Happy Sunday everybody! I thought I would start this week off with a favorite quote:
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably the earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing..."
{Brooke Fraser wrote this song based on the above quote. I love her music and I think she did an amazing job with the lyrics... if you have a minute, check it out}.
Alright, now off that rabbit trail and on to other highlights from the week...
(Mere Christianity... pages 90- 177).
"But, as I said before, 'the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.' Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the whole basis of a whole life."
"In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that --and therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison--you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God... For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."
"To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God."
"The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did... When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him."
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of."
"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next."
"Thus if you have really handed yourself over to [God], it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside of you."
"... in Christianity God is not a static thing--not even a person--but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost a kind of dance... The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is not other way to the happiness for which we were made."
"We may be content to remain what we call 'ordinary people": but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania, it is obedience."
"The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose."
"The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose you life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
"In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that --and therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison--you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God... For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."
"To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God."
"The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did... When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him."
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of."
"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next."
"Thus if you have really handed yourself over to [God], it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside of you."
"... in Christianity God is not a static thing--not even a person--but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost a kind of dance... The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is not other way to the happiness for which we were made."
"We may be content to remain what we call 'ordinary people": but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania, it is obedience."
"The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose."
"The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose you life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
Wow, sorry that ended up being SO long... there were many many other quotes I could have included. I finished Mere Christianity this week... such an incredible book. My head is still swimming with all of the different things presented in its pages. 6 more books to go... tune in next week for excerpts from The Screwtape Letters.
{xo. jarah}
{xo. jarah}
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