Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 5:38am

Preparing for Easter: 50 Devotional Readings by C.S. Lewis;
Session 1, Ash Wednesday to 18 February

My good wife gave me a fine Valentine’s Day gift:  “Preparing for Easter,” 50 devotional readings from the works of C.S. Lewis, one for each day during the Lenten period.   My first thought was to share these day by day, but I’m not as devoted a webster as Don, so I’ll do it this way: five days of readings in one post, that is, a quote and a summary for each day of a five day period.  Each reading has associated Scripture citations, to which I’ll link (KJV for all).  So, here goes.

Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, 14 Feb. 2018, “Getting Closer to God.”

Matthew 11:27-30;   Psalm 90:1-6

Man in his woeful state has a need for God, a need to become like Christ, a son of God.

“…our imitation of God in this life…must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions.  For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.”–‘Introduction,’  THE FOUR LOVES.

Thursday, 15 Feb. 2018, “Embracing Glory”

Romans 8:22-27;  Psalm 1:1-3

Nature has fallen, as has man, and as will man, be redeemed.  Man will be even more than if he had not fallen, because he has been redeemed by the Son of God.

“Man will be the very species into which Mercy will descend.  For this prodigal the fatted calf, or, to speak more suitably, the eternal Lamb is killed.  But once the Son of God, drawn hither not by our merits but by our unworthiness, has put on human nature, then our species…does become in one sense the central fact of all Nature:  our species, rising after its long descent, will drag all Nature up with it because in our species the Lord of Nature is now included.”–‘The Grand Miracle,’  MIRACLES

Friday, 16 Feb. 2018, “On Perfection”

Matthew 5:43-48;  Psalm 19:1-8

We don’t want to change, to grow to perfection, but Christ asks this of us and will help us to achieve it.

“Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into.  But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.  He is the inventor, we are only the machine.”  ‘Counting the Cost,’  MERE CHRISTIANITY

Saturday, 17 Feb. 2018, “Rejoicing in Judgement” (sic)

Matthew 25:31-46;   Psalm 67:1-7

In the Old Testament, the Judgment of God is as in a court of justice.  In the New Testament, the Judgment of Our Lord Jesus Christ, will be an act of mercy.

“But what alarms us in the Christian picture is the infinite purity of the standard against which our actions will be judged.  But then we know that none of us will ever come up to that standard. We are all in the same boat. We must all pin our hopes on the mercy of God and the work of Christ, not on our own goodness.”–‘Judgement (sic) in the Psalms,’ REFLECTIONS ON THE PSALMS

Sunday, 18 Feb. 2018, “Becoming a Follower of God”

Through Christ we are to become more than a selfish thing of nature, only interested for our own good; we are to becoome like him, begotten of the Father.

“What then, is the difference whi He has made to the whole human mass?  It is just this, that the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life int timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us.”  ‘The Obstinate Toy Soldiers,’ MERE CHRISTIANITY

More to come on Friday, 23 February.

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