Desire

"There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven;
but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart
of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.... It is the secret
signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable
want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our
friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our
deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or
work.... All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just
beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming
when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have
attained it." - C.S. Lewis

Slackers

Daniel Akin included this C.S. Lewis quote in his 2009 "Armed for the Battle" manual:

"God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself." (Mere Christianity, ch. 12)

Love vs Unselfishness

John Piper says that this is "One of the most important paragraphs I ever read: First paragraph of C.S. Lewis' 'The Weight of Glory" [link]

"If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."