Fear of God: A Preliminary, Natural, Necessary Phase

Naturally the first emotion of man towards the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear ...

Until love, which is the truth towards God, is able to cast out fear, it is well that fear should hold; it is a bond, however poor, between that which is and that which creates - a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be broken only by the tightening of an infinitely closer bond. Verily, God must be terrible to those that are far from him; for they fear He will do, yea, He is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can ill endure. Such as many men are, such as all without God would become, they must prefer a devil, because of his supreme selfishness, to a God who will die for His creatures, and insists upon giving Himself to them, insists upon their being unselfish and blessed like Himself. That which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be - and they fear Him.

- George MacDonald

Christianity: A Derivative of Morality

Men say 'How are we to act, what are we to teach our children, now that we are no longer Christians?'...I would answer...You are deceived in thinking that the morality of your father was based on Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity presupposed it.

- C. S. Lewis

Metallic Norm

Sometimes it is the sound of iron sharpening iron, and no other, that wakes us from our slumber.

Artwork

We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.

- C. S. Lewis

Drop me to my knees as many times as it takes to extract the character you desire from me. Break my heart as many times as is necessary to bring it to real life. Free me to find my way down the dead end paths that lead to nothing but misery, that the misery might drive me back to your arms. Once and for all, remove the attraction of what's false, so that I will chase after and ultimately latch on to the real: the unending nourishment and fulfillment for which I was made.
Amen.

Why I Oughtta

If I cannot feel as I ought, then let me at least act as I ought.

Christianity's Target Audience

It is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law. It offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help towards keeping, that law, and by so doing, re-affirms it.

- C. S. Lewis

Faith

The principal part of faith is patience.

- George MacDonald

Ideas About Reality

I "let Jesus into my heart" when I was four years old. I believed then as I do now that He is a real person, alive, and working in my heart in ways that are not possible, at least not for me, without His influence. Then, as now, I don't know how it works. I have heard theories/ideas on how it works from the minds of people smarter than me. I've also heard, from people smarter than me, that the idea of God is all a fiction. In the end though, they are only ideas. Ideas are only our minds' forms of things that are either real or not. The things themselves exist, or not, regardless of the ideas we have about them. I believed He was real then, I believe He is real now. An odd thing to me is that there has never been a time since my youthful "conversion" (perhaps even before then) that I didn't believe He is real, is alive, is God. Even during the seasons (yes, that's plural) of my life where I turned my back on Him, I still believed in Him.

Jesus was real to me as a 4 year old and throughout my life in very different ways than he is now. He is also very much the same in other ways. As a 4 year old, I held the image in my mind of a door on the outside of my heart that swung open to the knocks of a tiny Jesus. This image, when taken literally, is pure nonsense. But the image was just an idea: the abstract form of a true or untrue thing made as best as my young mind was capable of at the time. The idea was given to me in many forms by my upbringing in church, by some people who didn't believe it and some people who did, and by the illustrated children's Bible that we had in our house as kids. More than likely that image of Christ knocking at the door was from a drawing of Jesus knocking at the door of one of his friend's house, mixed with the image that formed in my mind from hearing Sunday school teachers, pastors, and various other people talk about "asking Jesus into your heart". Back then I believed that I was letting someone who loved me into my life, into myself. The image that formed in my mind had no bearing on whether or not the thing imagined was actually true. The amalgamation of ideas presented visually and audibly through religious channels, was useful in that it helped me understand then what I still believe is the reality. The childlike imagery is gone now, but if what the image/idea was about is true, no ideas either for or against it will change that. I believe that the truth will win out. However sound or nonsensical our ideas about the truth are, it will win, independent of them. Everything I've experienced to this point in my relatively short life has confirmed this on many fronts.

My wife, who (or whom, I never know when I get that right) I love more than even I know, and our children, who mean more to me than my own life, I encourage and will continue to encourage to seek honesty, whatever path it takes them down. The Person I asked into my heart at age 4 is the same Person I see and feel in the hearts of my wife and children (among others). It is the same Person that I saw in Stacy's heart even before I decided that I wanted her for my wife.

