on the walk

Here is a bit of what Lewis says on the subject of choosing life. He is unapologetic that living a godly life leads to rewards. The rewards we seek through sin pale in comparison with the good rewards that God desires to give us through the life God offers. (Let us be clear this is not what many popular preaching today says about how God wants to bless us. Notice we are talking here about the good rewards that God desires to give us, not the base rewards like money and comfort that we desires from God. If someone tells you what to do so that God will make you rich and perpetually happy, they are lying. I don’t need to name names. If they tell you that, they are lying.)

Here it is.

If you asked twenty men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians 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 ideal 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 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 the 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 desire, 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. We must not be troubled by the unbelievers when they say that this promise of rewards 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 desire that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man a mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not a mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is a mercenary; a general who fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.

Doesn’t that make such wonderful sense. The rewards for life God’s way are simply the fullness of that life. When we love as God calls us we are rewarded with relationships full of love. When we give up our own desires we are rewarded with a spirit of contentment.

We are offered a chance to choose life and instead we choose junk.

on the walk

-Ethan

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