I will be posting a number of excerpts taken from the book by Charles C. Ryrie entitled The Holy Spirit, Revised and Expanded. Ryrie is a Bible scholar and annotator of the Ryrie Study Bible. He served as professor of systematic theology at Dallas Theological Seminary. Students of Scripture will benefit from his concise, practical study of the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

I close C. S. Lewis’ comments with this one that speaks to the vital issue of human wickedness, or sin:

“Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one who is always making impossible demands and always inexplicably angry.”

It is vital to our ultimate salvation that we understand humility before our Creator God and His boundless grace and love that has provided for our eternal communion with Him through Jesus Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit who guides our sanctification, overcoming our human wickedness, learning to live in Christ.

Lewis makes a number of excellent statements about pride, which I am including:

“According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. . . . Pride is competitive by its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.

“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man but enmity to God.

“In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. . . . For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

Pride blocks the Counsel of the Holy Spirit, even His entry into our human spirit and soul.

I am sharing comments from C. S. Lewis concerning Hope:

“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”

We are blessed by the boundless love of God to have the opportunity to be in intimate, personal communion with Him through His Holy Spirit. It is already a blessing in our time that we will have for eternity in the New Creation in His presence, but it is not yet fully accomplished in our time. Yes, we are blessed to aim at Heaven and are meant to do so!

C. S. Lewis comments on being drawn into a personal relation with the triune God when we pray:

“An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him [Italics added]. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him [Italics added] which is pushing him on - the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life . . . he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.”

The Being inside the praying man is the indwelling Holy Spirit, restored to repentant believers by the living Jesus Christ who redeemed us by being a sin sacrifice and sent as He promised upon His resurrection the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And the interactive communion we can have with God through the indwelling Holy Spirit is available to us in our time.

C. S. Lewis distinguishes between begetting and making, important distinctions:

“One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God ‘begotten, not created’; and it adds ‘begotten by his Father before all worlds.’ Will you please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something that happened before nature was created at all, before time began. ‘Before all worlds’ Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?

“We don’t use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers, and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set - or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver, he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.

“Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.”

I now share a thought-provoking reading by Lewis on Joy:

“I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. . . . There was no doubt that Joy was a desire (and, insofar as it was also simultaneously a good, it was also a kind of love). But a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. . . . It may be asked whether my terror was at all relieved by the thought that I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood. Not in the least. No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy. If anything, it was the reverse. I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person. For all I knew, the total rejection of what I called Joy might be one of the demands, might be the very first demand, He would make upon me. There was no strain of music from within, no smell of eternal orchids at the threshold, when I was dragged through the doorway. No kind of desire was present at all. . . But what, in conclusion, of Joy? For that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.”

C. S. Lewis has given us the truth of Joy, Christ in me!

From Lewis’ reading, “The Universe:”

“We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case, and in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall, or staircase, or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.”

I suggest that Lewis has identified the Holy Spirit as the being inside ourselves.

C. S. Lewis wrote a book entitled The Joyful Christian. It consists of 127 readings, and several relate to my own writings, which I will share on my blog with comments. The first is from his reading “Right and Wrong.”

“Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature,’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature,’ they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.”

Believers have been blessed by the love and grace of God through the sin sacrifice of the living Jesus Christ to have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit restored. The Spirit of God serves as Counselor and Helper, guiding our choices in life and discerning right and wrong. But as Lewis states, we have also been given free will and can choose to obey or to disobey the Law of Right and Wrong. Recall from Genesis 2:8-9; 16-17 that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They did, and humanity suffered from the Fall until the resurrected Jesus sent as He promised the Holy Spirit to be restored to mankind as an indwelling when in repentance. We have the choice.

Johnson clarifies indwelling and infilling, two actions of the Holy Spirit I addressed in Chapter Four of my second book, The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story.

“Indwelling refers to the Holy Spiri’s residence in the life of a believer upon their confession of faith. When we are saved, the Holy Spirit moves in!

“Ephesians 3:16-17 ‘I pray that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.’

“Infilling refers to a secondary act in which the Holy Spirit ‘baptizes’ or ‘fills’ the life of a person AFTER confession of faith. When you receive salvation, God then invites you into a deeper experience with His Holy Spirit!

“Acts 2:4 ‘All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.’”

In my books and blogs I have endeavored to present in compelling manner that the redemptive, sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross of crucifixion restored to repentant believers the indwelling of the Holy Spirit so that we can be in two-way communion with God’s Spirit that was lost by the Fall. The Holy Spirit was sent as promised by the resurrected, living Jesus Christ. Our minds are restored to an intimate, personal communion with the Mind of God.