Showing 76 to 100 of 105 results
76. Call Him God
Matt 16:13-20; Mark 8:27-38
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C. S. Lewis
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis addressed the inclination to say nice things about Jesus, but to stop short of calling him God. He wrote, "I am here trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was mer...
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things—including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown-up.
C. S. Lewis
78. Christ, Divinity of
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C. S. Lewis
He went about saying to people, ‘I forgive your sins.’ Now it is quite natural for a man to forgive something you do to him. Thus if somebody cheats me out of five pounds it is quite possible and reasonable for me to say, ‘Well, I forgive him, we will say no more about it.’ What on earth would you say if somebody had done you out of five pounds and I said, ‘That is all right, I forgive him’?
It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with B. We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
C. S. Lewis
80. How I Take Sorrow
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C. S. Lewis
As to how I take sorrow, the answer is "In nearly all the possible ways." Because, as you probably know, it isn’t a state but a process. It keeps on changing - like a winding road with quite a new landscape at each bend. Two curious discoveries I have made. The moments at which you can call most desperately and clamorously to God for help are precisely those when you seem to get none. And the mome...
81. I Certainly Don't Recommend Christianity
Matt 16:21-28
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C. S. Lewis
I have an elderly acquaintance of about eighty, who has lived a life of unbroken selfishness and self-admiration from the earliest years, and is, more or less, I regret to say, one of the happiest men I know.  From the moral point of view it is very difficult! As you perhaps know, I haven't always been a Christian.  I didn't go to religion to make me happy.  I always knew a bottle of Port would do...
82. Knowing Temptation
Luke 4:1-13
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C. S. Lewis
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is . . . A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always gi...
83. Lewis on Uniqueness of Christianity
John 14:1-14
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C. S. Lewis
A Christian who understands his own religion laughs when unbelievers expect to trouble him by the assertion that Jesus uttered no command which had not been anticipated by the Rabbis—few, indeed, which cannot be paralleled in classical ancient Egyptian, Ninevite, Babylonian, or Chinese texts. We have long recognized that truth with rejoicing.
84. Morbid Pleasure in Other's Faults
Luke 7:36-8:3
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C. S. Lewis
"Unfortunately, we enjoy thinking about other people's faults: and in the proper sense of the word 'morbid,' that is the most morbid pleasure in the world."...  "and while we are governed by this vice, there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf.  It's not a question of God "sending" us to hell.  In each...
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in ...
C. S. Lewis
86. Our Fuel
John 15:1-8 
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C. S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis wrote, "God has designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy without bothering about religion. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing....
87. Self Righteousness
Luke 18:9-14
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C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis recounts that when he first started going to church he disliked the hymns, which he considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as he continued, he said, "I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't ...
88. The Miracle of the Virgin Birth
Matthew 1:18-25
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C. S. Lewis
The grounds for belief and disbelief are the same today as they were two thousand or ten thousand years ago. If Joseph had lacked faith to trust God or humility to perceive the holiness of his spouse, he could have disbelieved in the miraculous origin of her Son as easily as any modern man; and any modern man who believes in God can accept the miracle as easily as Joseph did.
89. The New Narnia
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
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C. S. Lewis
Most have heard of and even read "The Lion, The Witch, and Wardrobe" by CS Lewis. There are 6 other books in the series. At the end of the series "The Last Battle" Lewis contrast the "new Narnia" with the "old Narnia." He writes: It is hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some ...
He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is love.
C. S. Lewis
The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly "as to the Lord." This does not, of course, mean that it is for anyone a mere toss-up whether he should sweep rooms or compose symphonies. A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow.
C. S. Lewis
Theology is practical: especially now...If you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.
C. S. Lewis
To love at all is to be vunerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket safe, dark, motion...
C. S. Lewis
We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
C. S. Lewis
We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning Heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about "pie in the sky," and of being told that we are trying to "escape from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere." But either there is "pie in the sky" or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there ...
C. S. Lewis
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and everyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf worl...
C. S. Lewis
We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of rewards makes the Christian's life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary ...
C. S. Lewis
When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over. God is going to invade, all right; but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else comes crashing in? This time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every ...
C. S. Lewis
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?
C. S. Lewis
The greatest evil is not done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint...it is conceived and...moved, seconded, carried, and minuted...in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
C. S. Lewis
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