Christmas Cheer – Songs from St Petes and Readings from CS Lewis that will make your week!

We have some wonderfully talented people in St Petes…one of whom is David Henderson – who every year produces a wee Christmas video….here Dave and various others equally talented people from the congregation sing a new song – one that he wrote for the occasion….love it…enjoy .  I have also included some incredible quotes from CS Lewis and a couple of other songs sung by Dave and Laura….as well as finishing with a classie…if these do not move you ain’t got no soul and you probably don’t have a pulse (at least spiritually!)…

 

While listening to this for the first time I was reading C S Lewis’s  The Problem of Pain and thought the following quotes were just so superb for Christmas:

“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love’, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. ‘Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.’14 We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well pleased’. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.” (from “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics” by C. S. Lewis)

Whilst reading this I also listened to my favourite rendition of my favourite carol.  I’m not sure I know of any piece of music which is as beautiful as this – its on a level with Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or St John’s Passion! Enjoy Dave and Laura…

 

“Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty—of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive.” (from “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics” by C. S. Lewis)

 

“the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God.” (from “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics” by C. S. Lewis)

This time its Dave with Megan and Max, whose ability to make the violin sing always astounds me!

 

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.” (from “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics” by C. S. Lewis)

And finally back to this year’s offering – its joy and beauty combined!  Thats what Christ brings….

I hope you get as much joy, stimulation and pleasure as I have from these songs and readings…