Mere Christianity -- Book 3, Chap. 12

Faith – Part 2

Complete Trust – the second, higher sense of faith (cont.)

The first step to arrive at this level of faith is to recognize your own bankruptcy (this is a level that many do not arrive at).

It comes only after you have tried your best to practice the Christian virtues and found that you are an utter failure.  You come to find out that even if you could live them out perfectly at the end of the day you are simply giving back to God what was already his own.  You have nothing to offer Him that He doesn’t already completely possess.

This is the kind of creature God is intending you to be – the kind that he is remaking you into.  The Christian life is not ultimately about your actions, so much as what kind of person you are.  And you cannot get into a right relationship with God until you are aware of your own bankruptcy. 

But Lewis is talking about merely being “aware” of your own bankruptcy in a “parrot-fashion.”  Even a small child can mimic back that he has nothing to offer God and that all he has already belongs to God. 

But Lewis is talking about truly, really knowing – really finding out by experience – that you are spiritually bankrupt.

We can only learn this by honestly giving God’s law our very hardest attempt – and then failing.  It is only after we have honestly tried (and failed) that we will loose the idea that only “if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good.”

This is the crucial lesson of the Christian life many Christians never learn.  They keep thinking that if they will just have more law – better application – then next time they will be better.

But it is only after you have traveled the road of moral effort that “all this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this.  I can’t” 

Only then will you reach the moment when you realize:

It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God.

By “leaving it to God” Lewis means that the Christian:

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.

It is only as we come to an end of ourselves (die to ourselves) that we realize that our life is in Christ – we share in His “sonship” before God – we are in union with him and in Him we are Sons of God.

Christ gives us His life – he gives us something, even everything for the nothing we have to offer.  The difficulty of coming to this realization about ourselves is that we must first recognize that we have done all and it is simply nothing.

But this surrender doesn’t mean that you will simply give up on trying to live the Christian life – rather it means that you will live it in a different way:

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, but 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.

Faith Alone or Faith Plus Good Works

Some have asked which is more necessary, faith or good works?  Lewis says that is like asking “which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary?”  Lewis says that:

A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point:  and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.

But “good works” done with the wrong motive are not “good.”  And “faith” that does not work is not real faith.

Paul puts both of these together in Phil. 2:12-13:

Work out your salvation with fear and trembling;  13 for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

The first half sounds like the entire Christian life is entirely up to us but the second half sounds like everything is entirely up to God.  Such is the nature of the Christian life. 

What is clear and what all Christians agree on is that faith is absolute necessary and that faith without good works is not faith at all.

You will find that even those who insist strongly on the importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. 

Lewis concludes this section:

I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond.  One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke.  Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light.  But they do not call it goodness.  They do not call it anything.  They are not thinking of it.  They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.  But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world.  No one’s eyes can see very far beyond that:  lots of people’s eyes can see further than mine.