Faith in Action: Belief, Works, and Authority

Thank you.

Well, good evening everyone! It's so great to see you guys again on what is a beautiful, beautiful night here in Columbus, Ohio. It's actually almost a little cold, which is a little bit weird to say that it's getting to be that fall weather in this area. In fact, I woke up this morning, came out, and it was 55 degrees, which was just fantastic. It got up into a little bit of the 70s, and now it's starting to cool off again. So, it's just that beautiful time of the year.

I'm so grateful that you're tuning in tonight from wherever you are. Just let me know where you're coming in from in the chat. I always love to catch up with all the different people from all over the world. It's just great to see it, especially those that are tuning in after the fact. Man, it's so great! There are so many of you guys sending messages after letting me know how things are going and where you're from. I absolutely love that; it's fantastic!

Some who just started joining us last week—also fantastic! You're catching up on some of the videos and watching some of the things from the past. I also had a couple that sent me a message saying they're actually watching all the way from going back to some of the videos from last spring, last semester. So, it was fantastic! I love hearing that, love seeing that.

Great to see Bakersfield, California! Jovan, 95 and sunny in Bakersfield, California? Yeah, at four o'clock! You might be wishing you were in this area right now with this nice cooler weather here. I'd love to see—there's Judy coming in from Dalton, Georgia. Great to have her with us!

So grateful for all of your presence. It is a fantastic evening. We don't have as much to cover tonight as we did last night, but we have a lot when it comes to the actual premise of Christianity.

Yes, John Dobbs, great to see you from Monroe, Louisiana! My guess is it's just still a little bit muggy down there; that would be my guess down in the Louisiana area. OKC's overcast, 74, David Clevenger.

Yes, I love it! Just fantastic to see all these people from so many different places. Oh, well, we got just about every coast from Georgia all the way to California. We got kind of the middle America and Oklahoma. We got some people from Atwater, California—fantastic! And then also from Louisiana, from the bayous and the rest. And then Savannah, Tennessee—wonderful! Yes, it's great to see you, David Highland.

I'm so grateful for all of y'all's presence coming in from all over the place. It really is awesome! And Washington State—absolutely! Man, we're covering all the corners of everything here. I know I've got a couple that watch from Florida too, so we may just end up covering everything in the United States here.

I had one person last semester that came from Maine. If we can get somebody from Maine, man, we're covering like Maine, Vermont, that whole area. We're covering all of the United States in some form or fashion.

So, great to have you guys with us tonight on this continuation of our study through Mere Christianity. As some of you noted, or some of you even may have known or seen photos from this week, we are actually doing the same study on Tuesday nights here on campus with the students at Ohio State University and a lot of our campus ministry, Buckeyes for Christ. It's been a lot of fun!

In some ways, I get to do this twice. I get to do this once live in person, which I hope you all understand would be preferable. I would love to sit in a room with all of you guys to be able to sit down, have these conversations, hear from you in person, having that one-on-one time with each one of you. It would just be fantastic!

But because we're all over the globe, it's just not possible. So instead of that, I'm grateful for this avenue. I'm grateful that we have this, even though it may seem at times one way, and I wish it wasn't. And that's why I love your comments, and I love your thoughts. Please feel free to share those. Please feel free to put those in there. I love hearing those. I think it's good to hear just more than just one voice on this, so please feel free to add.

But because we can't all be together, we will use the best available technology we have to be able to still have these studies. So let's dive right in! We've got a lot to cover tonight, so I'm going to minimize myself down, and we're going to get to where we are in Mere Christianity, which is these two chapters at the end of Book Two, which are chapters four and five, often titled "The Perfect Penitent" and "The Practical Conclusion."

So just as I've done a couple of broad overview strokes here, some key concepts and themes as we dive into especially this chapter four.

So, "The Perfect Penitent," C.S. Lewis explores the idea of repentance and the nature of true Christian repentance. He begins by discussing the concept of forgiveness and how it relates to Christianity. Lewis argues that Christianity is fundamentally a religion of forgiveness, and it offers the opportunity for individuals to be forgiven from their sins.

Now, this is a broad overview, okay? And this is kind of a broader review about chapter four and chapter five. He then delves into the idea of repentance, emphasizing that it's not just feeling sorry for one's sin, but involves a change of heart and commitment to turning away from sinful behavior. Lewis explains that true repentance requires acknowledging one's own flaws and seeking God's forgiveness.

