I came across this while looking for something else, it is the end of my very first "proper sermon" while on my first placement during training, a little idealistic perhaps, (who... me?):
"We are all of us somewhere on the spectrum of enquiry, on our journey of faith, somewhere between a society that tells us that the material has all the answers and an inner consciousness that tells us otherwise. And all the while God is waiting to be invited more and more into our lives.
But what does it take to fully accept the call of Christ on our lives, what does it take to follow him, and is the price too high to pay?
CS Lewis puts it as follows:
“It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to his personality, that I begin to have a real personality of my own.
Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes everyday and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre 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 only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
The key is “to look for Christ”… “to turn to Christ” .. to accept Christ as the way, the truth and life - we will not do it in our own strength.
When we turn to Christ we have the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit…. there with us every step of the way. We may not always recognise it, but we do.
We take this journey together as the body of Christ, the royal priesthood, the community of believers and with all the angels, archangels and all the company of heaven as our support."
