Made New

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

The last of Lewis’s four series of broadcast talks was the most ambitious. Having argued for a moral law, for the identity of Christ, and for a Christian way of behaving, he turned to the doctrine that most of his listeners thought was beyond them: the Trinity. And he used it to explain what the Christian life actually is. Christianity, as Lewis presented it, is not mainly a set of rules for being good, nor even a set of beliefs about God. It is God taking ordinary human beings and making them into new creatures, sharing His own life with them, so that they come to be truly His children.

Made and begotten

Lewis began with a distinction from the Nicene Creed, which says that the Son of God was begotten, not made. To make something, he explained, is to produce something different from oneself, as a carpenter makes a table or a sculptor a statue. To beget is to produce something of one’s own kind, as parents beget children. The Son is begotten of the Father, and so is God as the Father is God. We, on the other hand, are made. By nature we are God’s creatures, not His children — rather as a photograph of a man is not a man, however lifelike it may be.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name. JOHN 1:12

The whole point of Christianity, Lewis said, is that this gap can be crossed. The life that the Son has from the Father — a different kind of life from the merely biological life we have by nature — can be shared with created beings. The New Testament calls it eternal life. When a person is joined to Christ, that life begins to flow into him, and he begins, slowly, to become what by nature he is not: a son of God, sharing the life of God.

The life of the Trinity

To explain this Lewis needed the doctrine of the Trinity, and he approached it with a teacher’s patience. He presented God not as a solitary being but as an eternal communion of love: the Father loving the Son, the Son loving the Father, and the love between them being itself a Person, the Holy Spirit. Christians are not invited simply to look at this life from outside. They are drawn into it. Lewis pointed out that the doctrine is not remote from the simplest believer’s experience, because Christian prayer is itself shaped by it: the believer prays to the Father, through the Son, by the help of the Spirit.

For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. EPHESIANS 2:18

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. GALATIANS 4:6

Acting as sons

How does this new life actually take hold? Lewis offered a homely answer. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer and call God our Father, we are, in a sense, putting ourselves in the place of the Son. We are claiming a relationship that, left to ourselves, we do not have. This might seem like pretending. But there is a kind of acting that leads to the real thing, as a beginner plays a piece of music badly long before he can play it well, and learns to play it well only by playing it badly first. When we begin to act as children of God, Christ Himself is present to make the act real. Very often, Lewis said, the right thing to do is to behave as a Christian would behave, even when we do not feel like it, and find that Christ comes to meet us in the doing.

Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof. ROMANS 13:14

Nothing less than everything

Lewis was very clear that this process is not comfortable. God does not want a part of us. He is not interested in improving us a little, making us somewhat nicer or more respectable, and then leaving us alone. He intends to remake us completely, and He will not stop until the work is finished. It is as if a man asked a gardener to trim one overgrown hedge, and found him setting about the replanting of the whole estate. The work goes deeper than we asked for, and it hurts.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. PHILIPPIANS 1:6

This was why Lewis distinguished so carefully between being nice and being new. Some people are naturally pleasant, with easy tempers and good upbringing; others are naturally difficult, with nervous constitutions or bitter memories. God does not grade us on what we started with. A naturally irritable person who has become a Christian may be much less pleasant than a naturally sweet-tempered unbeliever, and yet be much further along the road. The question is not how nice someone is, but whether they have handed themselves over to be remade. And the niceness of the nice unbeliever, Lewis warned, may be the very thing that keeps him from seeing his need of God.

Christian behaviour

The same section of Mere Christianity, together with the third series of talks, set out much practical teaching on the Christian life, and a few points stand out. Lewis argued that morality has three parts: fair dealing between people, the right ordering of each person’s inner life, and the purpose of human life as a whole — and that modern people tend to think only of the first. He held that Christian giving ought to pinch — that if it costs us nothing we notice, it is probably too small. He wrote frankly about sexual morality and held to the Christian teaching of chastity outside marriage and faithfulness within it. He said that forgiving our enemies is the hardest of the commands, and that we can begin by remembering that we already know how to hate what a person does while still wishing him well, because that is how we treat ourselves.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. MATTHEW 5:44

On the old dispute between faith and works, Lewis characteristically declined to take sides. He said that both are necessary, that a man who trusts God will begin to obey Him, and that arguing over which comes first is less useful than getting on with both.

Weighing it

Lewis’s teaching on the new life is rich and searching, and much of it is a vivid account of what the New Testament calls sanctification and adoption. His insistence that God wants all of us, not a part, is a bracing word for comfortable believers.

Evangelical readers will want to add what Lewis left implicit. His account of the Christian life is overwhelmingly about the gradual transformation of the believer, and it says relatively little about the believer’s standing before God from the first moment of faith. The New Testament holds the two together, but it puts justification first. A believer is not accepted by God because he is becoming like Christ; he is becoming like Christ because he has already been accepted, freely, for Christ’s sake. Lewis’s reluctance to engage with the Reformation’s language of justification by faith alone leaves his account open to being read as though our acceptance depended on our progress. That is not what the apostles taught, and the anxious reader should rest on their word.

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ROMANS 5:1

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. EPHESIANS 2:8–9

Read with that foundation in place, Lewis’s picture of the long, costly, glorious remaking of the believer is one of the finest things he wrote.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read John 1:12–13 and Galatians 4:4–7. Give thanks that you have been made a child of God.

2. Ask yourself whether you have been content to let God improve you a little, rather than remake you entirely. What part of your life are you holding back?

3. Think of a Christian you find difficult. Remember that God judges the raw material differently, and pray for that person.

4. Look honestly at your giving. Is it comfortable? Ask God whether He wants more.

5. If you have been anxious about whether you are changing fast enough, read Romans 5:1–11 and rest on your justification.

A PRAYER

Father, You have given me the right to become Your child, through faith in Your Son.

I confess that I have wanted to be improved, not remade, and that I have held back parts of my life from You.

Take all of me. Knock down what must come down, and build what You intend, however long it takes and whatever it costs.

Thank You that You have accepted me in Christ already, and that the One who began this good work in me will finish it. Amen.