Scott continues the book of Matthew through concepts of promises made to Christ and the deeper meanings behind our spiritual longings and desires. The discussion opens with a look at promises beyond the initial commitment to Christ and raises thought-provoking questions about the sufficiency of heaven without Him. They discuss the significance of God's perspective on humanity, particularly whether we are viewed as a delight or a terror.

The conversation takes a deeper turn into the themes of humility, human interactions, and the transformative power of learning and desire. By reflecting on insights from C.S. Lewis's "The Weight of Glory," the discussion highlights our inherent longing for divine approval and the symbolic nature of biblical promises. The episode emphasizes that while initial obedience may start as mechanical, it can evolve into genuine desire and fulfillment.

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Insight Sheet Blank:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qwk3aIasNQvtcWZvt5QVhZT4FVfZPrQV/view?usp=sharing

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Key Topics Discussed:

• Promises Made to Christ
• Heaven’s Sufficiency Without Christ
• God’s Perspective on Humanity
• True Humility and Praise
• Transformation of Obedience to Desire
• Longing for Eternal Fulfillment
• Nature of Glory and Divine Approval
• Participatory Beauty and Human Longing
• Encountering Puzzling Scriptural Elements
• Summary and Symbolism of Scriptural Promises

Hi. If you're looking for greater hope, assurance, and confidence through the shifting sands of life, then join me on today's episode as we dig deep into the bible to discover rock solid truth for life and living from the God of the bible. I'm your host, Scott Keffer. Hi, and welcome to today's episode. As always, for a deeper experience, you can go to the show notes and download the blank insight sheet. Fill in the blanks along with the group. Depending on how you're listening to this, there'll be a link to the episode website at beholdingbibletruth.com, and a sheet with the answers is included as well. Enjoy today's episode.

Gonna do something a little different today? Should be fun. Because I was thinking about resurrection. We looked at resurrection and all of the benefits stack up for each of us as a result of the resurrection. And you could wrap them all together into one package when you think about what is it that we, we receive as a result of the resurrection a result of being a Christ. You could put it into a box and call it glory. The glory glory that is Christ. So it says that the word became flesh. The word in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and the word became flesh and tabernacle, literally tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the father, full of grace and truth.

So it's if no man has seen God at any time in first John, but the only begotten God, he has brought him out in I don't know. Into the open. So so the glory has been revealed to Christ. And he prays in John 17 before he goes, we would share his glory. Right? We would share in his glory. And then Ephesians tells us that we are to be to the praise of his glory. The praise of his glory. You think, what the heck is this glory? What is the word glory? Glory essentially It the word doc's time.

And it's glory mean wait. It means weighty, And it speaks about the the, death and the the the value of the pain as well as the recognition goes along with it. The idea of weightiness of, the thing. So you think about that death that god would be glorious. God would see glory. This idea that we would share his glory or that we would be to the praise of his glory. Crazy. It's just crazy.

Damn.

So I thought

about this, and then have you read but never heard CS Lewis? How many read is CS Lewis anything? And once you read one thing, then you wanna read another. And I read a book called the weight of his glory, which included the weight of his glory and a number of other radio addresses that he did in the 1940 where he was speaking to the nation Oh, great. Not he had talked to the world as well about various issues. Great great apologist. Just great in terms of, his fiction. Great in terms of his nonfiction as well. Okay. So I would read through I would say to I've talked to Josh a little bit about this, and I said, sea of Lewis is similar if you think about wisdom and the scriptures.

I said, number 1, you read it and you think, what the heck did that say? It seemed like it said something really important, but I don't get it. Level number 2 is you say, I I get it. Level number 3 is you can share it. Level number 4 is this he actually wrote this. He actually

I want it.

So takes a while to kinda go through there. Thinking about his way to glory.

Thank you.

And he originally preached Jeremy in, 1942, and it became it showed up in in couple other booklets as I had a on on the front there, and I thought this would really be, important for us to do this. So what I want you to do, I put some quotes from the address on the front. But if I were you, I would just turn over your while you hear this. Play it. You take some notes, and then enter. What I'll do is ask you, well, you know, tell us some things you got from it, then we'll go through and look at some of the particular quote, you know, quotes pulled out. Amazing. So we're gonna have it on on the screen.