There is one path that will lead to that Person, and it is honesty. Once you catch the scent of honesty, or rather, once it catches you, you will follow it to the end. We were made for it. We demand justice and truth because it is fused in our bones. We get angry because truth matters to us. In my estimation, the scent has gotten ahold of my wife, now more than ever. I see it, and the more I think about it, the more I feel secure in the merit of her search, and know that hearing about her journey will only grow me. One of the reasons I know this is because there is pain with growth.

I believe He is there, leading us to Him, to our ultimate truths that He has made for us at the end of our spatio-temporal road. Regardless of the degree of the truth or falsehood of the ideas that come our way, I believe He is at the end of it all, calling our names: calling our true selves back to Him. Follow truth, wherever it takes you, because truth, in the end will win out. If you are a lover of truth from the outset, you will not be disappointed in the end. You will be confirmed in your quest, and ultimately validated throughout your entire being: you were made for it. Keep Truth and Honesty as your master, because you will meet Him at the end of the road: He and they are one in the same. When that happens we will all finally know (not believe or disbelieve, but know) what I hope is true: that our ideas of truth and honesty are to the reality as a marble is to the sun. Then we will see for the first time fully and completely, and we will be in awe of and love the Truth.

He Who Loses His Life Shall Find It

You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind...If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in the 'High Countries'.

- C. S. Lewis

Lenten Sunday

This is what you signed up for: a life of radical inconvenience.

- Rev. Don Lee

Reversal

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good.

- C. S. Lewis

Enticement

There is a certain illusionary quality of the reality we're limited to by our senses. I think the enemy uses this fact to his advantage with great success. What seems to us good and perfect, sweet and innocent, nourishing and renewing, can in reality be the road to death. We can be enchanted, persuaded, and ultimately deceived that wrong is right; that a little is alright, so long as it does not turn into a lot. A minor indulgence here, and the pain will be salved. All the wrong in our world, we are so shrewdly and passively convinced, could be changed to right with the addition or subtraction of one little thing, or one particular person, or one elusive time and place. The coercion is applied by our enemy as a sweet longing. We begin to tell ourselves that the wrong we yearn to call right is innocent. Horrifically, we begin to believe that it is somehow made pure by the assertion that we deserve it. We didn't get it - what we expected - how, when, and where we expected it, or enough of it, so we swallow whole the lie that in this unlawful context in which it is presented, the righteous thing to do is take it: a trivial indulgence. Wrong will never turn into right, no matter the circumstance. This existence, this reality and its illusionary tendencies, would fool and shipwreck even this fool, were it not for beacons of light blazing brightly from the shore.

Proverbs XVI:32

It is better to be patient than powerful; it is better to have self-control than to conquer a city.

It's the Thought that Counts

For all our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like the intrinsically worthless present of a child, which a father values indeed, but values only for the intention.

- C. S. Lewis

The Judge of All Hearts

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices...Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends.

- C. S. Lewis

Men of God

There is no one without faults, not even men of God. They are men of God not because they are faultless, but because they know their own faults, they strive against them, they do not hide them, and are ever ready to correct themselves.

- Mohandas Gandhi

Captivating

An evil man is held captive by his own sins; they are ropes that catch and hold him. He will die for lack of self-control; he will be lost because of his incredible folly.

- Proverbs 5: 22-23

Flame

To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.

- George MacDonald

Our Journey Home

The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God witholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and [place] an obstacle [against] our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bath or a football match have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasent inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

- C. S. Lewis

Dear Conscience and Will,

There is a thing wonderful and admirable in the parables, not readily grasped, but specially indicated by the Lord himself--their unintelligibility to the mere intellect. They are addressed to the conscience and not to the intellect, to the will and not to the imagination. They are strong and direct but not definite. They are not meant to explain anything, but to rouse a man to the feeling, 'I am not what I ought to be, I do not the thing I ought to do!' Many maundering interpretations may be given by the wise, with plentiful loss of labour, while the child who uses them for the necessity of walking in the one path will constantly receive light from them. The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. It was not for our understandings, but our will, that Christ came. He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness.

- George MacDonald