daughters, Karina and Angela.

Christians trying to model their lives after Jesus may find that He gets buried under lists, rules, and formulas. Now bestselling author Randy Alcorn offers a simple two-point checklist for Christlikeness based on John 1:14. The test consists of balancing grace and truth, equally and unapologetically. Grace without truth deceives people, and ceases to be grace. Truth without grace crushes people, and ceases to be truth. Alcorn shows the reader how to show the world Jesus — offering grace instead of the world's apathy and tolerance, offering truth instead of the world's relativism and deception.

Grace or Truth…or Both?

Truth without grace breeds self-righteousness and crushing legalism.

Grace without truth breeds deception and moral compromise.

Is it possible to embrace both in balance?

Jesus did.

Randy Alcorn offers a simple yet profound two-point checklist of Christlikeness. “In the end,” says Alcorn, “we don’t need grace or truth. We need grace and truth. And for people to see Jesus in us, they must see both.”

Publishers Weekly

Hate the sin but love the sinner is the gist of the paradox explored in this slender point-of-purchase book by minister Alcorn. The author of Deadline draws on his experiences of getting "proabortion" activists, unbelieving academics and his "resistant" father to see the light to argue that Christians must display grace-a spirit of humility, love and inclusion-while also insisting on the truth of Christian doctrine. Truth without grace, he asserts, yields a self-righteous Pharisaism, while grace without truth leads to "moral indifference" and a dilution of Christ's message. Alcorn writes in a contemporary idiom, likening grace and truth to a binary star system or the twin strands of the DNA double helix. But his is a traditional evangelical outlook that combines Biblical literalism, hell-fire and a deep acknowledgment of personal sin. Alcorn registers his fundamentalist views on such topics as relativism on campus, the fallacy of Darwinism and Oprah Winfrey's "have-it-your-way designer religion." But he also chides Christians for their holier-than-thou attitudes ("Jesus," he warrants, "would preach five sermons against self-righteous churches for every one against taverns") and compares himself with evil-doers ("I am Dahmer. I am Mao") in attesting to the fallen state of all humanity and their dependence on God's unmerited grace for salvation. Firm but forbearing, Alcorn's tract is a dose of old-time religion in a smooth modern formulation. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.