There And it was originally done designed just you heard. There I did add close close tabs so you can, you know, like, following words would be on there, but, it's good to just listen. Right? And it's not important you know, the most important wisdom often takes many surveys. Just take many times through it. So take what you can get from it, and then we'll talk about it at the end. That make sense? Cool. Let's see if I can

make this work or is it it's make me

oh, hold on here. I'm gonna do this. I'm grateful at the boot camp that I don't do any of this. That'd be fine. And you would be grateful as well that I don't do any of this. Good. Nothing. Yeah.

Don't do this. Don't go, please. What are you doing? Listen.

It was reproduced as a pamphlet by SPCK and later appeared in Transposition and Other Addresses 1949. They asked for a paper, 1962

going good.

And then in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 1998. If you ask 20 good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, 19 of them would reply, unselfishness. But if you had 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 idea 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 deny ourselves and 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 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 desires not too strong, but too weak. We are halfhearted creatures falling 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 of the sea, We are far too easily pleased. We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things.

Money is not the natural reward of love, which is why we call a man 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 mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is 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. There is also a third case, which is more complicated. An enjoyment of Greek poetry is certainly a proper and not a mercenary reward for learning Greek. But only those who have reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience that this is so.

The schoolboy beginning Greek grammar cannot look forward to his adult enjoyment of Sophocles as a lover looks forward to marriage or a general to victory. He has to begin by working for Mark or to escape punishment or to please his parents or, at best, in the hope of a future good which he cannot at present imagine or desire. His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary. The reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural or proper reward, but he will not know that until he has got it. Of course, he gets it gradually. Enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the other began. But it is just insofar as he approaches the reward that he becomes able to desire it for its own sake. Indeed, the power of so desiring it is itself a preliminary reward.

The Christian in relation to heaven is in much the same position as this schoolboy. Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship. About we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way and cannot even begin to know it at all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Adjust in proportion as the desire grows, our fear, lest it should be a mercenary desire, will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day. Poetry replaces grammar. Gospel replaces law. Longing transforms obedience as gradually as the tide lifts to ground in ship.

But there is one other important similarity between the schoolboy and ourselves. If he is an imaginative boy, he will quite probably be reveling in the English poets and romances suitable to his age sometime before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of the same sort. He may even be neglecting his Greek to read Shelley and Swinburne in secret. In other words, the desire which Greek is really going to gratify already exists in him and is attached to the objects which seem to him quite unconnected with Xenophon and the verbs in me. And now if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object and would even appear as the rival of that object. And this, I think, is just what we find. No doubt there is one point in which my analogy of the schoolboy breaks down. The English poetry which he reads when he ought to be doing Greek exercises may be just as good as the Greek poetry to which the exercises are leading him so that in fixing on Milton instead of journeying on to Aeschylus, his desire is not embracing a false object.

But our case is very different. If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at least only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy it. In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, of which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you, The secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence. The secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and effect to laugh at ourselves. The secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.

We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it. What he remembered would turn out to be itself for remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them. It was not in them.

It only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things, the beauty, the memory of our own past, are good images of what we really desire. But if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself. They are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am. But remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.

And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness, which has been laid upon us for nearly a 100 years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent inner voice. Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of progress or creative evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sup to your sense of exile in earth as it is. And next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving us up to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all.

And the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, forever and ever. Hence, all the nonsense that mister Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith and Bergson's remark that B'Elavit al is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death. As if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics. Do what they will then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? Nor does the being hungry proves that we have bread. But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man's physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread. He may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic.

But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, although I do not believe, I wish I did, that my desire for paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her, but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called falling in love occurred in a sexless world. Here then is the design, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies. Our sacred books give us some account of the object. It is, of course, a symbolical account. Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is, therefore, just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself.

Heaven is not really full of jewelry any more than it is really the beauty of nature or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to God than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries. The natural appeal of this authoritative imagery is, to me, at first, very small. At first, I did chills rather than awakes my desire, and that is just what I ought to expect. If Christianity could tell me no more of the far off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself. If it has more to give me, I must expect it to be less immediately attractive than my own stuff. Sophocles at first seems dull and cold to the boy who has only reached Shelley.

If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent. For it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know. The promises of scripture may very roughly be reduced to 5 heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ. Secondly, that we shall be like Him. Thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have glory. Fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained. And, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe, Ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God's temple.

The first question I ask about these promises is, why any of them except the first? Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only. I think the answer turns again on the nature of symbols. For though it may escape our notice at first glance, yet it is true that any conception of being with Christ, which most of us can now form, will not be very much less symbolical than the other promises, for it will smuggle in ideas of proximity and space and loving conversation as we now understand conversation. And it will probably concentrate on the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of his deity. And, in fact, we find that those Christians who attend solely to this first promise always do fill it up with very earthly imagery indeed, in fact, with hymenial or erotic imagery. I am not for a moment condemning such imagery. I heartily wish I could enter into it more deeply than I do and pray that I yet shall. But my point is that this also is only a symbol, Like the reality in some respects, but unlike it in others, and therefore needs correction from the different symbols in the other promises.

The variation of the promises does not mean that anything other than God will be our ultimate bliss. But because god is more than a person, unless we should imagine the joy of his presence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love with all its narrowness and strain and monotony, a dozen changing images correcting and relieving each other are supplied. I turn next to the idea of glory. There is no getting away from the fact that this idea is very prominent in the New Testament and in early Christian writings. Salvation is constantly associated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendor like the sun and stars. All this makes no immediate appeal to me at all, and in that respect, I fancy I am a typical modern. Glory suggests 2 ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity.

As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion, and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?

Right.

When I began to look into this matter, I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report, but not fame conferred by our fellow creatures, fame with God, approval, or, I might say, appreciation by God. And then when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural. Nothing can eliminate from the parable, the divine accolade, well done, thou good and faithful servant. With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child. And nothing is so obvious in a child, not in a conceited child, but in a good child, has its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently, what I had mistaken for humility had all these years prevented me from understanding what is, in fact, the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures.

Nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior, the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parroted in our human ambition or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment, a very, very short moment before this happened during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self approval, she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be. And the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero's book.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself. It is not for her to band a compliment with her sovereign. I can imagine someone saying that he dislikes my idea of heaven as a place where we are patted on the bank, But proud misunderstanding is behind that dislike. In the end, that face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God himself, it is not. How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.

Indeed, how we think of him is of no importance, except insofar as it is related to how he thinks of us. It is written that we shall stand before him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God, to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness, to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son. It seems impossible. A weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. And now notice what is happening.

If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire, which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connection at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connection is perfectly clear. A glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants, I have begun to learn better what I really wanted. When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keith as the journey homeward to habitual self. You know what I mean.

For a few minutes, we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us. Her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please. We may stay if we can.

Nobody marks us. A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment, the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness, I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves, but we pine. The sense that in this universe, we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality is part of our inconsolable secret.

And, surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being noticed by God, but this is almost the language of the New Testament. Saint Paul promises to those who love God, not as we should expect, that they will know him, but that they will be known by him. 1 Corinthians chapter 8 verse 3. It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all time? But it is dreadfully re echoed in another passage of the New Testament.

There, we are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, I never knew you. Depart from me. In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside, repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently then, a lifelong nostalgia, a longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, To be on the inside of some door, which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old age.

And this brings me to the other sense of glory, glorious brightness, splendor, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun. We are to be given the morning star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the morning star already. You can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? But we want so much more, something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it.

We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words, to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves. That, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehood. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul, but it can't. They tell us that beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into a human face, but it won't or not yet. Or if we take the imagery of scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the morning star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.

At present, we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of mourning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see, but all the leaves of the New Testament are wrestling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which nature is only the first skinned. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into nature. Nature is mortal. We shall outlive her.

When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol, but it is the symbol scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through nature beyond her into that splendor which she fitfully reflects. And in there, in beyond nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God. But the mind, and still more the body, receives life from him at a 1,000 removes through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far off results of those energies which God's creative rapture implanted in matter when he made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures. And even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management.

What would it be to taste that the fountainhead, that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As Saint Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will flow over into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetite, we cannot imagine this, Terence Voluptatis. And I warn everyone most seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned to drive out thoughts even more misleading, thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body was made for the lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mount. Meanwhile, the cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning.

A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great captain inside. The following him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter. It is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load or weight or burden of my neighbor's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the banks of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long, we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities. It is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of Annette. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. Immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind, and it is, in fact, the merriest kind which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously. No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner. No mere tolerance or indulgence, which parodies love as strippancy parodies merriment. Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way.

For in him, Christ, very Latitan, the glorifier and the glorified. Glory himself is truly hidden.

I mean, I may like to hear that one again. Yeah. You can, but what I want you to do is write down 3 things. Write down 3 things you got from that. Well, guys, you want to be rich in the worst in multiple choice. Can I just do a multiple choice? Right? Not there. So let's have one. What what'd you get? Hold on.

Let me get this wackadoo going. Okay.

One that I education use silence.

Education use silence.

Is. I have someone with first information.

Education have been used to sign up. This was 19 or now it's been phone to an art. Well,

I like the, 5 promises

that he said to Christ.

I'd be like him to let more be entertained. You have a position.

God. Right? Hope you like him.

Have glory. Entertain position and have

She said good and have a statement and, authority. Right? Initial visual position. So it was private promises.

Scott, I noted that as well. But a little further down the page, he asked the question, the rhetorical question, is there anything needed beside number 1?

Right.

And I guess for me, when I start to hear the esoteric discussions and questions about heaven, this is my fallback position. Is there what else is there beside number 1? But he suggests that there are other things that is new to me or a new perspective, I should say,

which is clearly. Right? He said this thing. Right? Mhmm. It is that price, you know, and everything, you have nothing more than either with price below. But there is more. There is more. Interesting. God promises.

Yes.

Well, it's like that question that says, if every good thing is in heaven, but Jesus isn't, is that enough? You know, it drives the question of what number 1 is. You know? Is it Christ alone, or would we be satisfied with heaven if it was everything good, but Christ wasn't there?

That's good news. It's not that you don't acknowledge that the gods never leave.

And he said it's not important what we've got. You know? In comparison, David, what God thinks about me.

What God thinks

about you. What God thinks about you? And the fact that he's either by inexpressible, delight or a terror. It's either a delight or a terror. Anybody else? Yes.

No. The the phrase perfect humility dispenses with modesty. I was trying to figure out what that would help.

Praise of what?

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

Yeah. I mean, he has a dawn of we receive God's praise, it's a prideful thing. It becomes a it becomes something that causes us to bow in in humility. Right? When the greater blesses the lesser, that sense, this is an of self adoration. This is the adoration of the only one that matters. Right? The glory is reported by God. Who else?

So I like the part where he referred to you're surrounded by immortals, you know, in other human beings. And it brings brings on the message

to love your neighbor as yourself.

What do

you think about that? I was looking at logging, transforms, and obedience.

Logging. No. It's actually obedience transforms, makes a lot. Well, when I don't not what I heard. Yeah. That that the the picture, which is an interesting one, but saying you were agree in order to read the great writer. And at first, it's McNair and Paul. It's obedience.

And that as time goes on, you start to acquire more than I'm just doing this to learn and read and reading the great writers just to read them. At some point in time, you begin to actually get the desire, and you start to see the beauty in the great writing. So the the obedience, the mechanical part turns into it, and it says the reward is not here. The first reward is longing. Then that they transforms our desire. So first, we read scripture, we memorize scripture, we start to seek god. As a person, it's just mechanical. Feels like, I don't I'm really long.

You know? And then it starts to transform into a desire and a great reward is that actually belong to the deer pants or as the deer pants or whatever so my soul does for me. That make sense? So the the obedience, you see it in a child that, you know, at some point, you just do it to do it, and then at some point, it's the desire to to please. The desire, the longing to please the one. Does that make sense? That makes sense. That's why Lewis takes a couple of times through for a buyer's exhibit. Yes.

