C.S. Lewis in “Mere Christianity” from yesterday:
“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.
(Continuing today…) All this trying leads up to the vital moment to the final moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.” Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, “Have I reached that moment.” Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, “Hello, I’m growing up.” It is often only when he looks back that he realizes what has happened and recognizes it as what people call “growing up.” You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see if he is going to sleep is very likely to remain awake. As well the thing I am talking of now may not happen to everyone in a sudden flash as it did to St. Paul or Bunyan: it may be so gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair in doing anything ourselves and leave it to God.
I know the words “leave it to God” can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trust that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language he will share his “sonship” with us, will make us, like Himself, “Sons of God:”. . . .
. . . . If you like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing. In a sense the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to reach the point of recognizing that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we should have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones. Again, in a sense, you might say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it—throw in the sponge. But then you could not “stop trying” in the right way and for the right reason until you have tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying that you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, because he has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of heaven is already inside you. ~ C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, N.Y. 1943, pgs 127-29)
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