Preparing for Easter: Fifty Devotional Readings from C. S. Lewis

by C.S. Lewis

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. SURPRISED BY JOY “Checkmate”

For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention: it is ourselves. For

What cannot be admitted—what must exist only as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy—is the idea of something that is ‘our own’, some area in which we are to be ‘out of school’, on which God has no claim.

He cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There’s no bargaining with Him. THE

Selfishness has never been admired.

First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil.

The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil.

turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity ‘because affliction is good for them’ (as Marlowe’s lunatic Tamberlaine boasted himself the ‘scourge of God’) is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must be prepared for his wages.

Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death if such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not.

Worse still, they may be regarded as the only thing He wants, so that their punctual performance will satisfy Him without obedience to His demands for mercy, ‘judgement’, and truth.

There is thus a tragic depth in our worship which Judaism lacked. Our joy has to be the sort of joy which can coexist with that; there is for us a spiritual counterpoint where they had simple melody.

I find an experience fully God-centred, asking of God no gift more urgently than His presence, the gift of Himself, joyous to the highest degree, and unmistakably real.

Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined.

It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him.

It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.