C.S. Lewis: Wholly His

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Then He said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. Luke 9:23

“When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”

C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (Samizdat University Press: Quebec) 26.

Denying yourself is setting aside your desires.

A good practice for this is fasting. Take a few meals a week and skip them to fast from food. In those moments, ask the Spirit to show you what the “clamour of self-will” looks like and root it out. God won’t do it for you.

It’s like weeding the soil of our hearts, and we all get weeds. All of us.

This shapes our generosity because when self-will is rooted out, we become more the people God desires us to become. His Spirit in place of self-will, makes us into generous conduits of spiritual and material blessing.

The tricky part is that self-will looks different for all of us.

We tend to desire different things. Except if we walk into an In-N-Out Burger, then we may be on the same page. Anyway, when we exchange our self-will for what God’s desires, we become better selves and more wholly His.

God, we set aside our desires. Make us wholly yours and more ourselves than ever. Amen.