But for Grace...

Lynnette Horner sent this C.S. Lewis quote to me that she has framed on her desk!

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him."

~~C.S. Lewis in "The Great Divorce

WOW...now there is a thought provoking statement if there ever was one!

Grace...

“All writing comes by the grace of God.”

~~Ralph Waldo Emerson

From the writer to the reader too...

The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered, unwasted flow . . . The man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because the man is full of the divine unction.

~~POWER THROUGH PRAYER by Edward M. Bounds, Chapter 1, Men of Prayer Need

Well Said...

Here's another great insight from Jim Thompson in response to this Mark Twain quote:

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Ol' Sam Clemens knew how to spin a phrase.

I did a little reading about him, and by modern standards, his early life was a failure. That gives me hope that I might still have some future communicating my wacko ideas to others.

I love his imagery of the diffuse light becoming a luminous flash. I could compare it to the grape juice I'm drinking at the moment. The pure juice, though one of God's more remarkable creations, is almost too rich. Dilute it with water, and it just becomes weak. But dilute it with some complementary substance, and it tastes delightful.In case my comparison needs some explanation, the pure grape juice is the essence of a beautiful story. Diluting it with stylistically flavorless prose just weakens the story, rendering it unappealing. The right stylistic ingredient, though, turns the story into a gourmet's delight.