And and similar to patients who want you to do, you do right,

and

eventually, doing the will and then your emotion.

Yeah. But but I start to desire it. Right? And even the prayer, Lord, help me to long for you. Because at birth, we really don't. We really don't. And and then we're even satisfied, you say, to read it. You know? Or in some sense,

he would be, hey.

You know? And he starts to rip off the the the authors he talks about. I mean, he does. It's like reading comic books and think we're reading great literature. Right? At first, you have to read, and you just start to read, and then you desire more. Well,

I think depending on what kind of childhood or early adulthood you've had, what really blessed me was he's had a couple quotes. We are welcomed into the heart of things, and but we are now on the outside of the door. And someday, we we called in and welcomed. That that just really spoke to me.

Outside of the door. One day, we will be welcomed. Yeah. Of course, there's a lot lot lot lot lot. So one thing I put down there is where he reminds us we're far too easily pleased. Right? That we get that our desires are not it's not the fact that we we desire too much. We desire too little. Right? We're far referred to easily pleased.

And so the first, reward is the desire that god grants. The first reward is our desire for more. And that we're made for heaven, and that would just trans trans temporal. So we have this false desire for the trans temporal. We think it's that.

Yeah.

We think it's that. And he says that that memories of the good old days or memories of a past time or memories of when we, you know, when we saw the sunset or memory black did that thing with the family or met. All of those are faint echoes that we are were made for something more. I think what we want is those. We wanna go back to those. We wanna go to those. And he's saying, no. They're pointing to something that doesn't that isn't here.

Something grander and something greater. That greater longing. Right? And he said it's it's the scent of a flower you've never smelled or the actual of a tune you've never heard or the news of a of a country you've never been to. That's because there is, there's more. I picture that there's more. That the nostalgia and the remnants of the reminder of those things, those are reminder that we're made for something greater. We don't long for those things there. We long for those things there.

Make sense? And that, this idea of fame is about appreciation, and the idea that a child is wired and desires to be praised by the father. Not a bad thing. That's a good thing. Self adoration is is a, word goes bad. This is where someone someone prays with us. We long for that. Right? My dad never said I'm proud of you. I long for well done.

I long for the well done. That's glory. That's the nature of glory. It's the it's the well done, which is really amazing. And then, you know, lastly, for me, the this idea of or brightness that when we see beauty, when we hear a great, composition, we read something that's amazing, we hear a symphony, we see a sun we whatever kinda blows you away, that thing never welcomes you. You're never part of it. It's always separate from you. Right? And that inside, we have this longing to be part of it, you know, to to be a part of the beauty, to be a part of the sunset, to be a part of that thing, but it's it never never welcomes you.

It never includes you, and it never knows you. But in points, God, whose glory is going to welcome you to be in the glories, to be a part of the story. It's not a story you read and want to be in, but it doesn't include you. This is a story that will know you and include you at the part of it. Right? And so it reminds us unity never knows us or includes us, but we will be known by God. And we'll be included in the glory. That that luminosity, it will share in that brightness, will share in that glory. Right? So pretty amazing, You can read it again.

You can listen to it again. It's around, and hopefully, you you, you were some light bulbs went off in terms of glory. Why do you and you got a different thought. Yeah. It it it it it's something, and it's a part of a a a greater set. There's a book called The Weight of Glory, which is a set of, you know, his all of his talks back in the 1940, and you'll see there's no difference then than there is now. It's just, you know, an acceleration of some of the forces that are worth no different. But may the God who will welcome you into his glory, if you are in Christ, may he bless you.

May he cause his face to shine upon you. May he lift up his countenance and grant you his shalom deep in your soul, in your spirit, in your body, and every inch of all that you are. May he bless you and keep you. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.

Thanks for listening. I hope you have greater hope, assurance, and confidence in your life and a deeper trust in the God of the bible and his son, Jesus Christ. Until next time, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may the lord lift up his countenance on you and give you his peace, his shalom in your soul and in your life. Until next time, may god bless you and keep you.