Love by C. S. Lewis

The will. "Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will." "Love in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion.  It is a state not of feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people."

Feeling after acting. "The rule for all of us is perfectly simple.  Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did.  As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets.  When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.  If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more.  If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less."

Christ, not the Bible, is the True Word of God; Tyranny

"It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit, and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons." – C.S. Lewis. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis.

"You diligently study the Scripture because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me." – John 5:39.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock.

1) The Dance (Mark 1:9-11): The Trinity in Creation and Redemption

Outline of King's Cross

Quote: "If this world was made by a triune God, relationships of love are what life is really all about." (9)

"Instead of self-centeredness (of fallen man), the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are characterized in their very essence by mutually self-giving love. No person in the Trinity insists that the others revolve around him; rather each of them voluntarily circles and orbits around the others." (8)

The Beginning: Jesus' Divinity (Mark 1:1-4)

Mark asserts Jesus' divinity from the very outset of his gospel (Mark 1:1). Next, by quoting Isaiah's prophetic passage (Isa 40:3), Mark asserts that John the Baptist is the fulfillment of the "voice" calling out in the desert to prepare the way for the Messiah (Mark 1:2-4), thus rooting Jesus in the historic, ancient religion of Israel. Christianity is not a completely new thing, for Jesus the Messiah is the fulfillment of all the O.T prophesies (John 5:39; Luke 24:27,44).

The Dance: The Trinity (Mark 1:9-11)

As the Trinity was present at creation (Gen 1:1-3; John 1:1-3), the same 3 parties are present at Jesus' baptism: the Father, who is the voice; the Son, who is the Word; and the Spirit, who is the dove (Mark 1:10-11). Just as the original creation of the world was a project of the triune God, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is now beginning with the arrival and baptism of the King, is also a project of the triune God.

What is the meaning of God as the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? C. S. Lewis said, "In Christianity God is not a static thing...but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance." (Mere Christianity) Thelogian Cornelius Plantinga, noting that the Bible says the Father, the Son, and the Spirit glorify one another (John 17:4-5), notes, "The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, and defer to one another... Each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others... God's interior life [therefore] overflows with regard for others."

God is infinitely, profoundly happy because the Father, Son, and Spirit are giving glorifying love to one another, each centering on the others, adoring and serving them, pouring love and joy and adoration into the other for all eternity. And if it's true that this world has been created by this triune God, then ultimate reality is a dance.

What's wrong with the world? The opposite of this dance is a self-centered life, which is stationary, static and not dynamic. A self-centered person wants to be the center around which everything else orbits. Self-centeredness makes everything else a means to an end, by expecting all others to circle around them.

The Battle: Satan's Temptation (Mark 1:12-13)

Satan's full time job is to tempt us away from the dance, away from centering around and trusting God, and focusing on self: "What about me!" That's what he did with Adam in the Garden of Eden, and again with Jesus in the wilderness. Satan says, "This idea of self-giving love, where you make yourself totally vulnerable and you orbit around other people--that'll never work."

Practical Question: Are you in the divine dance (centering around God and others), or are you looking around for someone to orbit around you?

Posted via email from benjamintoh's posterous

C.S. Lewis on Pride

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you." C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

What a reflective quote from Lewis' chapter on The Great Sin that we heard in the sermon. I found additional meaningful related quotes from that chapter:

"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves."

"There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others."

"According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison..."

"...if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?' The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise."

"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."

"How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people..."

"Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good-above all, that we are better than someone else-I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object."

"It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly."