20 November 2020

Luther and Lewis

How strange this saying sounds, ‘I die daily.’...But not every man knows and understand what he means, or what this dying is, or how it comes to pass, that he always carries death around his neck and is unceasingly tormented by it so that he feels more of death than of life. And yet at the same time he says he has the honour or glory of eternal life, although he has only a dim feeling of it, and often none at all. Thus there is a constant struggling and striving between life and death, sin and sanctity, a good and an evil conscience, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, faith and doubt; in short God and the devil, heaven and hell.—Martin Luther, Sermon, 1532

It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore.And how should Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.—C. S. Lewis, Business of Heaven, p. 289.

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