Jesus said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul, all your heart, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment."
Matt 22:30-38
I have a few note cards that I keep within the pages of my Bible. I've written on them answers I feel that I've heard while praying. On one of them I've written "I'll give you vision but don't try to figure out how to get to step 25 right now. Just start at step 1." I have to remind myself of this answer often as I'm trying to run the race all on my own. I'm very glad to have this notecard in my Bible. I find myself uttering under my breath on many an occasion, "start at step 1."
Step 1: love the Lord your God with all your heart... and seek first the kingdom of God. The funny thing is that I'm growing more and more certain that there really is only one step. I would love to take all 25 steps in the direction I'm going but I don't think God has planned it that way. No matter what circumstances I find myself in, no matter what journey I see lying before me, I think His plan is to carry my down the path, I must only take one step: Love the Lord your God with all your heart... In taking this first step He does all the rest. Then you step again: Love the Lord your God with all your heart... Then you step again: Love the Lord your God with all your heart.
Is loving God with all your heart so easy peasy, just do it and done? Oh no! The Bible says that "if you love Me, keep my commandments." Now that's truly a tall order and certainly makes me feel that I am incapable of honestly loving God but I can start at step 1 and I think that's the very best place to start.
Do we need more than that? Do we need Christianity And...?
The older I get, the less I seem to think so.
My dear Wormwood,
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call 'Christianity And.' You know - Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart - an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, an inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end to itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.... We pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.
-C.S. Lewis
The Business of Heaven
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