Death brings Life

I did a rare thing this evening. I finished two books: Discovering the Soul of Service and Mere Christianity. I am not going to quote the first one, but I am going to quote the last sentences of the second.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Death brings life. This is the paradoxical life that God calls us to. It is so very hard, but God's grace is stronger.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

photo: New Attitude 2008 in Louisville, KY

good people or bad people?

At our church picnic yesterday afternoon, I was talking with a couple friends about how we interact with people who profess to be Christians but do not live in step with the gospel. What could be worse than being lost but thinking you are safe?

Tonight, I read the following in Mere Christianity:

But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world - and might even be more difficult to save.

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.

You must have the bad news before the good; you will not want a Savior if you do not see what you need to be saved from - the wrath of God against sinners. Saved from What? by R.C. Sproul is a book that also addresses this.

photo: Cinque Terre, Italy 2007

two notes on two options

C.S. Lewis helpfully diserns the vanity of making certain distinctions between two options (in two different cases): what could have been versus what is and one evil versus a "lesser" evil.

Have the words, 'Could have been' any sense at all when applied to God? You can say that one particular finite thing 'could have been' different from what it is, because it would have been different if something else had been different, and the something else would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on. (The letters on this page would have been red if the printer had used red ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so on.) But when you are talking about God - i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend - it is nonsensical to ask if it could have been otherwise. It is what it is, and there is an end of the matter (pg. 183-184).

And [the devil] always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors (pg. 186).

Study God

Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression - like believing the earth is flat. (Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis)

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

humility

I am enjoying youth camp being at the church property this week. Even if it completely takes over and invades the office, I am glad that I can be in the midst of it while having a "normal" day's work. What a blessing that God has given us this property to use in building up the parents and youth from our church and three of our sisters churches. (post and photos from today; photos from last year)

Here's another Mere Christianity quote. Remember, I'm using this blog to help me in my reading endeavors. So, sorry if you're getting sick of C.S. Lewis, but it's what I've been reading lately.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

Taking interest in what others say, enjoying life so easily, not thinking about yourself at all - these all need to grow in my life. Pride needs to die and humility needs to blossom. What a beautiful picture Lewis paints of a humble man.

I shared with a friend tonight how I want to be like Beth Mellinger (wife to Ken Mellinger, pastor of Living Hope Church in Harrisburg). She was at youth camp, and I was reminded of how I want to be like her. Her whole countenance exudes peace; she carries herself in such a gracious unassuming manner; she always seems to be happy with whatever is in front of her and is in no hurry to find something better; she almost seems to forget herself and rest in a steadfast joy. Cynthia Haughery is much the same. That's what I want to be like when I grow up.

photo: Potter County, PA 2008

hope

I read this last night:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

pg. 136-137 in Mere Christianity, chapter titled "Hope"

quote

Mere Christianity,

pages 132-133:

On the whole, God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.' He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him. (emphasis mine)

We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Because God works we work. (John Murray)

Side note: has anyone else ever gotten their hair stuck on a fly strip? What about your arm? yeah...it happened to me this evening. A garage is a silly place to have a fly strip, don't you think? ;-)

photo: Cinque Terre, Italy 2007

giving

I want to be reading more. One way to help me remember this is to put up quotes on this blog. Here is one that I read in Mere Christianity before dinner today.

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusement, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.

It is good to evaluate if you are giving sacrificially and with joyful faith.

photo: Germany, 2007

physical and spiritual

In Mere Christianity:

God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

This makes me think of Heaven by Randy Alcorn. Reading his book was one of the first times I really spent some significant time thinking about how heaven will be a physical place. (I have not finished that book by any means - it's on my shelf of books that I have started and have yet to finish)

photo: driving from Seattle to George, WA 2006

thoughts prompted by C.S. Lewis

I picked up my copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity recently, which I have yet to finish reading. I'm about 1/3 of the way through. I remember getting this book sometime after Creation West '05. Those of us heading back to the east coast had to kill some time before our red-eye flight, and so we were wandering through Borders (I think, or another bookstore). I remember talking to Kurt about this book, and, being the great book promoter that he is, I ended up with my own copy some weeks or so later. That was in July of 2005, almost five years ago, and I have not gotten past reading 1/3 of the book. The same is true of other books. With this one, I think I realize/remember part of the reason I stopped when I did. I had a somewhat difficult time sifting through which of his logic was biblical and which was not. A page before my bookmark, he was writing on free will. He says,

"Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating."

On why God allowed free will, he says that "apparently He thought it worth the risk." Risk? God takes risks? That is scary.

But within the same chapter, and only a 6 page chapter at that, he beautifully writes on some biblical truth:

God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing (page 50).

God is so loving to not let us find happiness and peace in any idols, broken cisterns. He keeps our souls restless until they rest in Him alone.

Starting on page 51, Lewis also writes wonderfully of how Christ could not have been only a great human teacher.

We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself.... But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money?... Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Christ says that He is 'humble and meek' and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis is standing up for the deity of Christ. Bravo! I know that my view of Christ needs to be widened to see more of his majesty. Kevin DeYoung, at NEXT 2009, said that "you may not know who Jesus is if he has never made you feel uncomfortable." There are those just preaching moralism today, and what we need is fear of the Lord. Fear of the Lord positions our hearts to be awed and humbled that he would die for us, call us his own, and love us.

photo: Burano, Italy 2007

Purposeful Love

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says the following in his chapter on Christian Marriage (p.109):

If the old fairy-tale ending 'They lived happily ever after' is taken to mean 'They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married', then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true . . . But, of course, ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense - love as distinct from 'being in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriage) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.

photo: Cinque Terra, Italy 2007