Well, I have written much about my love for the works of C.S. Lewis. Please allow me to also highlight some of my favorite quotes from the works of another 20th Century acclaimed Christian Author who speaks some hard truths to my soul – Oswald Chambers. In his bestselling devotional – My Utmost for His Highest -He writes:
On the Beatitudes and Becoming a Disciple of Christ: The Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, it is a statement of what will happen in me when Jesus Christ has altered my disposition and put in a disposition like His own. Jesus Christ is the only One who can fulfill the Sermon on the Mount…….. The summing up of our Lord’s teaching is that the relationship which He demands is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural work in us.
If we are to be disciples of Jesus, we must be made disciples supernaturally. ‘I have chosen you” That is the way the grace of God begins. It is a constraint we cannot get away from; we can disobey it, but we cannot generate it. The drawing is done by the supernatural grace of God, and we never can trace where His work begins. Our Lord’s making of a disciple is supernatural. He does not build on any natural capacity at all.
Related to the above, On the Christian Character: The expression of Christian character is not good doing, but God-likeness. if the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you will exhibit Divine characteristics in your life, not good human characteristics. God’s life in us expresses itself as God’s life, not as human life trying to be godly. The secret of a Christian is that the supernatural is made natural in him by the grace of God, and the experience of this works out in the practical details of life, not in times of communion with God. When we come in contact with things that create a buzz, we find to our amazement that we have power to keep wonderfully poised in the center of it all.
On Temptation: A man’s disposition on the inside, i.e., what he possesses in his personality, determines what he is tempted by on the outside. The temptation fits the nature of the one tempted and reveals the possibilities of the nature. Every man has the setting of his own temptation, and the temptation will come along the line of the ruling disposition.
Until we are regenerated, the only kind of temptation we understand is that mentioned by St. James – “every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.” But by regeneration, we are lifted into another realm, where we face temptations of the kind our Lord faced. The temptations of Jesus are not those of a man, but the temptations of God as Man. This type of temptation has no home in our human nature until the Son of God is formed in us by regeneration.
Satan does not tempt us to do wrong things; he tempts us in order to make us lose what God has put into us by regeneration, viz, the possibility of being of value to God. He does not come on the line of tempting us to sin, but on the line of shifting the point of view, and only the Spirit of God can detect this as a temptation of the devil.
Temptation means the test of an alien power of the possessions held by a personality.
Culled from My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers.
Hilltop Thoughts, Valley Strengths 