Highlights: Ep. 34 | Mere Christianity | Part 13 | More Than What We've Become
When we draw our circle bigger we’re enriched. When we don’t we’re impoverished and diminished.
Streams of Living Water, (Richard Foster)
If you’ve benefited from the writings of C.S. Lewis, it’s because a few key people a generation ago decided to draw their circle bigger. They took a dip in another stream. We owe them a big debt and we’d be wise to follow in their steps.
“Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have his way, come to share in the life of Christ. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God…He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life he has…Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”
“What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God. A statue has the shape of a man but it is not alive. In the same way, man has the “shape” or likeness of God, but he has not got the kind of life God has. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man. And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are…going to come to life.”
“He said in the Bible that we were ‘gods” and he is going to make good his words. If we let him…he will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and life as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly his own boundless power and delight and goodness…that is what we are in for. Nothing less.”
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” (The Weight of Glory)
We are destined for more than what we’ve become.
The glory for which we are destined is not just a transformation of our appearance but a re-instatement of our status as God’s vassal kings and queens. We will not only regain our luster but we will regain our crown. “For too long, scholars and laymen alike have myopically viewed justification and salvation as ends in themselves…The goal of salvation is believers’ conformity to the Son of God - their participation in his rule over creation…with the purpose of extending God’s hand of mercy, love, and care…This was humanity’s job in the beginning; it will be believers’ responsibility and honor in the future.” (Conformed to the Image of His Son: Reconsidering Paul’s Theology of Glory in Romans, Haley Goranson Jacob)
A “son or daughter of God in training” practices being a servant.
We are future vassal kings and queens over creation. God’s servants who will one day be so dazzling, so radiant with God’s love, God’s wisdom, power and joy that if we were to see ourselves now as we will be then we would be tempted to worship. So remember… remember…who you are.