The Weight of Glory

Today I read C.S. Lewis' sermon entitled "The Weight of Glory." While I will suggest that everyone should read this sermon, I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes with you. Here they are:

"The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not other's happiness was the important point."

"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith."

"Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

"If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object."

"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."

"We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy."

"God will be our ultimate bliss."

"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."

"In the end that Face which is the delight or terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised."

"Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted."

"We want...to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare."

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."

"It is with immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."


These are but a few quotes from this extraordinary sermon. If you have time I would highly recommend you find it on the internet or go to our local bookstore and pick it up so that you enjoy the full experience for yourself. It is one of the most challenging and encouraging writings I have ever read.

Bryan

A Tree is a Tree

I was watching a debate over the question of the existence Satan this morning and one of the two men who denies the existence of Satan kept making the following statement:
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

His point was that Satan is a figment of our imagination. While I disagree with his view of Satan, I also think there is a much deeper problem with his statement: Things do not change when you change the way you look at them. Our perspective changes, but the object of our site does not fundamentally change. While the statement about things changing when we change the way look at them changes is clever, and I would even say cute, it is fundamentally based on a lie.

A simple example should help. If I look at a tree from the base of the tree I will see what looks like a bunch of individual twigs and sticks and limbs intertwining. However, I will also see that there is space between the limbs where birds and squirrels make their homes. Now if I move 500 feet back from the tree and change the way I look at it my perception will be completely different. I may see a mass of leaves sitting atop a trunk coming from the ground. At this distance I may not even be able to see the limbs and twigs and sticks that I was able to see earlier, but that does not mean that the tree has changed just because I can't see the twigs, limbs, and sticks. It is still the same tree with all the same features, I just see those features differently, and I would say that my perspective has changed. But a tree is still a tree with limbs, sticks, and twigs no matter the way I look at it. My view cannot change what a tree is.

I know the man who made this statement was probably not necessarily referring to tangible objects such as trees, but the same can be said about the thoughts of our minds as well. This growing idea that we create knowledge and truth through experience is tearing down the foundations for all of life. When we remove a standard bearer of truth and lie, right and wrong, good and evil, then we are opening our lives to the rule of chaos, and in a chaotic society, the physically strong will rule the physically weak because there is no basis to tell the strong that they are wrong in their thoughts and their actions. Without a truth that transcends human thought and experience, the moral and ethical bounds of society collapse and fall back onto the strength of the mob to push their ideas on the smaller mobs.

Truth is truth, and it is beyond our thoughts and experiences and ultimately in my Christian thought truth is experienced by knowing the truth personally through Jesus. Jesus prayed that we would be sanctified by truth, and that truth is the Word of God. The Bible reveals the truth that transcends thought and experience and stands as the standard bearer for good and evil, truth and lie, right and wrong. We put our faith and trust in the truth of the man that the Bible tells the story of, Jesus Christ. Through His life, death, and resurrection He opened the way for man back to a right relationship with God, who is truth.

I can't change a rock to gold by thinking differently about it anymore than I can make God not exist by choosing to believe that He doesn't. God exists beyond my thought, and no matter what I think or perceive or experience, He will continue to be real. If you think that truth is only what you think or experience, then put it to the test and step out in front a moving car and just think that it won't hit you and kill you. However, if you want to live in reality, accept the fact that there are truths in this world that are beyond our thought and experience and therefore cannot be changed by the way we think.