Thought for the Week

Do you long to be more Christ-like? To have more fruit of the Spirit in your life: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:22)? I’ve been doing some self-reflection on this fruit and assessed that while I could use more of everything, my Achilles heels are longsuffering and gentleness.

As much as I pray to be loving with others, I still sometimes get irritated, snippy, and impatient with people. I really want to stop that! But there are obviously “rats in my cellar” as C.S. Lewis talked about. I could say that I become unloving because something came out of left-field and took me by surprise like lights being flicked on in a dark cellar. The rats scurry in the light, but it isn’t the light that produced the rats in me. They were already there. The suddenness of the light simply revealed them. (Paraphrased from C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, McMillan Publishing, 1952), pp. 164-165.)

How do I get rid of those rats?

Read more about the process of becoming one with Christ here…

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? …

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

“Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35, 38–39).