The only legitimate
and genuine answer
to the unconditional
Yes in which
God forgives us
is an equally
unconditional
human Yes.
–Karl Barth
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Responding to Grace
To Enter Heaven
TO ENTER HEAVEN is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is “remains.”
To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man – to be an ex-man or “damned ghost” – would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.
–C. S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain
Learning how to live
Jesus rarely “takes the wheel.”
Being co-laborers with God
means we get choices.
God wants to teach us
how to drive.
–Jonathan Martin
Getting a real personality
The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
–C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
Make me new
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
–John Donne
(1573-1631)
Gotta serve somebody
I came to know . . . that each one’s uniqueness, or in modern parlance, each one’s identity, is experienced only through the Lord or through the demons to which one surrenders. No one belongs to himself or herself.
–Ernst Käsemann
(1906 – 1998)
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Two kinds of people
There are only two kinds
of people in the end:
those who say to God,
“thy will be done,”
and those to whom
God says, in the end,
“Thy will be done.
–C. S. Lewis
The Great Divorce
Stepping out of the parade
The moment we make up our minds that we are going on with this determination to exalt God overall, we step out of the world’s parade… We acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurgings and its outgoings.
–A. W. Tozer
The Pursuit of God
Surrendering to Life
Prayer is fundamentally and essentially self-surrender . . . It is self-renunciation in order to find self-realization. Your petty self is renounced in order that your potential self might be realized. Prayer is the wire surrendering to the dynamo, the flower surrender to the sun, the child surrendering to education, the patient surrendering to the surgeon, the part surrender to the whole—prayer is life surrendering to Life.
A branch not surrendered to the vine, but cut off and on its own, it not free; it is dead. A person who doesn’t pray isn’t free; he is futile. He is a blind man who won’t surrender his blindness to the surgeon in order to see. He is free—to remain blind.
–E. Stanley Jones
Everyone surrenders
If you don’t surrender to God,
don’t think you don’t surrender.
Everybody surrenders—
to something.
–E. Stanley Jones
Conquered by Goodness
We might well pray for God to invade and conquer us, for until He does, we remain in peril from a thousand foes.
We bear within us the seeds
of our own disintegration…
The strength of our flesh is an ever present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life. Safety and peace come only after we have been forced to our knees… So He conquers us and by that benign conquest saves us for Himself.
–A. W. Tozer
(1897 – 1963)
