Lewis: both sides

March 10, 2009

Meditation:
    You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
    -- Isaiah 64:5,6 (NIV)

Quotation:
    If... you are ever tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane—if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground—ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of past ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling of how our softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God.
    ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Problem of Pain, Macmillan company, 1944, p.52 (see the book)

Quiet time reflection:
    Without You, Lord, I know nothing but sin.

    See the Christian Quotation of the Day and the Quotations Bible Study