Miracles, C.S. Lewis

I am preparing a message that I will be preaching this Sunday at the Monroe County jail (thanks, God!) and I got to thinking about death again. There is a passage in C.S. Lewis' book Miracles that has shaken me and continues to unto this day:

"But to convert this penal death into the means of eternal life - to add to its negative and preventive function a positive and saving function-it was further necessary that death should be accepted. Humanity must embrace death freely, submit to it with total humility, drink it to the dregs, and so convert it into that mystical death which is the secret of life."

He then goes onto say that Christ himself was the one who defeated and redeemed death and that his death can be our own. He is the one that, on the cross, made death my friend. He is the one who lives so that penal death may die and that I can partake of death so that I can know life.

The only way I can know life that is truly Life is to continually, with all humility and by all means necessary, drink death until I am staggering in drunkenness. Drink of it until I have died to me and until I am alive to Him and Him alone.

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