Sweet Essence

It's been a little bit since I have shared my thoughts on Smalltowns.  The last time I wrote, I was in a congregation and growing insecure in my faith more and more.  As of right now I find myself in a hallway as CS Lewis so eloquently states in "Mere Christianity".  I started this book for the fourth time but in quite a different season in my life. I believe this is the first book I read which is quite peculiar because I thought I gave it to someone else to read.  Not sure why it came back in my possession but I'm grateful. I get to glance at my thoughts as a baby christian and compare it to my thoughts now and see if I still agree.  One of my favorite quotes is just in the Preface at the beginning.  I wrote on the side of this quote, "that God can move such words inspires me."  

"I hope no reader will suppose that "Mere Christianity"  is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions -- as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted.  But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals."  (Mere Christianity; CS Lewis)

This last statement was hard for me to dwell on because I remembered the last two years of my so called room and realized that my room was empty for me and I was starving because of the lack of care. I find that the  hallway is a good place for me at this time because I can wonder in and out of different rooms and the Lord gives me fellowship with people that are like minded and sometimes in the sweetness I get fed and get comfy in a chair close to the warm fire. My heart rejoices in these moments sometimes it's just a sweet fellowship among friends dwelling on the Greatness of the Lord.

My prayer today; Heal hearts today let the broken reside in You, fix our sharp edges and help us to bring forth a clear image of you Lord. 

Smalltowns

" Six pennies are quite separate and very alike: my nose and my lungs are very different but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life.  Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-- different from one another and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbors, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that.  You and they are different organs, intended to do different things.  On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are 'no business of yours', remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you.  If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you become Totalitarian.  But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.

I feel a strong desire to tell you -- and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me -- which of these two errors is the worse.  That is the devil getting at us.  He always sends errors into the world in pairs -- pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.  But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them. "
 CS Lewis
Mere Christianity

Smalltowns

"Now No Feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last, but feelings come and go"

CS Lewis

Smalltowns

"We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the others,  that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection. "
CS Lewis 

Sweet Essence

Sometimes God gives you something dear to your heart that can't be explained; a word that makes the very essence of Him quite dear to you.  When I engross myself in Christian literature sometimes words draw me into something so dear and  true to me that just a sermon or word from someone brings to me remembrance of a sweet moment.  This happened tonight during a Tent Meeting, when our Evangelist spoke the words about how God created man and compared it to how a Sculptor creates a statue how delicate their touch to mold and make perfect their creation.  I was taken back to when I was reading one of favorite authors C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity.  I tell you this is a hard read but worth every word you have to look up and paragraph you have to read twice or three times, for the anointing words that God gave this man to fill up a book are amazing.  

"But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that means). There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason. Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can "become Sons of God." One asks "Aren't we Sons of God already? Surely the fatherhood of God is one of the main Christian ideas?" Well, in a certain sense, no doubt we are sons of God already. I mean, God has brought us into existence and loves us and looks after us, and in that way is like a father. But when the Bible talks of our "becoming" Sons of God, obviously it must mean something different. And that brings us up against the very centre of Theology. One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God "begotten, not created"; and it adds "begotten by his Father before all worlds." Will you please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something that happened before Nature was created at all, before time began. "Before all worlds" Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?  We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When 

you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver  begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set—or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way, man has (in a sense I am going to explain) the "shape" or likeness of God, but he has not got the kind of life God has. Let us take the first point (man's resemblance to God) first. Everything God has made has some likeness to Himself. Space is like Him in its hugeness: not that the greatness of space is the same kind of greatness as God's, but it is a sort of symbol of it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter is like God in having energy: though, again, of course, physical energy is a different kind of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world is like Him because it is alive, and He is the "living God." But life, in this biological sense, is not the same as the life there is in God: it is only a kind of symbol or shadow of it. When we come on to the animals, we find other kinds of resemblance in addition to biological life. The intense activity and fertility of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the 

unceasing activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals we get the beginnings of instinctive affection. That is not the same thing as the love that exists in God: but it is like it—rather in the way that a picture drawn on a flat piece of paper can nevertheless be "like" a landscape. When we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds who are more like God than man is, but we do not know about them.) Man not only lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known level in him.  But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, 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 sort 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., is Bios. 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 rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life."

C S Lewis 

Small glimpse into a great mind.