Our sense of gratitude for the Lord’s mercies ought to create a ready acknowledgment of our utter ineptitude without him. “Every faculty you have,” Lewis taught, “your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you would not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.”
Does that sound a bit like Benjamin in the Book of Mormon? “I say unto you,” the righteous prophet-king declared, “that if ye should serve him who has created you from the beginning, and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants” (Mosiah 2:21). (Andrew C. Skinner and Robert L. Millet, C. S. Lewis, the Man and His Message: An LDS Perspective [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999], 145–146)