So from there, we're just going to start doing—in fact, I found last week that you all kind of enjoyed this style where I joked about it. I could have just put the book up live on screen and just gone with it and just kind of read it aloud. But instead, I've just kind of snippets, but it may feel like I'm reading almost the whole entire chapter, and in some cases that may be the case. But I find like there's just so much there for us to discuss, and I don't want to miss out even on the smallest things.

So we'll dive straight in.

So we are faced then with a frightening alternative. This man we are talking about either was and is just what he said he was, or else a lunatic or something worse. Now, if you remember back to last week and what we discussed, the last thing he basically said was Jesus was not just a good moral teacher. He does not allow for such a thing. He is either a liar, lunatic, or Lord. He is one of those things, but he is not just some good moral teacher. The things that he said would not be classified as something good if he was not who he said he was.

So from there, he's now going into saying this man we are talking about either was and is just what he said he was, or else a lunatic or something worse. Now, it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God.

God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. He has landed in this area, and he's saying this Jesus is God because either he is not, and you can just say he's a fool and he's crazy and the rest, but he can't just be a good moral teacher because he did not allow for such a thing.

And now, what was the purpose of it all? What did he come to do? Well, to teach, of course. But as soon as you look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing, you will find they are constantly talking about something different about his death and his coming to life again. So it doesn't seem to be just this idea that he showed up. It seems that he came specifically to do something very particular about his death and his coming to life again.

Now, before I became a Christian, I was under the impression that the first thing Christians had to believe was one particular theory as to what the point of this dying was. According to that theory, God wanted to punish men for having deserted and joined the great rebel, but Christ volunteered to be punished instead, and so God let them off.

So he's giving us just a little bit of his insight into what Lewis, in essence, was thinking when he was before he was a Christian, that he was an atheist. He was like, "Now, before this, I just kind of thought you had to agree with a certain kind of point as to what all of this was about, about Jesus coming as God, coming to die, and so forth."

What I came to see later on was that neither this theory nor any other is Christianity. The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter.

Now, this is very typical of what he is trying to accomplish specifically with this type of book. Now remember, and this is sometimes hard for us to remember all this, but this is live on radio and so forth. That's what he's doing this, and then he has written this book a few years later. He's taken, he's compiled these four different addresses that he made into one book in 1952, and now he's setting it forth.

He's basically saying, "My goal is to give you Mere Christianity, the basics of this all. I'm not interested in trying to dive into all of the different theories and all the different doctrines and all those different things. Instead, I really am trying to give you the basis for Mere Christianity."

And so that's why he kind of throws out these little thoughts like theories as to how it did this or another matter. So he's kind of setting this aside, going, "There's a lot of debate on this, but it's not necessarily what I'm trying to get into."

All sensible people know that if you are tired and hungry, a meal will do you good. But the modern theory of nourishment, all about vitamins and proteins, is a different thing. People ate their dinners and felt better long before the theory of vitamins was ever heard of. And if the theory of vitamins is someday abandoned, they will go on eating their dinners just the same.

So he's making this argument, in essence, that what ultimately matters is whether or not Jesus came, died, and was God, and then was resurrected. Oh, but the how and the why and the rest—not necessarily the how, but the why mainly, or all of the intricacies of it all. He's saying ultimately there are so many different thoughts about it and the rest, but the fact that it happened altogether.

And he uses this example, the modern theory of nourishment. He says basically vitamins and proteins and the way we dissect all of our foods down. And man, if Lewis could be around today with the way that this is done when it comes to food, I think there—in fact, there are no laws that state where you actually have to put the calorie counts and all the rest on every single one of the menus and the rest when you go into restaurants. All have to be shown very clearly there.

And here he's going, "Look, either way, people, whether or not those are there or not, people are going to still need to eat. Eating is still going to happen, and they know that if they eat, they're going to be nourished, and that's what's going to happen."

And so he uses this really common concept for us to understand the importance of what he's actually trying to get at, which is ultimately what really matters is did Jesus come and die? Was he God, and did he come and die and resurrect? And is that the main tenant of Christianity?

Theories about Christ's deaths are not Christianity; they are explanations about how it works. Christians would not all agree as to how important these theories are. My own church, the Church of England, does not lay down any one of them as the right one. The Church of Rome goes a bit further.

