Where Do You Find Yourself?

In preparing to preach on Mark 8:31 – 9:1 and in my studies I ran across this quote from CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity. It gave me much to think about when it came to this passage…and to the scope of my life.


The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become…our real selves are all waiting for us in him…The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surrounding and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call “Myself” becomes merely the meeting-place for trains of events which I never started and I cannot stop. What I call “My wishes” become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts…It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His personality, that I finally begin to have a real personality all of my own…[Nevertheless], you must not go to Christ for the sake of [a new self]. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all…

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, the death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and the death of your whole body in the end: Submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.