Showing posts with label discipleship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discipleship. Show all posts

Saturday, February 20, 2010

C. S. Lewis on WWJD

It depends, of course, on what you mean by ‘practising Christian’. If you mean one who has practised Christianity in every respect at every moment of his life, then there is only One on record—Christ Himself. In that sense there are no practising Christians, but only Christians who, in varying degrees try to practise it and fail in varying degrees and then start again. A perfect practise of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ—I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one’s own particular circumstances. Not in an idiotic sense—it doesn’t mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything as something that comes from Him, and always looking to Him and asking His will first, and saying, ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’


--C. S. Lewis in God in the Dock



Editor's note: One thing that bugs me to no end is when writers—or at least smart people—put the period or comma outside the quotation marks. This is never, under any circumstance, to be done... unless you are a British writer, as Mr. Lewis was. If English-speaking Europeans are your market, then you may do so. That is why it is such in the quote above. And why s is substituted for z or c in many words.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Growing old in God



It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terribly difficult to sustain the interests. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate.  Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In art and culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty it goes on the garbage heap. There's a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

Eugene H. Peterson, from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society