So here he's actually kind of just laying out this idea of, "Look, these theories about Christ are not necessarily the totality of Christianity. They are explanations about how it works, why it happened, and so forth. But the fact that it did happen is what he's saying is Christianity."

The rest, he says, look, there's disagreement when it comes to his own church, the Church of Rome, the Church of England. And if you look at the denominational world today across the board, you're going to find a lot of differing opinions as to what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and so forth. But the fact that it happened is what he's ultimately trying to get at.

In my view, the theories are not themselves the things you are asked to accept. Many of you, no doubt, have read Jeans or Eddington. These are authors. What they do when they want to explain the atom or something of that sort is to give you a description out of which you can make a mental picture. But then they warn you that this picture is not what the scientists actually believe. What the scientists believe is a mathematical formula.

So he's trying to kind of set forth this idea that even the way that we describe things is not necessarily even in a picture. It's not necessarily what it actually is. So how do you describe an atom? How do you describe those things? He's saying it's so minuscule that you can't see it.

We don't have the pictures. You gotta remember this is 1952, so even being able to—didn't even have what we have today where we have clear images of what it is. But what you're ultimately describing is still mathematical.

Recently, in fact, this was a fascinating study that I saw just the other day where it talked about how everything, even the atoms going down even further within that, have movement to them—not just movement where they're clashing together or they're moving, but there seems to be a vibration associated with each and every one of them.

And so that everything that we see here, whether it's this desk, this microphone, the computer screen in front of you, the phone in front of you, whatever it may be, is actually made up of little vibrating atoms in some way or another that you can't see that. And what you have in your hand doesn't look like that, but you have maybe something in your mind that tells you what it looks like, but you still don't really know what it is.

You still don't have a clear picture. What you might have is, as he notes, a mathematical formula. You have, "Well, I know this looks like this because this is what it seems like." But if I really got down to the inner workings of it, I wouldn't know what it is.

And then he says, "We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course, we're not going to be able to picture this."

So the idea that God came down in human form into our world to walk among us, to live, breathe, and die is absolutely unimaginable. It's unbelievable. And he's really looking at this not just from a philosophical perspective, but also from a religious perspective, from a human perspective that God would come and walk among us is just something unimaginable.

And he's really trying to paint this picture, saying we can't even picture half the things that we actually can see in front of us. Imagine the things that we can't even imagine.

And so he goes back to the same premise again. He says, "A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept that Christ has done without knowing how it works. Indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it."

And so he's trying to get people to understand there will be some things that you will not understand until you start to believe.

On the other side of this is where he starts to take a turn here. We are told that Christ was killed for us, that his death has washed out our sins, and that by dying, he disabled death itself. That is the formula; that is Christianity; that is what is to be believed.

Any theories we build up as to how Christ did all these are, in my view, quite secondary—more mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us. And even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at. Now, this is a fascinating little term because he's saying, "Look, there's so much we're not going to understand, but also here is the basics."

And so in some ways, he's really diving into the very premise of Mere Christianity. We are told that Christ was killed for us, that his death has washed out our sins, that by dying, he disabled death itself. That is the formula; this is Christianity; this is what has to be believed.

And then he says, "Any theories we build up as to how this happens, in my view, are secondary." Now, I might disagree with Lewis on this. In fact, I think I do in some context—not all. I think when he's referencing broadly here, I think I actually agree with him.

I think that there are aspects where it does matter, and these theories do matter as to Christ's death. But Lewis is not trying to give you the doctrines; he's trying to give you the broad spectrum understanding. And in some aspects, he's speaking to almost more unbelievers than believers.

And so from that standpoint, I do believe there's a lot of leeway I can give to Lewis on this and actually say I understand what he's saying, what he's trying to get at here.

Any theories, though, that we build up as to how Christ did all this—whether that's the atonement, and he gets into that, and whether it's the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whether or not this body is still used, you know, every time the mass comes about, the Lord's Supper, which we'll get into—all of those happen.

Whether or not that is real or not in those contexts, I do believe that there is a conversation to be had about those, but that's not Lewis's goal here. And so I don't want to, as he asked us in the first week, to put words in his mouth or to take his silence as some type of thing.

But in general, I do believe this is important, but I do believe that I want to note that I believe his context is correct in what he's saying here.

So from there, he says, "The one most people have heard of is the one I mentioned before." So this is kind of—he's diving a little bit deeper into this—the one about being let off because Christ has volunteered to bear our punishment instead of us.

