“Coming to Christ” – A Good Description of the Entire Christian Life

“The Christian is always coming to Christ. He does not look upon faith as a matter of twenty years ago, and done with, but he comes today and he will come tomorrow. He will come to Jesus Christ afresh tonight before he goes to bed. We come to Jesus daily, for Christ is like the well outside the cottager’s house. The man lets down the bucket and gets the cooling draught, but he goes again tomorrow, and he will have to go again at night if he is to leave a fresh supply. He must constantly go to the same place. Fish do not live in the water they were in yesterday; they must be in it today. Men do not breathe the air which they breathed a week ago; they must have fresh air into the lungs moment by moment. Nobody thinks that he can be fed upon the fact that he did have a good meal six weeks ago; he has to eat continually. So “the just shall live by faith.”

We come to Jesus just as we came at first, and we say to him: -

“Nothing in my hands I bring,
Simply to thy cross I cling;
Naked come to thee for dress,
Helpless, look to thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly,
Wash me, Savior, or I die.”

This is the daily and hourly life of the Christian.”

C.H. Spurgeon, Coming to Christ, a sermon from 1 Peter 2:4, 1868, he was 32 years old.

We Are Far Too Easily Pleased

Perhaps the greatest C.S. Lewis paragraph?

The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and to nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, p. 1. (emphasis mine)

Why We Must Think Rightly About God

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.

A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, p. 1.