First, From time to time I ask for your prayers for a particular situation or person. Today it is for the Mission Team going from Catonsville United Methodist Church to Costa Rica. There are 59 people on the team and they are returning to the Christian Camp with which CUMC has been associated for twelve or so years, returning each year to conduct a Vacation Bible School for the area children, witness to the adults, and assist with the work projects which the local leaders have prepared. This on-going partnership provides support and encouragement for our sisters and brothers there as well as being a blessing for the team members.
Now, you have often heard me refer to the need to believe what Jesus says, and to achieve, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the perfection which Jesus expects of each of us here and now. Here are further comments on living the Christian life in practical terms, and on Jesus’ expectation of us to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian apologists of this century, continues to have a profound and far reaching effect on people. The following is a passage from Mere Christianity, Book IV, Chapter 8.
The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad...
This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the State is there for....
In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.
Yours & His,
DED
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