Quotable Lewis

As I was preparing the message a few weeks ago, I came across two of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes.

“If you had gone to Buddha and asked him, ‘Are you the son of Bramah?’ he would have replied, ‘My son, you are still in the vale of delusion.’ If you had gone to Socrates and said, ‘Are you Zeus?’ he would have laughed. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, ‘Are you Allah?’ he would first have rent his clothes and then cut of your head… The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question…. the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic … I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Christ: ‘I can accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Jesus up as a fool, you can spit on Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.” –Mere Christianity

The second is this:

“The things Jesus says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, “This is the truth about the universe, this is the way you ought to go.’ But Jesus says, “I am the Truth, the Way, the Life.’ He says, ‘No man can reach absolute reality except through Me….’ He says, ‘If you are ashamed of me, if when you hear my call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything keeps you from God and from me, whatever it is, throw it away…Come to Me everyone who is carrying a heavy load and I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out, I can do that . . . do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole Universe.’”

     – God in the Dock.     

Simple. Clear. Thought provoking.