Now, on the face of it, that is a very silly theory. If God is prepared to let us off, why on Earth did he not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see if you're thinking of punishment in the police court sense.

So now he's going to the idea of why in the world would any of this need to happen? Why would he have to sin? Why does a perfect person have to come and take the place of us? Why does he have to do this if he was prepared to let us off the hook for the sins of our lives? Why didn't he just do that?

And this is where Lewis makes an argument that candidly is very, very unique, that you don't find in a lot of other places. Very, very unique. And so we're just going to keep diving in.

On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there's plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take paying the penalty, not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of standing the racket or footing the bill, then of course it is a matter of common experience that when one person has got himself in a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend.

So this is basically saying, "Look, if it's just about punishment, that doesn't seem to make sense. If it's about a debt that someone's in, now that's a little bit different premise. If there's a debt that needs to be paid, that's a whole different type of concept, and that's different than just punishment."

There is punishment associated with debt or being in debt with something, but the trouble of getting him out usually falls to a kind friend. Now, that's an interesting turn of phrase.

Now, what was the sort of hole man had gotten himself into? He had tried to set up on his own to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement; he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you're sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track, and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of our hole. This process of surrender, this movement full speed of stern, is what Christians call repentance.

Now, this introduction of repentance, especially in light of the fallen nature of man and the rest, is a fascinating one because what he's laying the ground floor here for is there's a debt that has to be paid because of our rebellion, not because of that we had somehow had the ability to be perfect in our own right. In fact, we cannot.

He's going to get into that. We don't have the ability to pay off this debt. It is a debt we cannot repay. And so what needs to happen, though, is we should repent and change and go back the other way.

But now, repentance is not fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all 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. Then 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 a perfect person, and he would not need it.

So he's saying we're caught between a rock and a hard place because we're not a perfect person, and the only perfect person that could do it needs to do it, but he won't need it. And so we are literally caught in this kind of, you know, in a context, kind of this Catch-22.

Now remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before he will take you back, in which he would let you off if he chose. It is simply a description of what going back to him is like.

Yes, David, sounds a lot like substitutionary atonement via Anselm and his scholasticism—absolutely!

So it is simply a description of what going back to him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.

Very well then, we must go through with it, but the same badness which makes us need it makes us unable to do it. Can we do it? If God helps us.

And this is where he says, "Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of 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. He puts a little of his love into us, and that is how we love one another."

When you teach a child riding, you hold its hand while it forms the letters. That is, it forms the letters because you are forming them.

So he dives into how God might work through us and how he might help us in trying to be these better people, to move away from our badness and into goodness.

Now, if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately, we now need God's help in order to do something which God in his own nature never does at all: to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all.

So that one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God in his own nature has never walked. God can share only what he has. This thing in his own nature he has not.

And so Lewis is making this argument, saying God cannot give us something of us that he himself is not. So because he is not death, and he is not bad, and he is not those things, it is not in his nature to be able to give us those things.

So this is the fascinating part that Lewis's arguments make. But supposing God became a man. Suppose our human nature, which can suffer and die, was amalgamated with God's nature in one person. Then that person could help us.

He could suffer, his will, and suffer and die because he was man, and he could do it perfectly because he was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us, but God can do it only if he becomes a man.

Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of his intelligence. But we cannot share God's dying unless God dies, and he cannot die except by being a man.

That is the sense in which he pays our debt and suffers for us what he himself need not suffer at all.

Now, this is a fascinating argument in essence that God is the only one who can make a way. In fact, when you think of the words of Jesus in the garden, specifically, "If there is any other way, let this cup pass," three times he goes and says that prayer, "If there's any other way, let this cup pass from me."

And you see this over and over again, but there is but one way. Only the perfect man who is not in need of forgiveness can take the place, and the only one that could take the place that could suffer and die for us is God himself, that we might then find through him salvation.

There is none who go to the Father except through Jesus. So it's a fascinating concept that he's laying forth here that it's a theological argument, but it's also very philosophical, and it's making an argument that God is the only one.

This was the only way, much like what we see Jesus say and what God has said, that there was but one way in which this could take place.

And this is where I love this little argument because in the book he notes that some people might say that, you know, "Well, it was easier for God to do this than for man." Obviously, it would have been easy because he's God.

And this little side note that he adds at the end of the chapter, he said, "If I'm drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back between my gasps, 'No, it's not fair! You have an advantage! You're keeping one foot on the bank!'?"

