At church this morning Pastor Steve read the following
C.S. Lewis quote within his sermon making an excellent point as always. I was blown away by this quote in and of itself apart from the sermon having never read it or heard it before today.
"By Love, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the
self happy. And not happy in this way, or in that; just happy. What most
of us mean by God is not so much a Father in Heaven, as a grandfather
in heaven—a senile old benevolence who, as they say, liked to see the
young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was
simply that it might be said at the end of each day, that a good time
was had by all.
But if God is Love, then He is, by definition, something more than
mere kindness. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we
are is to ask that God should cease to be God. Because He is what He is,
His Love must be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present
character, and because He already so deeply loves us, He must labor to
make us more lovable.
When Christianity says that God Loves man, it means that God really
actively Loves man. Not that he has some disinterested and impartial
concern for our welfare, but that in hard to swallow and unbelievable
surprising truth, we are the actual objects of His great Love. You asked
for a Loving God, and you have one. The great Spirit you so lightly
invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect,’ is in fact present. Not a senile
benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy; not the cold
philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate; not the care of a host who
feels responsible for the comfort of his guests; but the consuming fire
Himself, the Love that made worlds, persistent as an artist’s love for
his work, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, and as
jealous and inexorable and exacting as the love between a man and a
woman."
~ Excerpted from "The Problem of Pain" by C.S. Lewis
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