Blog

Some of you will recognize that phrase as the title of an essay written by C.S. Lewis. If you have never had the privilege of reading it, take an hour at some point in your day to stop and meditate on this classic piece of writing. You might not grasp all the concepts, but you will be better informed for having tried, and if you apply what he wrote, you’ll be becoming a better person and a better friend. Both in and out of the church, people have recognized that character is not given at birth, it is formed by our life choices.

Some people love surprises. I’m not one of them. When I’m going to get a snack and I ask Diane if she wants anything, sometimes she’ll say, “Surprise me.” I don’t say that. It’s not that I’m never surprised. I’m surprised quite often. I think I know how things are going to be and then they go another direction and I’m surprised. I like predictable better than surprises but that doesn’t mean my life is predictable.

That’s the title of a book by J.B. Phillips. In the introduction he wrote, “Many men and women are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish or, as the old-fashioned would say, “godless,” but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough to “account for” life.

It’s a one-word prayer in the Hebrew, we translate it with two words, “Remember me.” It is prayed by Job, Samson, Hannah, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, a Psalmist and perhaps most famously, by the thief on the cross.

Usually when we think of drunkenness we think of the overuse of alcohol. Paul wrote that we should not “be drunk with wine,” rather we should be filled with the Spirit. There are other ways to be drunk. Some people are drunk in their thinking, in other words, they are not “sober-minded.” There are many people that have never been drunk with alcohol that have crazy thinking. When we are not thinking Biblically, we are not sober-minded.