[…] our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good.
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.
[…] the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.
Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the world, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
[…] The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, the some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayer and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good […] Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
[…] A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail. If there was any idea that God has set us a sort of exam and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If there was any idea of a sort of bargain […] that has to be wiped out […] Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already […] It is like a small child going to its father and saying, “Daddy, give me six pence to buy you a birthday present.”
[…] What God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain Kind or quality […] creatures related to Himself in a certain way.
If you like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing; He even offers everything for nothing […] But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognizing that all we have done and can do is nothing.
To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says […] Thus is you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of people who really were in touch with God – experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map […] that is just why a vague religion – all about feeling God in nature, and so on – is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach.
God is the thing to which he is praying – the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.
[…] the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred…
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
What then, is the difference which 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 into timeless “spiritual” life, has been done for us. Humanity is already "saved" in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work - the bit we could not have done for ourselves - has been done for us.
After the first few steps in the Christian life we realize that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.
To become new man means losing what we now call “ourselves”. Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts […].
[…] the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. […] a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God.
He came into the created universe, of His own will, bringing with Him the Zoe, the new life. […]. And He transmits it not by heredity but by what I have called "good infection."
Your real, new self […] will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.
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