an A.M. with C.S. Lewis

Now that I've entered my second trimester, filled with energy and vigor, I have been able to get up before Colson and get some reading in. It's been fantastic for me. Let me share with you an exerpt from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity that jumped and grabbed me by the throat.

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble
pie. It means unlearning all of the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be perfet person - and he would not need it"


Lewis goes on to say what makes it possible for us to repent. And that is with God's help. This is obvious, of course, but what is meant by God helping us? "We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think." Because Christ, submitted, unto death, even being a perfect man, he enables us, because of his indwelling, to submit unto death, to cut off the sin in our hearts, to undergo a death, to follow Christ, and to be resurrected unto a new start, a new life. You and I can surrender our will, and suffer and die, only because God does it in us; and the only means he can do this in us, is because He did it Himself, in the form of a man.