That advantage, call it unfair if you like, is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?

Yes, David, now we've got some theosis with a little Gregory and Athanasius laid out by Paul—so absolutely we do! If you guys don't know, David has a fantastic understanding of a lot of the early church fathers and church history and the rest of these fantastic comments. I love those!

So he's making basically this argument: if you think it's easier because it was God, and he's going, "Okay, so what if it was easier? Who are you going to look for to help if it's not for somebody that's stronger than yourself?"

That somebody can go through—he says it's ludicrous to say, "Well, everything, it's not fair that God can do these things." Because God is God! What else do you want him to be? He's God!

Do you not want the help, or do you want to just drown in a river? No, you want the help from the person who has the power to be able to do that.

So going into chapter five here are some key concepts. Real quick, I'm going to skip through this because we've got a few slides I really want to get to here at the end because these two chapters really do go well together here.

The perfect surrender in humiliation were undergone by Christ. Now notice this: the perfect surrender and the humiliation—perfect because he was God; surrender in humiliation because he was man.

Now, the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ, we shall also share in his conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect and perfectly happy creatures.

This means something much more than our trying to follow his teaching. People often ask when the next step of the evolution, the next step to something beyond man will happen. But in the Christian view, it has happened already in Christ.

A new man, a new kind of man appeared. In this new kind of life which began in him, it is to be out into us, is to live out within us that we are called to be different in this world because Christ lives in us.

There are three things that spread the Christ's life to us. Now, this is where in some arguments—and I've heard people argue, scholars argue this before—that this is where he goes. Lewis goes beyond just basic Christianity into some concepts of doctrine.

I disagree with him. I do believe these are the three major tenets I can make very broadly about Christianity: baptism, belief in that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names—Holy Communion, the mass, the Lord's Supper. At least those are the three ordinary methods.

I'm not saying there may not be special cases where it is spread without one or more of these. Okay, so I just want to note real quick you might notice why some people push back on some of these things, specifically the first one, baptism.

Now, and I don't mean this just as tongue-in-cheek, but Christianity on the whole—and I would say Christendom on the whole—has done a very good job over the last 200 years, 300 years of doing its best to really water down baptism to where baptism is almost no water is assumed at all.

And the very act of baptism, immersion into water—and I could go back a lot further. You go back into infant baptism within Catholicism and the rest—that baptism seems to be almost a strange foreign thing now to some Christian denominations and churches.

Now, on the other hand, I can say that we are seeing kind of almost a little resurgence of this, specifically because more and more people are actually opening their Bibles again and looking at it and going, "It says baptism, and it seems to be water, and it seems to be immersion."

And knowing even the Greek, the city of the Greek, and knowing the word "baptizo" and the full immersion and so forth, that it's not just sprinkling; it's not just the pouring over those types of things.

But this is one of the reasons scholars often push back on this term because for a lot of them, maybe a personal thing where their own church doesn't practice baptism.

And here Lewis is making a very clear argument: it's one of the three major premises of Christianity. So these are three things: baptism, belief in that mysterious action which Christians call by different names, the Lord's Supper, communion, the mass, and the rest.

I've explained why I have to believe that Jesus was and is God, and it seems plain as a matter of history that he taught his followers that the new life was communicated in this way. In other words, I believe it on his authority.

So now he's diving into this authority. So why these things? Because Jesus said so!

Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine percent of the things you believed are believed on authority.

That it's one of those things that especially in our world today, we push back on authority. We push back on these things pretty consistently, and it's actually something that we need to change and get over and realize that we're actually pushing back against that which God has set forth from us pretty consistently.

And I do want to note that authority almost has a bad rap these days. We are taught to question everything, to question every notion of everything that's happening, every people. And in some contexts, let me tell you, I agree.

But when it comes to God, when it comes to Jesus and the rest, I do believe that God welcomes our questions. He welcomes that. But there comes a point in time where you have to say either I believe this or I don't. Either this is true or it's not.

And if this is coming from the God of the universe, if this is coming from God, then it does not matter if I disagree with it. It is what he has said, and that is a hard thing.

Now, I can honestly tell you also in Christianity on the whole that is a dying understanding even within Christendom. We question the authority of Scripture. We love to question Paul because if we don't like his teachings on certain things, we love to question Peter on his teachings on certain things.

We love to question the Old Testament on a lot of different things because we don't like it. We don't love to question New Testament patterns because we think it's just subjective.

