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Thoughtful Thoughts
"As the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are My thoughts higher than your thoughts, saith the Lord God of Hosts"

These musings are not my own, neither did I write them. But there is a rich train of thought in many of them, an a sense of wisdom and logic that surpasses, I think, my own meagre store.

Duty: A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he'd always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. 

Forgiveness: I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him. 

God’s Love: Though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him. 

Human Value: The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but Jesus died for sinners. He loved us not because were lovable, but because He is Love. 

Money: One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realise your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing cheques, you many forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God. 

Satan: Satan is without doubt nothing else than a hammer in the hand of a benevolent and severe God. For all men, either willingly or unwillingly, do the will of God: Judas and Satan as tools or instruments, John and Peter as sons. 

The Adversary: Like a good chess player Satan is always trying to manoeuvre you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop. 

Salvation: The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life. 

Time: Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met? 

Christian Character: Take the case of a sour old maid, who is professing, but cantankerous. On the other hand, take some pleasant and popular fellow, but who has never been to a meeting. Who knows how much more cantankerous the old maid might be if she were not professing, and how much more likeable the nice fellow might be if he were a Christian? You can't judge people simply by comparing the product in their lives; you would need to know what kind of raw material Christ was working on in both cases. 

Eternal Life: As organs in the Body of Christ, as stones and pillars in the temple, we are assured of our eternal self-identity and shall live to remember the galaxies as an old tale. 

Friends: Is there any joy on earth as great as a circle of professing friends by a fire?

Wisdom: The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are. 

Good and Evil: Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. 

Hell: There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

Morals: Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse. 

Politics: A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion. 

Confession: We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us. 

Grief: In grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? 

Hope: Hope means a continual looking forward to the eternal world. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither. 

Courage: You shouldn’t worry about not feeling brave! Our Lord didn't, just look at that scene in Gethsemane. We can have such thanks and hope in that when Christ was put into a human frame, He did not choose a frame of a man with iron nerves, filled with self-courage and a devil-may-care attitude. No, instead he became exactly like you and me; with a body that suffered, a mind that was sometimes anguished, and a spirit that was sensitive to the things around Him. And that is why weaklings like you and me can look to the Mighty Lord above; because he did overcome the world. 

Nature: Jesus prayed in the garden. Try doing likewise. Say your prayers in a garden early, surrounded by the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy – and astounded at the magnificence and perfection of all that God hath wrought. 

Psychiatrists: Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know what they are about. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion and faith is an illusion and they will try to 'cure' it. They make this assumption not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. 

Sin: The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self that I must try to overcome. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous man who goes to church may be far nearer to hell than a total moral bankrupt. But, of course, it is better to be neither. 

Contentment: Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about ‘misery’. 

Wicked People: If the Divine call does not make us better (and it will only fail if we do not in humility allow God the full passage he desires), it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God. 

The Future: The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years. 

Happiness: God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about prayer and Christ. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. 

Obedience: The Father can be well pleased in that Son only who adheres to the Father when apparently forsaken. The fullest grace can be received by those only who continue to obey during the dryness in which all grace seems to be withheld. 

Prayer: Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. 

Questions: Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem. 

Creation: God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly unnecessary and unneeded creatures in order that he may love and perfect them. 

Faith: We believe in Jesus, not only because we see Him, but because by Him we see everything else. 

Object of Faith: Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. Not if he is your husband, or she is your wife. After all, there are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it. 

Glory: The filth that our poor, muddled, sincere, resentful enemies fling at the Holy One, either does not stick, or, sticking, turns into glory. 

Spiritual Heath: A man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. 

Humility: If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise one is proud. And it’s biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed. 

Loyalty: Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts. 

Preaching: There are too many accommodating would-be preachers in the world, and too many practitioners in these many, many churches who are not believers. Christ did not say 'Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite all right.' He did not say, ‘Preach love without repentance, salvation without blood, mercy without judgement, faith without works.’ Neither did he say, ‘Go out and tell them precisely what they want to hear. Go out and concern yourselves with collections and congregation numbers.’ Indeed not! The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world and everything the world stands for. 

Saving Power: You must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, and turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world, and might be even more difficult to save. A mere improvement is no redemption, although living for and in redemption always improves people even here and now. But the best thing of all is that redemption will, in the end, improve us all to a degree we cannot yet imagine. 

Reason: There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream of water can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. 

Heaven: If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. 

Miracles: The miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story that is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. 

Airs and Graces: All men tend to turn into the very thing they are pretending to be. 

The Answer: When I almost came to the brink of utter defeat, lost in swirling ideas and creeds – evolution and philosophies and science – I ended up weeping myself to sleep with a great flashing light shining before me NO ANSWER. I had no answer to the great riddles of life, to the deepest need in my soul. So I tried again – more philosophies, heavier science – which still gave me NO ANSWER, and led me to a state of total depression in which I was at least able to admire a flower as a wonderful piece of ‘evolution’. I now understand why there is NO ANSWER. Because Christ is the Answer; Christ himself and Christ alone; none other can save and guide and redeem. Before His face all questions die away, except for one last moving and very deep question: “what other answer in all this wide world, besides our Lord and Saviour, could ever suffice or satisfy?”