C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’:
“Now, once again, what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What He cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind of quality—the kind of creatures He intended us to be—creatures related to Himself in a certain way. I do not add “and related to one another in a certain way,” because that is included: if you are right with Him, you will inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted rightly into the hub of the rim they are bound to be in the right position to one another. And as long as man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him as sort of a paper to do, or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain—as long as he is thinking of claims and counter-claims between himself and God—he is not in the right in relation to Him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right relationship until he has discovered the fact of our own bankruptcy.
When I say “discovered,” I mean really discovered: not simply said it parrot-fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this: really finding out by experience that it is true.
Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in becoming completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense, it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. (to be continued…) ~ C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, N.Y. 1943, pgs 127-28)
