No Ordinary People

Good stuff from my bronameth, Erik Most. You can find his blog HERE. 


Lewis:

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit..."

The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses p.46

I wonder how many times in my self centeredness I've engaged with people flippantly, in favor of my own agenda, or busy schedule, motivation, or intention. What would our relationships look like in our families, friendships, churches, work, and institutions if we internalized this sense of all peoples created in the image of God?

Temptation and Sin

HT: Dane Ortlund

.... Dane, this spoke big time to me. Thanks man. There seems no better truth than that last line ....

Lewis: Temptation and Sin

C. S. Lewis, letter to Mary Neylan, January 20, 1942:

I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations.

It is not serious provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc doesn't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes are airing in the cupboard.

The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present to us: it is the very sign of His presence.

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 507; emphasis original

Every Longing of the Heart

From Jerram Barrs's The Heart of Evangelism:


"The Gospel fulfills every right longing of the human heart. It answers every honest question of the searching mind. It delights and surpasses every good impulse of the creative imagination. It meets and transcends the ache in every soul to come to know the living God. C.S. Lewis write concerning his own conversion that he was surprised by joy when the hopes and desires of his inner being were completely satisfied as he was humbled before God and as he put his trust in God's Son, Jesus Christ."

To Love Is To Be Vulnerable

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

C.S. Lewis

Like Pencilled Lines on Flat Paper

"Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except the sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencils she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that the outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother a pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. 'But,' she gasps, 'you didn't think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?' 'What?' says the boy. 'No pencil marks there?' And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition-the waving tree tops, the light dancing on the weir, the colored three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible that his mother's pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. 'We know not what we shall be'; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters and let in the blaze of the risen sun."

C.S. Lewis

Infinite Joy

" If there lurks in the most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept if from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased."

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis on God's Love

"God loves us; not because we are lovable, but because He is love, not because he needs to receive, but because He delights to give."

C.S. Lewis

Nice People or New Men

Reading C.S. Lewis's 'Mere Christianity' over the last couple weeks has been a refreshing experience. Here is a quote from one of his last chapters 'Nice People or New Men'.

"For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so; and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders, no one could tell by looking at them, that they are going to be wings, may even give it an awkward appearance."

Prideful Christians?

C.S. Lewis writes,

"This raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious. I'm afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pounds worth of Pride towards their fellow man."

Lewis continues,

"And any of us may at any moment be in this death trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good, above all, that we are better than someone else, I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether"