The Weight of Glory

The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis

(Preached originally as a sermon in the
Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford,
on Jun 8th, 1942: published in
"Theology", November 1941)


C.S. Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963)

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any good Christian of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love.

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 nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. And if there lurks in the 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 to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he could not imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real love; and he is not mercenary for desiring it. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. There is also a third case which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper, and not a mercenary, reward for learning Greek; but only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so. The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage. He has to begin by working for his marks, or to escape punishment, or to please his parents, or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually; enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just insofar as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.

The Christian, in relation to heaven, is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.

But there is one other important similarity between the schoolboy and ourselves. If he is an imaginative boy, he will, quite probably, be reveling in the English poets and romancers suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort. He may even be neglecting his Greek to read Shelley and Swinburne in secret. In other words, the desire which Greek is really going to gratify already exists in him and is attached to objects which seem to him quite unconnected with Xenophon and the verbs in Greek. Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think, is just what we find. No doubt there is one point in which my analogy of the schoolboy breaks down. The English poetry which he reads when ought to be doing Greek exercises may be just as good as the Greek poetry to which the exercises are leading him, so that in fixing on Milton instead of journeying on to Aeschylus his desire is not embracing a false object. But our case is very different. If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolic relation to what will truly satisfy.

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing and indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret that hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and effect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mere mention of it's name.

Cont'd

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to these moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered when turn out itself to be a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, then turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, new from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for almost (over) a hundred years (parenthesis added by NAM). Almost our whole education system has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair. they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation will lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson's remark that the elan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death - as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics.

Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? "Nor does being hungry prove that we have bread." But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called "falling in love" occurred in a sexless world.

Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies. Our sacred books give us some account of the object. It is, of course, a symbolic account. Heave is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is to me, at first, very small. At first sight it chills, rather than awakens, my desire. And that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperment led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I expect it to be less immediately attractive than "my own stuff". Sophocles at first seems dull and cold to the boy who has only reached Shelley. If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals which we do not yet know and need to know.

Cont'd

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised (1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like Him; (3) with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have "glory"; (4) that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and (5) that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe - ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God's temple. The first question I ask about these promises is "Why any one of them except the first?" Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only. I think the answer turns again on the nature of symbols. For though it may escape our notice at first glance, yet it is true that any conception of being with Christ which most of us can now form will be not very much less symbolical than the other promises; for it will smuggle in ideas of proximity in space and loving conversation as we now understand conversation, and it will probably concentrate on the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of His deity. And, in fact, we find that those Christians who attend solely to this first promise always to fill it up with very earthly imagery indeed - in fact with hymeneal or erotic imagery. I am not for a moment condemning such imagery. I heartily wish I could enter into it more deeply than I do, and pray that I yet shall. But my point is that this also is only a symbol, like the reality in some respects, but unlike it in others, and therefore needs correction from the different symbols in the other promises. The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bless; but because God is more than a Person, and lest we should imagine the joy of His preence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love, with its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images, correcting and releiving each other, are supplied.

I next turn to the idea of glory. There is no getting away from the fact that this idea is very prominent in the New Testament and in early Christian writings. Salvation is constantly assocated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendour like the sun and stars. All this makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect I fancy I am a typical modern. Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a type of living electric light bulb?

When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures - fame with God, approval or (I might say) "appreciation" by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable of the divine accolade, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down liek a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child, and nothing is so obvious in a child - not in a conceited child, but in a good child - as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the creaturely of pleasures - nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior; the pleasure of beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment - a very, very short moment - before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the remeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserably illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should not call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment that heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero's book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; "it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign."

I can imagine someone saying he dislikes my idea of heaven as a place where we are patted on the back. But proud misunderstanding is behind that dislike. In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each one of us either with one expression or the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame than can never be cured or disguised. I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. But by God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. Indeed, how we think of Him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how He thinks of us. It is written then we shall "stand before" Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God... to be a real ingrediant in the divine happiness... to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son - it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

Cont'd

And now notice what is happening. If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surpise, looking back, that the connection is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turn out to satisfy my original desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider me own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted. When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omiting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually motice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has eben well described by Keats as "the journey homeward to habitual self." You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may say if we can. "Nobody marks us." A scientist may replay that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment, the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Perhaps it seems rather crude to desribe glory as the fact of being "noticed" by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully re-echoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, "I never knew you. Depart from Me." In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside - repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razors ege between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostallgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fantasy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

And this brings me to the other sense of glory - glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already; you can go out and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more - something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth adn water with gods and goddesses and numphs and elves - that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is teh image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but that do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will now always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human sould have become as perfect in voluntary obediance as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obediance, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think I am putting forward any heaten fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away; each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.

Cont'd

And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind and, still more, the body receives life from Him at a thousand removes - through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God's creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filttered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will "flow over" into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites, we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn everyone most seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thought even more misleading - thoughts that what is save is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.

Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft gas opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid on my own back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs fo the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and godesses, 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, or else a horror and a corruption such as you not meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, , marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean however that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorfier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

"If I seek only my own glory then that would be no glory at all."
~ Jesus


NAM: Typing this out was a labor of love. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did when I first read it, the second time. It took me a second read to fully grasp its import and export upon which I felt compelled to share it with the ATS community so that we might seek out and find the promised glory together because it's a "we" thing after all.

God Bless.

What did you actually type?

That's a bunch of cut and paste.

reply to post by winofiend


I typed the whole thing word for word.

But what does that matter, let us consider the content and talk about that, k?

Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

reply to post by NewAgeMan


Just read the first post. Great stuff. I have his complete works here somewhere.

These three quotes jump out at me. Such amazing writing.

"The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. "

---Consummation is being married to something, like his last example of marriage for money as compared to marriage for love of the other person.

"But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship. "

---The die lifting a grounded ship is also comparative to the angel of heel in the ship's mast. It's the only way to turn a new direction. We must bend to the authority of both the law and gospel with obedience. He's amazing!

"If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolic relation to what will truly satisfy."

This reminds me of many good quotes. Poe for one:

"V. All things are either good or bad by comparison. A sufficient analysis will show that pleasure in all cases, is but the contrast of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. But it has been shown that, in the inorganic life, pain cannot be; thus the necessity for the organic. The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven." LINK

Have you read James Allen? ALEN

When I first read As a Man Thinketh, I had the odd feeling I was reading something I had already read. Turned out, I was right. LINK

Many of these good writers like this are well read. It's the key to opening the mind. I love how he points out the connection between duplicity, hard work and suffering for the rewards that follow our endeavors. Great stuff. Thank you for sharing this to start out my day.

winofiend
What did you actually type?

That's a bunch of cut and paste.

Sounds like you need to spend some time learning Greek Grammar. It's a treasure chest of pearls if you bother opening the box.

akushla99
Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

If you want the diamonds cut to size, dig them out of the ground first.

reply to post by NewAgeMan


I also like this: "The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised (1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like Him; (3) with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have "glory"; (4) that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and (5) that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe - ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God's temple. The first question I ask about these promises is "Why any one of them except the first?" Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? "

Reminds me of this:

1 Cor 2:9

9 However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him"--

...and this from the Midrash:

"Future bliss can neither be imagined, explained, nor described. We know nothing of its nature, form, greatness, or beauty, its quantity or quality. This much one should know, the phrase, "the world to come," does not imply that it is a world yet to be called into existence; it exists already, but the phrase is employed to describe the life into which those who are in the present stage of existence will be transposed when they throw off this mortal coil."

EnochWasRight

akushla99
Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

If you want the diamonds cut to size, dig them out of the ground first.

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I'm wearing enough weightier ones, thanks EWR...

I'm getting jack of cut and paste (whether it was 'typed out' or not)...

Å99

akushla99

EnochWasRight

akushla99
Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

If you want the diamonds cut to size, dig them out of the ground first.

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I'm wearing enough weightier ones, thanks EWR...

I'm getting jack of cut and paste (whether it was 'typed out' or not)...

Å99

To me, it's a great way to stumble on writing that others value. I can't get enough of this stuff. It's the The Mind's Treasure Chest really. Do you know jack? If YDKJ, then WWJD.

EnochWasRight

akushla99

EnochWasRight

akushla99
Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

If you want the diamonds cut to size, dig them out of the ground first.

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I'm wearing enough weightier ones, thanks EWR...

I'm getting jack of cut and paste (whether it was 'typed out' or not)...

Å99

To me, it's a great way to stumble on writing that others value. I can't get enough of this stuff. It's the The Mind's Treasure Chest really. Do you know jack?

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I value it from my bookshelf...I'd much rather see original work from posters...not cut and paste...'jack' - ennui...

Jesus would at least be original...

Å99

akushla99

EnochWasRight

akushla99

EnochWasRight

akushla99
Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

If you want the diamonds cut to size, dig them out of the ground first.

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I'm wearing enough weightier ones, thanks EWR...

I'm getting jack of cut and paste (whether it was 'typed out' or not)...

Å99

To me, it's a great way to stumble on writing that others value. I can't get enough of this stuff. It's the The Mind's Treasure Chest really. Do you know jack?

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I value it from my bookshelf...I'd much rather see original work from posters...not cut and paste...'jack' - ennui...

Jesus would at least be original...

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

Maybe you are missing the point of the thread. Sounds like an opportunity to me.

EnochWasRight

akushla99

EnochWasRight

akushla99

EnochWasRight

akushla99
Maybe you could condense that down to a few lines...I'm personally getting jack of cut and paste...its making the ATS experience a really really boring one...so how about it...PRECIS

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

If you want the diamonds cut to size, dig them out of the ground first.

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I'm wearing enough weightier ones, thanks EWR...

I'm getting jack of cut and paste (whether it was 'typed out' or not)...

Å99

To me, it's a great way to stumble on writing that others value. I can't get enough of this stuff. It's the The Mind's Treasure Chest really. Do you know jack?

edit on 11-11-2013 by EnochWasRight because: (no reason given)

I value it from my bookshelf...I'd much rather see original work from posters...not cut and paste...'jack' - ennui...

Jesus would at least be original...

Å99

edit on 11-11-2013 by akushla99 because: (no reason given)

Maybe you are missing the point of the thread. Sounds like an opportunity to me.

Maybe you are assuming a little too much...

Å99

reply to post by NewAgeMan


"If I seek only my own glory then that would be no glory at all."
~ Jesus

Loved your quote.

Also, John 5

41 “I do not accept glory from human beings, 42 but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. 44 How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

How arrogant does this sound at first? That is, until you consider what he is saying.

He's not even speaking of his own Glory. This is the point of his humility.

John 12

41 Isaiah said this because[g] he saw his glory and spoke about him. 42 Nevertheless many, even of the authorities, believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they did not confess it, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; 43 for they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God.

Summary of Jesus’ Teaching

44 Then Jesus cried aloud: “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me.

He was always pointing back to the Father.

John 8: "49 Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon; but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. 50 Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is one who seeks it and he is the judge. "

reply to post by akushla99


"The more you open yourself up to opportunity, the more it becomes available to you."

EnochWasRight
reply to post by akushla99

 

"The more you open yourself up to opportunity, the more it becomes available to you."

Cuuuute...

Å99