C. S. Lewis on How To Begin the Day

C. S. Lewis is always a great source of encouragement when you face the day ahead. This is especially true with regard to the Lord’s Day. In his masterful work, The Weight of Glory, Lewis make a powerful distinction between acquiescence and failure that I have often found helpful. He writes:

I do not think any efforts of my own will end, once and for all, this craving for limited liabilities,

[or] fatal reservation. Only God can [end this]. I have good faith and hope He will. Of course I don’t mean I can . . . “sit back.” What God does for us, He does in us. The process of doing it will appear to me (and not falsely) to be the daily or hourly repeated exercises of my own will in renouncing this attitude, especially each morning, for it grows all over me like a new shell each night. Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularized presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our won. We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day. Our morning prayer should be—grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.

Each day is an opportunity to begin again because grace enables us to live with hope. This Lord's Day should, of all days, be a time to seek his grace anew for the living of life to the glory of God.