Even Scripture itself, there are many out there who claim Christianity who do not believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. They believe it to be just an amalgamation, a collection of Christian writings, but it's not the inspired word of God brought down for us.

That this is what Jesus said. And in some ways, yes, David, it's kind of been bred into the American DNA. You know, you can find it a lot in European churches. You find this in even some, a lot of very Orthodox churches that are falling more and more away from the idea of authority and that Jesus speaks with authority because we like to be in control, which is the great irony of what repentance and the rest is actually all about.

Now, he also wants to say this, and I love this little caveat: "Do not think I'm setting up baptism and belief in the Holy Communion as things that we'll do instead of your own attempts to copy Christ."

Now, if you're just to read that in and of itself, it sounds like he's saying these things aren't necessary, these things aren't real, or they're not necessary in all aspects. And in reality, he's saying you can do these things and still not be a Christian.

You can go through the motions, but if nothing has changed in your life, nothing has changed in your life. Your natural life is derived from your parents. That does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide.

He's saying your physical body was gifted to you, in essence, by your parents. You didn't do anything for it. You can lose it by not taking care of it, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it.

But always remember, you're not making it. You are not the one making this; you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way, a Christian can lose the Christ's life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it.

So you can be baptized and have belief and take the Holy Communion, but if you're not living your life the way that God wants you to, submitting to his will and the rest, then those things will not save.

And this is a big thing for Lewis. And this, he says, has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point, it will heal, as a dead body would not.

A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can, to some extent, repair itself. In the same way, a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble because the Christ's life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat in some degree the kind of voluntary death which Christ himself carried out.

This is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope by being good to please God, if there is one, or if they think there is not, at least they hope to deserve approval from good men.

Now, this is kind of the typical agnostic, atheist position. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ's life inside of him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.

Just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. And perhaps that explains one or two things.

Now, this is where he's kind of shifting a little bit here, and I love this little argument he makes, so I wanted to make sure I got to this. It explains why this new life is spread out only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion.

It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution, a biological or super biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be purely spiritual creatures. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.

We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not. He invented eating; he likes matter.

He’s making this argument—you’ll have to forgive me, I have a lot of typos and stuff when I'm typing things out fast here as I'm reading the book. I find all these great passages, and I start typing things out, and sometimes I run out of time to go back and check these things.

But one of the things that I love the most about this premise is that he plays off of both the spiritual and the physical. He's referencing the physical body but the physical act that we go through when we take the Lord's Supper and we eat the bread and we drink the wine in the Lord's Supper.

And then the actual act of worshiping and the actual act of baptism and all of these bodily acts are not just mental assent. So belief, mental assent—a lot of people can believe things, but it doesn't mean that you actually do anything about it.

That there seems to be a marriage between belief and action. As an example, James specifically references the fact that demons believe, but that's not counted for them for anything.

And James goes over and over again about the fact that faith—and we always like to add the word "and"—faith and works. I always like to just say faith works.

That we do not believe—we do not work to be saved; we work because we are saved. That we are given opportunities to serve God through our lives on a consistent basis, both in our mental assent that he is Lord, that he is God, and from our mouth that he is Lord and he is God.

But through the physical act of obedience of doing the things that he has called us to do. It's why we gather on the first day of the week to partake in the Lord's Supper in remembrance of him. It's why we are baptized so that we might arise a new creation, which Lewis spends a lot of time on this idea of a rising up, dying to ourselves.

In fact, in Romans 6, you see Paul makes the argument, "How can you be in life with Christ if you have not died with him?" And this goes back to the argument that Lewis made earlier that God himself took our place on the cross through his son Jesus and took away the sin, the debt that was owed.

And now we, in dying to ourselves, can arise a new creation—not the old creation, a new creation. And at the same time, he says, "Look, it's not just this spiritual concept. It's not just that religion."

And this goes to people at times who are here today. The modern construct would be, "I am spiritual but not religious." You know, "I want to worship God in my own way, but I'm not really interested in what he wants. I'm just going to do it my way."

And that is missing the point of along the way with what God ultimately desires from us.

Another possible objection is this: this is the last couple of slides here, and I'll close out for this evening.

Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil?

Now, I don't know about you; I just love this as a premise, a description of the church. I really like the idea that we're a secret society to undermine the devil. It's just kind of one of those neat little things that people throw out at times.

