"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

C.S. Lewis

"If God ‘foresaw’ our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the time-line… You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He know your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way—because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but the moment at which you have done it is already ‘NOW’ for Him."

C.S. Lewis

No Excuses

“If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” —William Law.

Profound statement—one which I must admit is true.

Often times I fool myself into thinking that perhaps it was easier for the early Christians to follow Christ so obediently (despite even their problems), and that as times have changed, it has made it much more difficult for those of now days to do the same. And yet, every time I’ve relied on such an excuse, I’ve always known it to be an outright lie.

Our challenges today may be different than those of the early Christians, but we most certainly cannot say that they are more difficult, or so much more difficult, that we can begin to excuse inferior behavior. If we (myself being no exception) insist on being inadequate followers of Christ, let us not blame our current social/political/environmental/economic conditions, but own up to the fact that our lack of obedience is nothing more than flat-out rebellion against God. Blame, unfortunately, is an easy thing to relocate to where it will do no good whatsoever.