The last few chapters of Mere Christianity have had a tremendous challenging influence on me ever since my high school days. This chapter is fairly straightforward, and actually puts into perspective the challenge Christianity offers.
The first thing Lewis states comes directly from the previous chapter: if you start to “put on Christ” and start to “pretend” to be like Christ, you’re going to find that there are going to be a number of things in your life you’re going to have to change if you really want to be like Christ—and some of those things you’re not going to want to change. Well, not to be too blunt, but tough. As Lewis says, “The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.” And that leads to one of the most significant quotes in the entire book of Mere Christianity (at least for me):
The Christian way is different: harder and easier. Christ says, “Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
Obviously, giving yourself over to be “killed” is hard. But Lewis’ point is that there’s really no other option if you want to become like Christ. So if you make the choice, be committed to the “salvation process,” and get ready for some pain. In fact, what I’ve found in life is this: pain is inevitable; it’s part of what it means to live in this world. How you react to it will determine whether or not it has a positive or negative effect on your life. It’s like fire: it can either purify you by burning away the dross in your life, so to speak, or it can completely consume you. Either way, it’s going to burn…so you’d better be prepared.
If you go about following Christ in the same way a lazy student goes about doing his schoolwork, you’re going to find that it’s going to be harder. As Lewis says, in the long run, laziness means more work. The student who pays attention in class and does the daily work, will, by the time the exam comes, have a fairly easy time. By contrast, the lazy student who doesn’t do the daily work, will end up pulling all-nighters, trying to study for the exam just to pass—and most of the time, those type of students don’t, in fact pass.
The same principle is true for the Christian life. Just as laziness and cowardice kills a student’s grade, laziness and cowardice can kill the Christian life. As Lewis says, “We are like eggs at present. You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
And that, by the way, is the point of the Church—to draw people into Christ and to make them little Christs. If that’s not happening, then as Lewis says, “all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.”
Very true indeed.
