The reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. I constantly walk away from these quotes and excerpts humbled, challenged, and thankful for the voice of Lewis. They do not come from nowhere. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own head – better still. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise…The world rings with praise – lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game… My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value. Lewis has this great moment in "The Weight of Glory" when this sense of longing for eternity really finds its way through the dark paths of my heart. 95+ C.S. Lewis Quotes About Love, Life, Faith, Bravery, and Friendship | Audible.com. On Heaven as Higher Desire. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. God has prepared the most wonderful things in front of us, since most of us can't really imagine how good those things are, sometimes, we just automatically give up getting those gifts from God.
"We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves. When the joy thus flows over into the nerves, that overflow is its consummation; when the anguish thus flows over, that physical symptom is the crowning horror. We do not construct a world of "everlasting splendors" by thinking positive thoughts. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. "When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. "Nature does not teach. "The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. June 8, 2015 Leave a comment. The period from which these pieces date was, for all of us, an exceptional one; and though I do not think I have altered any belief that they embody I could not now recapture the tone and temper in which they were written. The weight of glory quotes. The book is a collection of nine sermons that were delivered by Jack during the Second World War. Some criticize the Christian religion for its mercenary appeal to heavenly rewards as an incentive to Christian conversion and Christian living. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be within us.
Christians and soldiers are still men; the infidels idea of a religious life and the civilians idea of active service are fantastic. The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you. The weight of your glory. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. This is a kind of glory.
But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploi.... From The Chronicles of Narnia, The Four Loves, and more, here are 99 of the best C. Lewis quotes that capture the magic of childhood and reflect on life's mysteries. Reblog: C. S. Lewis on Sehnsucht (Longing and Desire in The Weight of Glory. What does war do to death? Even if you add Ambition, I think the picture is still incomplete. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant. " "I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. And the sermon rises to the high expectations created by such praise.
I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a childnot in a conceited child, but in a good childas its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. ] Lewis, The Problem of Pain. "Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests. 'Not because you are? ' Lewis, That Hideous Strength. In them we find a whole range of expressionsand therefore possibly of emotionswith which we are quite familiar in another context and which, in that other context, have a clear, natural significance. There Are No Ordinary People; You Have Never Talked to a Mere Mortal. From "On Forgiveness". It is also related to his experiences of joy: "Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity.
Therefore, in love, He claims all. "'I have come, ' said a deep voice behind them. "The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages... Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. But it is impossible for most of us. It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the completely anti-God state of mind. "Courage, dear heart. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means. Famous Quotes About Narnia.
William Paley (1743-1805). "the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him... ". For then we are concerned with some action to be here and now done or left undone by ourselves. 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. What do we do with this new self-awareness? "For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought. We are uncomfortable with this feeling, with the awareness that we are lacking and that we are always longing for more…. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. 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.
If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses … for in him also Christ 'vere latitat' – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil. 'Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia? ' Hence the value of authority in checking, or even superseding, our own activity is much greater in this sphere than in that of Reason. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. God is merely tuning the soul, as an instrument, in this life. If you attempted, in either case, to suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic activity, you would only succeed in substituting a worse cultural life for a better.
"I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't. If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. They are light when compared with the sufferings of the Lord Jesus. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Our little inch of time-suffering is not worthy of our first night's welcome-home to heaven. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons – marriage, or meat, or beer, or cinema; but the moment he stars saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning. After Jesus forgiving our sin, a brand new day is coming. "Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. They were part of the program.