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Have you ever read C. S. Lewis “Mere Christianity”? I just finished it - simple, deep, and cathartic for a long-time Christian such as myself. I can’t speak for the audience his book was intended for (those considering or curious about Christianity), but I found it amazingly relevant sixty years after it was written.
This isn’t a full review, but just a few quotes that are impacting my life right now….
This is from the second “Faith” chapter:
“The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ - which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, ‘For it is God who worketh in you’ - which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, “He did this bit and I did that.’ But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it…..”
Then later from the last chapter “the New Men”.
“It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires….It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own….. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in th end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, raige, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
And from “Counting the Cost”
“The practical upshot is this. On the one hand, God’s demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good, or even in your present failures. Each time you fall He will pick you up again. And He knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection. On the other hand, you must realize from the outset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole univese, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal. That is what you are in for….Many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to feel that we are now good enough. He has done all WE wanted Him to do, and we should be obliged if He would now leave us alone….But this is the fatal mistake. Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.”