Today’s Quote: “I found out that, if you want to know the purpose of a thing; you can’t ask the thing to tell you. A car doesn’t know why it’s a car. Only the manufacturer knows what it was made to do. I guess that’s the way it is with us and God.”- Not Easily Broken
I hope that yesterday helped bring you to your knees for a fresh start with Jesus.
Oh, I just love how He offers us that! I’ll never get over it.
I also hope that as you’re moving along in this journey you have, more than ever, begun to put all matters of love and intimacy in His hands. The only hands strong, gentle and capable enough to handle everything.
Sometimes, even though we know God is good, we can hesitate to hand Him over such precious cargo.
We are afraid we might lose something important, or even worse, ourselves. At lease I know I was. For a brief time I definitely wrestled with the idea of become something like a mindless follower, and wondered if that was where all of this was taking me.
I think
this excerpt by C.S. Lewis sums it up beautifully. It comes at the end of his
book Mere Christianity, and paints an
awesome picture of what Christ will do with a surrendered life:
“The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully.
He made them all. He invented- as an author invents characters in a novel- all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him.
It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires.
In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.
What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devil…. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas.
I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained.
It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
.…But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all.
The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether.
Your real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
Does that sound strange?
The same principal holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
The principal runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.
Keep back nothing.
Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours.
Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
Today’s Dare: I dare you to forget about yourself today and look for Christ!
