C.S. Lewis on loving God through loving people

For our sermon series Love Actually, which we wrapped up this past weekend, we’ve been reading through C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves on the four types of love the Greeks identified: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (passion), and agape (charity). One of the anxious questions that comes up around agape is whether loving God amounts to turning away from our earthly loves. When we go to heaven, will we somehow stop caring about the people we cared about in this life because we’re completely focused on God? Lewis has an amazing passage in his agape chapter that I wanted to just read as part of my sermon yesterday until my sermon took a completely different direction. So I thought I would share it below.From C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, page 139:

We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we do now.