A Thought for Sunday

“…[A] Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.”  –C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 63

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A Thought for Sunday

“Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot.  If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.  And free will is what has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  A world of automata–of creatures that worked like machines–would hardly be worth creating.  The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free.

“Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way; apparently He thought it worth the risk.”

—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 48

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