Getting to Know Jesus

 I love C.S. Lewis' book, The Great Divorce! I love it because it expounds so beautifully on the ideas of what makes heaven and hell. It illustrates in little parables a great deal of personalities and how we often miss what's right in front of our eyes.  Near the end of the book, we meet a heavenly angel named, George MacDonald, who is actually an author/preacher from real life; someone who C.S. Lewis greatly admired and studied his teachings thoroughly. 

Because of this introduction in The Great Divorce, I became curious about George MacDonald's books. I just finished reading, Getting to Know Jesus. It reminds me a little of Henry Drummond's writings because his were mostly a bound copy of published sermons - and it's the same with the book I just finished with Mr. MacDonald.

I love this part in Chapter 4 about God being truly in our hearts and us in His:

"The fact is, men of old knew their scriptures, yes - and they would talk from morning until night but they had neither heard the voice of God at any time nor seen His shape, and had not His word abiding in them. And therefore, they did not know the Lord when He came. That applies to all forms of truth: that those who have not the truth in them cannot know the truth when it comes to them. Not being true, they cannot recognize that which is not of their sort...."

"Do you think it is possible to be true-hearted and to refuse the truth thus brought down just into the very depths of the soul? Oh a man who is only anxious to save his soul never sees anything of this! If he does not love the truth, if he neither loves God nor would be ready to die for his fellow men, if he is only occupied with his own individual being and its well-being - he can know nothing about this. And he cannot know the kingdom of heaven or the liberty of the sons of God and the obedience of the truth...."

"We are far from the liberty of the children of God yet. Only when we have come to feel that life is precious to us, and only because we are the children of the Living One, and that we are hand and heart with Him: Only then can a man be thoroughly righteously be able to say, 'It is worthwhile to live.'"

"Some of you have learned that 'self' is a thing that is loathsome to you. You have begun to see that IF there come NOT into you a high power of purity and deliverance, a presence to your consciousness of the Living God by Whom and in Whom you live, your whole nature is as something from which you recoil! For it was never meant for you to live in the consciousness of SELF. And no man can live in that but must go mad- but must turn in and in upon himself until he goes mad... or goes out of being."