Holiness is Wholeness: According to C.S. Lewis


C. S. Lewis had this to say about holiness: "How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year's end?" I want to meet the real thing every day. The first time in 2004 was great. Let's make it happen every single day that the Lord has made!


Recently, an author has put together a book that argues that even more key to understanding C. S. Lewis than joy is holiness. The author says that Lewis had a view of holiness that fits with wholeness. I am not sure he adequately proves it. But what Lewis says about what happens to words is very applicable to holiness.



What I really enjoy in the book about Lewis' view of holiness is the explanation for what happens to great words like that of holiness, that make it rather dull instead of exciting. Good words, in Lewis' words, suffer "verbicide." Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that is violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden." Lewis further says: "We cannot stop the verbicides. The most we can do is not imitate them."

I am afraid that it is obvious that holiness has suffered verbicide in the past. I am now trying to not imitate it and to avoid what is forbidden, not just by law but also by Scripture. May we all want to know what this word meant before verbicide. God bless your day!



In Christ,


Pastor Jon