It is the Christmas/holiday kickoff this weekend. As we go into the wormhole of celebrations and gift exchanges, let us remember that it is not that which surrounds us that makes us wealthy, but the times in communing with God and with encounters with those who He made in His image which supplies our real sense of satisfaction and inner wealth.
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
― C.S. Lewis
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
The Apostle Paul warns, some 2000 years ago, against being excessive in our acquisitiveness (greedy): “…godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.”
1 Timothy 6:6-8
“He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Tag Archives: Bible
Billy Says It Best… (Shakespeare)
“…store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; 21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” – Jesus Christ (Matthew 6:20-21)
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory? (I Corinthians 15:54-55)
SONNET 146
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
These rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
William Shakespeare
CS Lewis on the Great Eventuality
“When the author walks on the stage the play is over. [Eventually] God is going to invade, [and then it will be] something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? …this time it will be God without disguise…it will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.” “We are to be re-made. All the rabbit in us is to disappear—the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man… a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.”
* CS Lewis
Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. I John 3: 1-3
The Single-most Convenient Lie About Jesus Christ
The best lie is a half-truth. To negate it, is to negate the truth it contains, while to affirm it, bolsters the lie. The greatest lie in our culture is: “Jesus was a simply a great teacher.” I wish I had a nickel for every polite (but wrong) agnostic or atheist who has ever said this to me.
It’s wishful thinking because it’s not true. Read the gospel of Mark and select only the teachings of Jesus, you will find the gospel to be pitifully slim. Or read the gospel of John, which is known to be content-laden with conversation. If you read it wide awake, you will find a good deal of direct instruction to his followers–the apostles. You also find much of the conversation to be prayer to His Father. Yes, there is some teaching in the gospels–but there is a lot of simple exhortation. No one ever says, “Jesus was a great teacher, and he said the Son of God.” Somehow the big points in his teachings go missing.
In fact, in the gospels Jesus more noteworthy as
1) a rabble-rouser who also created problems with most religious leaders
2) a miracle-worker – of all kinds of miracles
3) a living fulfillment of many Jewish prophecies
4) the only man in history who got up from a brutal death and ascended into heaven, as witnessed by more than 500 people. (Why doesn’t this make the Guinness book?) C. S. Lewis adds: “…He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met him. He produced mainly three effects—Hatred—Terror—Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.”
Is Scripture Too Pointed For Us?
George Orwell on writing: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink….
(He provides an example) In modern English:
” Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”
(It is) a well-known verse from the Bible, found in ECCLESIASTES:” I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth.”
Yeah, God Recycles!
Reading Seasons
Surely,
gold-tinged leaves portend
a falling into white-outs of frigid winters.
Even the sun rising in your equatorial homeland
is the toddler-baby
to the brazen, blazing noonday sands.
The earth is the Lord’s -
If he has made it,
time,
space,
and so much more.
He’ll wish it back–
but we confess,
it’s a mess.
Perhaps
Christ’s vernal visit here
was a warm-up
to the day He
blows the doors down
with the brightness of His coming,
incinerating while He restores?
© 2010 Charity Johnson
The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein.
For He has founded it upon the seas, And established it upon the waters. Psalm 24:1,2 KJV
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Luke 12:49-56
What Lies Ahead?
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him… (The Bible, I John 3:2)
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“Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows ups seeing nothing but dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except 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 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 pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on the beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole, he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother 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 treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured 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 than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.
So with us. “We know now what we shall be’” but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled 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 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 in “Transposition”
What Will Hold the Sacred Fish?
CS Lewis speaking on Old Testament Scriptures: “The human qualities of the raw materials show through [referring to the content of scriptures]. Naivety, errors, contradiction and even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God, and we… receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone and temper and so learning its overall message. To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorized and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and [even] envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best ofr us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done—especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it. We may observe the that the teaching of Our Lord [Jesus Christ] Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped by some degree by their context. And whne we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even…the “wisecrack.” He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject.” If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down.” The attempt is…like trying to bottle a sunbeam. It may be indispensible that Our Lord’s teaching, by that elusiveness (to our systematizing intellect) should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question on learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, allowing Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.
…it seems to me that from having had to reach what is really the Voice of God…in the cursing Psalms..through all …the distortions of the human medium, I have gained something I might not have gained from a flawless, ethical exposition. The shadows have indicated (at least to my heart) something more about the light.
…of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog’s ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read. …
[The final] reason for accepting the Old Testament [is] simpl[e] and… compulsive. We are committed to it in principle by Our Lord Himself.
[Still, it] is…idle to speak here of spirit and letter. There is almost no “letter” in the words of Jesus. Taken by a literalist, He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man’s whole heart nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.”
- CS Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp.112-119
