The Weight of Glory

Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it.

When Lewis said this I understood it as him saying not to approach God with a decision to live for Him when your intentions are to live to get benefits such as rewards for doing good deeds for God because that is not what God will call a “good and faithful servant.” Every person who calls themselves a Christian should want to do good deeds for others or help preserve the earth because they want to honor God and glorify his name.  I was with someone who kept pointing out to me all the good deeds she was doing such as giving to the less fortunate and leaving large tips at restaurants that we would go to. It made me wonder who this person was trying to please. Who was she trying to get praise from? As a Christian we should not seek praise from human beings, but from the heavenly father. Going along with this Lewis states the following

Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?

In that quote some more of Lewis’ sassiness comes out when he ends the paragraph asking who would want to be a light bulb. The rest of the quote really stresses that earthly fame does not matter because it seems to be coming from hell instead of heaven. He keeps a good balance between the fact that praise is not bad as shown because all Christians want to hear God say to them “well done my good and faithful servant. This is similar to what we talked about in class about children and how they will often come up to their mother with a picture that they just colored. They may turn to their mom and say look mommy, look how pretty it is. Isn’t it pretty. Of course the mother will proclaim oh my goodness it’s beautiful! I love it! Would a wonderful picture! Good job etc.

That child wanted their mother to praise them for the hard work they had done on their pictures just as we want to get praise from God for the hard work we do. However, our goal in life should be to glorify God in everything we do daily. This was a good reminder for me to read from Lewis’ sermon.