And I heard that, and I was like, "Oh, that's fantastic!" But then I also think back how that can be misconstrued and how people have misused that. For there was a while in certain parts of the Roman Empire where Christians were believed to be cannibals because they partake in the body and the blood every Sunday of the Lord's Day and so forth.

So I understand how that can end up looking like a weird thing. But he also says, "Why is he not landing in force, invading it? Is it that he is not strong enough?"

Well, Christians think he is going to land in force. We do not know when, but we can guess why he is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining his side freely.

Now, I love this as a philosophical argument. He's basically saying, "Oh, he's coming! Yes, absolutely! There is very much this time where God is going to return, and he is going to take this world by force, and it will not be a great battle. It will be a snap of the fingers, and it will be Jesus returning, as we see in Revelation 19 and the rest, coming on a white horse with a white robe dipped in blood, a sword coming out of my mouth, on his thigh, King of Kings, Lord of Lords—all of that's going to happen.

The chariots of angels behind him and the rest that are coming, the trumpets and sounds that will happen, and it will be done. It is finished at that moment.

But why the delay? The delay is because we are, as he's known, we are an enemy-occupied world, and he's still giving us the opportunity to change, the opportunity to repent, the opportunity to come home.

He wants to give us the chance of joining his side freely. You see, the battle's already won; it's done. But he gives us still the opportunity every breath we have—even right now, if you're watching right now—every breath you have is a gift from God of the moment of time that you have to repent in your life, to change, to go the opposite direction, and to seek his will each and every day in your life.

Now, today, and this is how he closes his chapter, this moment is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever; we must take it or leave it.

Now, here's just kind of how I want to encourage us all. You see, it's easy to feel like, "God, you know, I can pray just God come quickly, Lord return," and the rest. And there is a part of me, and there are days where that is my prayer pretty consistently.

But then there are people I know and who I love dearly who are not just not Christians; they're not believers. They're walking down lonely roads of despair and depression and anxieties, and they're not trusting in the Lord, and they've lost their faith or they've never had faith.

And I am grateful, though, for every moment that I have right now, every moment that we have to continue to spread the gospel, to tell this grand story—the greatest story of all time—that says that today you still have the chance to choose the right side.

Now, that will mean you have to die to yourself. It means you are baptized in the waters of baptism, in a risen, a new creation. And then you walk each and every day in perfection because of God's perfection, not because of your own.

You will fall, but God helps you rise up, and as he lives within you, he helps to grow you and push you and encourage you in those ways until either we die and we join him or until he returns again in that great moment.

It will be over, and when that time comes, I know where I want to be. And it's not because I deserve it; it's not because I've earned it; it's not because of anything I've done, but it's because Jesus came and took my place—something only he could do.

And he took my place, and he allows me to choose to be with him freely—the free gift of salvation. And for that, I'm grateful. And for that, I'm not just grateful now, but eternally grateful.

And I'm grateful for every one of you that tunes in now, later, whenever you might watch this. I'm grateful for your love, for your passion, for your desire to serve him better each and every day in whatever context you're in—whether you're a teacher, a preacher, a minister, or you're a grandmother or a grandfather, or you are a friend, whatever it may be.

I'm grateful. Keep working out your salvation every day, serving God to the best of your abilities. If you're not a believer and you want to study, you want to talk, you want to know more, please send me a message. Talk to other people in the group. There's lots of believers in this group, lots of believers that are watching this.

If you're just on my Facebook feed and you come across this video or on YouTube, wherever it is, know that if you have questions, we're here for you. And as I've said before, I never promised to have all the answers, but what I do promise is I know a God who provides the answers that are necessary and needed—all the things that we might need to know so that we might not just believe in him but see how he changes lives on a daily basis.

With that in mind, I'm just grateful—grateful for each and every one of you for being here each and every one of these weeks. I'm grateful for your presence, for the way that you serve, like I said, in your own context.

And I can't wait for next week because we dive into Book Three. It's going to be fantastic! Until then, please know that I love you, I care for you, and I can't wait to see you all again. If I can ever be of service to you, send me a message. I'd love to help out in any way that I can.

Never forget that you are loved. Never forget that you are not alone. And if we can serve you, help you, we're here for you. Love you guys! I'll see you all next week. If you're watching the video, I may see you just one of these other days at any point in time. Hit me up; I'd be more than happy to help you out however I can.

Love you guys! Have a wonderful night. Thank you!