C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Book IV | Beyond Personality: First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity
Chapter 9 | “Counting the Cost.”
Question: Which words of Jesus that Lewis quoted in the previous chapter bothered people?
Answer: “Be ye perfect.” Some thought this meant that unless we are perfect God will not help us. And since we can’t be perfect, we are hopeless. Lewis thinks Jesus meant something more like “The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less.”
Q: What analogy does Lewis offer?
A: He recalls waiting until the pain was really bad to complain to his mom about a toothache when he was a kid. She would give him aspirin, but then she would take him to the dentist the next morning. Lewis only wanted relief from pain, but then the dentist would start “fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache.” Lewis references an old proverb that says, “Give them an inch, and they take a mile.”
Q: How is God like that dentist?
A: We go to God to be cured of a particular sin of shame or that is “obviously spoiling daily life.” Lewis says, “He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there.” Once you reach out to God, “He will give you the full treatment.” This is why Jesus “warned people to ‘count the cost’ before becoming Christians.” We have free will and can push God away, but if you don’t, He will “see this job through.” God’s goal is to be able to say He is as well pleased with us as He was with Jesus. Lewis has God saying, “This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less.”
Q: What’s the other side of this?
A: While God has sent a Helper who won’t be satisfied with anything less than perfection, that Helper “will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty.” Referencing George MacDonald, every parent is happy with a baby’s first steps, but “no father would be satisfied ith anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. MacDonald concludes, “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”
Q: What is the practical upshot of this?
A: We don’t need to be discouraged by “present attempts to be good” or by “present failures” because “Each time you fall He will pick you up again.” Our efforts will not bring perfection. At the same time, we are the only person who can keep God from His goal for us of “absolute perfection.” If we don’t remember this, “then we are very likely to start pulling back and resisting Him after a certain point.” When we’ve overcome an obvious sin or two we will want God to leave us alone. We will be satisfied by being a decent, ordinary person.
Q: Why is this a fatal mistake?
A: It’s not about what we intend to be, but what God intended us to be when He made us. “He is the inventor, we are only the machine. He is the painter, we are only the picture.” We are already something different from what we were when we were in our mother’s womb. Now God’s plan is to continue changing us “at a higher level.” To avoid this is not humility, but laziness and cowardice. “To submit . . . is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience.”
Q: What is another way to put both sides of the truth?
A: One the one hand, we should not imagine that “our own unaided efforts” are reliable. Without God’s help, we are not safe from sin. “On the other hand, no possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what He is determined to produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in this life: but He means to get us as far as possible before death.”
Q: What should nor surprise us?
A: This could get rough. We think things should get easier as we grow. We get disappointed by the troubles of sickness and money problems and temptation. This is evidence of God’s work in us. These situations that ask for more bravery, patience, and love force us to a higher level. We don’t see the point “because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.”
Q: What other parable does Lewis borrow from George MacDonald?
A: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense.”
God is building a very different house than the one we were thinking of. “He is building a palace” because “He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
Q: What final thoughts does Lewis have about the command “Be ye perfect”?
A: It’s not an idealistic command. God is not asking us to do the impossible. “He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command.” God’s goal is to “make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature.” We are to be “a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly . . . His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”
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