Niceness: If Christianity is true, then why aren’t all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians? After all, here, Peter says,“Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love”? [1]Shouldn’t we be obviously more loving than non-Christians?
Reasonable: “What lies behind that question,” writes C.S. Lewis, “is partly something very reasonable and partly something that is not reasonable at all. The reasonable part is this. If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions—if he continues to be just as snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before—then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary … Christ told us to judge by results. A tree is known by its fruit; or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Unreasonable: The unreasonable part, however, is to expect that the world is neatly divided into two camps—people who are 100% Christian and people who are 100% non-Christian. “The situation in the actual world,” Lewis continues, “is much more complicated than that.” Moreover, “low output” doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re failures, especially given our different “natural causes” and “certain temperaments.” For example, what comes naturally (not necessarily spiritually) to Polly Anna may come only by the Spirit for Scrooge. “A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God,” says Lewis, “would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save. For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons; not simply to produce better men of the old kind, but to produce a new kind of man.”
Prayer: Lord, you came to make us new. Give us discernment to know whether we are good because of our natural inclinations or whether we are good because of our spiritual redemption. For we long to be changed by you and know that you are working in our hearts. Amen.
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