C. S. Lewis wrote in wrote in his book ‘Mere Christianity:’
“. . . . And if (as I said before) what we are matters more than what we do—if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are— then if follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about. And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them are done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally had led to some very bad act? But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realize that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. And that brings us to something which has been very misleading in my language up to now.
I have been talking as if it were we who did everything. We, at most allow it to be done to us. In a sense you might even say it is God who does the pretending. The Three-Personal God, so to speak, sees before Him in fact a self-centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says “Let us pretend that this is not a mere animal, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretense into reality.” God looks at you as though you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is that not how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to walk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were “almost human”: that is why they become “almost human” in the end. ~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company 1943,1945,1952) p.165-6
