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Posts Tagged ‘Faith’

On Morality

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 18, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. 
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Think about that! They are too busy looking at the source from which goodness comes. That is our great challenge; to focus on God instead of ourselves and our reactions to God. First we must come to God and then must make God the focus upon which we concentrate. “Come to me, ye who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest”. This does not say a word about our personal morality or guilt. It says to focus on God and turn to God for our peace and for our goodness.

 
Turning to God,
Z gardener

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On Heaven

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »

No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
 
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 

Heaven and God are more wonderful than we can possibly imagine. Any attempt to quantify, or even effectively describe them in human terms, will fall short. Yet, that which we can experience of God and heaven here below are greater than anything else we can experience. And once experienced, will ever draw us toward it. When we respond to that call, then all the joy, peace, hope and love possible become available to us here and now. That is how we experience God and heaven now, and how we prepare for the unimaginable experience of being with God in heaven forever.

 
Responding to the call,
Z gardener

 

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On Real Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

What man, in his natural condition, does not have, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the ‘greatness’ of space and the ‘greatness’ of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. 
 
The Biological life is Bios which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. 
 
Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
 
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

Let us come to spiritual life each day so that our biological life will come to reflect it. That is how we experience the love, peace, joy, hope and beauty of the garden God gave us here and now. That is also how we prepare ourselves here and now for eternal spiritual life forever with God.
 
In the spirit,
Z Gardener 

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Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

On Free Will
 
 
The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will: this surrendering a portion of His omnipotence (it is again a deathlike or descending movement) because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the re-ascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendor than any world of automata would admit.
 
From Miracles
Compiled in Words to Live By
Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Copyright 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1947 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Revised 1960, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
Free will gives us the ability to choose. We can choose between red or blue, sweet or sour, happy or sad and yes, good or bad. Free will would be of no value if there were no choices to make. So, for free will to matter, we must have choices; between red and blue and yes, good and bad. This is just one answer as to why God allows bad to exist. It must be so if we are to be creatures of divine nature endowed with free will.
 
Free to choose,
Z gardener

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On learning to depend only on God

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. That trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. 
 
I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgement, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwillingly) to begin practising it here on earth. It is good of Him to force us: but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time….
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 

 

Indeed, how hard it can be to feel that it is good. But, when we follow God’s guidance, we will be able to know it is good before we can see it is good and then feel it is good until we can see the good in it. That is God’s promise and this witness is true.
 
Depending on God,
Z gardener

 

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On Self

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 24, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
A rejection, or in Scripture’s strong language, a crucifixion of the natural self is the passport to everlasting life. Nothing that has not died will be resurrected.
 
The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

Christian baptism is the symbol of dying to the self and being resurrected to God. It prefigures our literal death and resurrection. When we bury the self, God shines through us into the physical world. When we bury our bodies, we shine through into the spiritual world.
 
Dying to live,
Z gardener

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On The Real Us

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. 
 
He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 
 
In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 
 
Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. 
 
It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
 
Mere Christianity. Copyright © 1952, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1980, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

We are infinitely more than the sum total of all the eggs and bacon we have consumed. Yet our commonly held sensory perception of self, creates a barrier to knowing our true nature and character. It is only when we let go of the self-hood we try to claim, that we can fully express the true self who is God within us.
 
We can not create our own universe, but we can become one with the universe created by God for us by seeking and following God’s will. Then, we will see and experience the true reality and be the real and true self God created us to be. 
 
Getting real,
Z gardener

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On Forgiveness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. 
 
Forgiveness says “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology, I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it, you weren’t really to blame.”. . .
 
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.
 
The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

The only unforgivable sin is one for which we do not repent, for which we think no forgiveness is needed, and/or for that which we have not admitted or accepted.
 
Forgiveness must be sought by a person who has accepted their sin, turned away from it and asked to be forgiven for it. It can not be given to those who believe they do not need it.
 
Seeking forgiveness,
Z gardener

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On Heaven

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 19, 2014| Leave a Comment »

 
 
But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
 
The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

All the love lacked or lost; all of the dreams dashed or deferred; all of the peace denied or delayed; all that is good and right and joyful will be ours when we are one with the one from whom we came.
 
Being one,
Z gardener

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On keeping to a regular pattern of religious life during the storms of life.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 13, 2014| 1 Comment »

I agree: the only thing one can usually change in one’s situation is oneself. And yet one can’t change that either—only ask Our Lord to do so, keeping on meanwhile with one’s sacraments, prayers, and ordinary rule of life. One mustn’t fuss too much about one’s state. 
 
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

The state we must be concerned with is the state of our mind, heart and will. That is best supported by keeping the pilgrim’s way each day. As within, so without.
 
In state,

Z gardener

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