Something Else Great

By the way, would you admit this--that to lose the sense of man's greatness is not fatal when men think something else great instead? Man can look pretty small in the Psalms, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Lucretius: but the poetry remains glorious because God, or the gods, or Natura are great. The modern predicament is that having voted man into the chair and then lost belief in Man, there is no glory left.

--letter from C. S. Lewis to George Hamilton, August 14, 1949, in Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (ed. Walter Hooper; HarperCollins, 2004), 967; emphases original

Repairing the Deformed Self

Growth in loving God repairs the deformed self. The point is not that a proper understanding of self leads to finding God but that a proper understanding of God is the only way to come (gradually) to a purified self--that is, a happy self. 

 --Ellen Charry, exegeting Augustine's thought, in By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 1999), 131

Charity and Worry

Lewis, 1946 letter--

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.)

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds' song and the frosty sunrise. 

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (ed. Walter Hooper; HarperCollins, 2004), 747-48; emphases original

Enough

If you know Christ and him crucified, you know enough to make you happy, supposing you know nothing else. And without this, all your other knowledge cannot keep you from being everlastingly miserable. 

--George Whitefield, in a sermon on 1 Cor. 2:2 in 1739, in The Sermons of George Whitefield (ed. Lee Gatiss; Crossway, 2012), 2:238

Heaven is God

Scott Oliphint and Sinclair Ferguson:

Some time ago we heard a fascinating radio program in which a number of famous people were asked what they thought heaven would be like. A consistent three-point pattern began to emerge in their answers, although its most significant element seemed to pass unnoticed by the program makers:

1. All those interviewed believed in heaven.
2. All those interviewed assumed they would be there.
3. When asked to describe heaven, not one of those interviewed mentioned that God was there.

But it is the presence of God in holy, loving majesty that makes heaven what it is. It can even be said that heaven is the presence of God--being in heaven means living with him forever. 

--K. Scott Oliphint and Sinclair B. Ferguson, If I Should Die before I Wake (Baker, 1995), 44; quoted in Dan Barber and Robert Peterson, Life Everlasting: The Unfolding Story of Heaven (P&R, 2012), 185

Unless You Turn and Become Like Children

A Philistine will stand before a Claude Monet painting and pick his nose; a person filled with wonder will stand there fighting back the tears.

By and large, our world has lost its sense of wonder. We have grown up.

--Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Multnomah 2005), 89-90

Take Heart

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
--Jesus

Those Non-Puritanical Puritans

Leland Ryken:

Married sex was not only legitimate in the Puritan view; it was meant to be exuberant. [William] Gouge said that married couples should engage in sex 'with good will and delight, willingly, readily, and cheerfully.'

An anonymous Puritan claimed that when two are made one by marriage they 'may joyfully give due benevolence one to the other; as two musical instruments rightly fitted do make a most pleasant and sweet harmony in a well tuned consort.'

--Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Zondervan, 1986), 44

'Behold, I am doing a new thing' (Isa. 43:19)

Love to see this.

September 16, 2012 from SGCLouisville on Vimeo.

Delighted In

Lewis: 

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected.

The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God.

To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain.

But so it is.

--C. S. Lewis, 'The Weight of Glory'