Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. Matthew 16:24-25
“If you asked twenty good men today what the highest of the virtues, nineteen 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 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 half-hearted creatures, fooling 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 at sea. We are far to easily pleased.”
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) in “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Harper Collins, 1949) 25-26.
Welcome to the second week of Lent. Hopefully you are discovering that Lewis is right: “We are far too easily pleased.” We make earthly goals our aim when the infinite joy of Heaven is offered us.
Again, what’s this got to do with generosity? Think about it. Generosity is not about doing a few kind things for the poor and then returning to the same fleshly pursuits as before.
Don’t settle for petty, temporal rewards. Lent is the season when we learn to strengthen our desire for the right things. Self-denial is the pathway for finding your life as a conduit of God’s love.