CS Lewis on praising God

Last updated on: September 3, 2015 at 5:03 am by Gerald McDermott

CS Lewis on praising God 2015-09-03T05:03:58-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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Is God an egotist?

Why does He repeatedly tell us to praise Him?

Jonathan Edwards had his answer for this in The End for Which God Created the World: God’s glory and our joy. God knows that a life of praise brings us into the joy of the Trinity.

CS Lewis said something similar. When the psalmists tell us to praise God they “were doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. . . . We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. . . . Lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are . . . because the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.”

This is one of the many fascinating peeks into CS Lewis’ personal spiritual life that Lyle Dorsett provides in his S eeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of CS Lewis (Brazos).

Dorsett reports that Lewis thought our experience of God, and of His beauty, comes especially when we worship in the liturgy with others. Lewis was “devoted to corporate worship and prayer. He saw community worship in one’s particular church as indispensable to spiritual health and growth. In addition to maintaining his routine of regular worship at College Chapel, or Dean’s Prayers as he called it, he felt constrained to attend his parish church on Sundays.”

Lewis wrote that it is it is in corporate worship that “God communicates His presence to men. . . . For many people at many times the ‘fair beauty of the Lord’ is revealed chiefly or only while they worship Him together.”

This is the only book that narrates in full the details of Lewis’ spiritual development–such as Lewis’ spiritual direction by Father Walter Adams. It is a rich read.

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