This Life Is Not My Own

Thanks to my Secret Santa this summer, I have a really awesome book that I'm so excited to own::"A Year With C.S. Lewis." I love C.S. Lewis and this book allows me to read little segments of some of his best work every single day. What I read today was kinda interesting, but I think he has a valid point::

"If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."-from Mere Christianity 

Reading this reminded me of James 2:10, "For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God's laws." 

We tend to look at sins and rank them in a certain order to make us feel better about ourselves. We seem to think that lying isn't as bad as adultery and that stealing isn't as bad as murder. I feel like we get so consumed with setting our own rules and boundaries to what we believe God thinks, but we forget that God's ways are higher than ours. He doesn't think the same way we do and just because we see sexual sin as being worse than lying or stealing, doesn't mean that God sees it that way. We like to think that God sees things the same way that we do, but the truth is, He doesn't because He is God and we are not.

It was striking to see C.S. Lewis say that a regular church goer might be closer to hell than a prostitute, but I believe his statement could be quite true.