Christ says ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 196 (emphasis added)
Tag: C.S. Lewis
4 Reasons to Not Celebrate Christmas (by C.S. Lewis)
Ahh, Christmas the most wonderful stressful time of the year! C. S. Lewis had a hard time with Christmas too. In fact, in several essays he denounces the contemporary celebration of Christmas. In “What Christmas Means to Me” he lists four reasons he condemns commercial Christmas.
- It gives on the whole much more pain the pleasure…Long before December 25th everyone is worn out…They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.
- It is predicated on involuntary gift-giving. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost blackmail. Consider the despair and resentment when an unexpected person gives you a gift at the last minute!
- The waste of money and human skill in buying gaudy and useless gadgets. Have we really no better use for material and of human skill and time that to spend them on all this rubbish?
- The nuisance of it all. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country…in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as charity.
Lewis on Discipleship (outstanding)
Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recongized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship. – C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Lewis on Community
He works on us in all sorts of ways. But above all, he works on us through each other. Men are mirrors, or carriers of Christ to other men. Ususally it is those who know Him that bring Him to others. That is why the church, the whole body of Christians showing Him to one another, is so important. It is so easy to think that the church has a lot of different objects – education, buildings, missions, holding services … the Church exists for no other purpose but to draw men to Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any
other purpose. – C.S. Lewis
Not sure how this quote came together, Doug? Part of it is from Mere Christianity.