Let's Pretend

Let’s Pretend

 

We are presently going through C.S. Lewis’s famous book, “Mere Christianity” and touching on some of the highlights.  This book is all about describing Christian beliefs.  And today we will touch on the Christian belief of what happens to us when we accept Christ as Savior.

 

Scripture tells us that when we believe in Christ as our Savior, that we are “righteous”. (2 Corinthians 5:21, Romans 4:5 and 13, Romans 9:30, Romans 3:22, and Romans 1:17) Christ’s righteousness has been wrapped around us!

 

But even though the Bible says believers are “righteous”, doesn’t it mean we “will become righteous” in heaven?  No Scripture says we “are” righteous right now when we know we are still sinning! When we say we are “righteous” aren’t we just pretending?  We still have ungodly thoughts and we still get angry when we shouldn’t!  What goes here? 

 

C.S. Lewis suggests that when you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do is to put on a friendly manner and behave (or pretend) as if you are a nicer person than you actually are.  And guess what?  In a few minutes, you really will be  feeling friendlier than you were.  Very often the only way to feel friendly or loving is to start acting friendlier and more loving.  Behaving as if you already felt friendlier and more loving.  And soon pretending becomes reality!  Christ Himself, the Son of God, is actually at your side and is already at that moment turning your pretending into reality!

 

If you ae seriously trying to be like Christ, there are lots of things that your conscience may not call wrong, but you feel that you cannot go on doing.  You are no longer thinking as much about right and wrong as about doing what pleases God.  The real Son of God is at your side, and He is beginning to turn you into being more like Himself.  He is speaking His kind of life and thought into you. 

 

You may be thinking that you have never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ.  We see the person who helped us without seeing Christ behind him or her.  But if there were no help from Christ there would be no help from other human beings.  Christ works on us in all sorts of ways. He works through His Spirit speaking to our spirit.  He works through nature and through others.  Through books and our own experiences.  And ways that only He knows.  We must go on to recognize the real Giver behind every good gift we receive. (James 1:17)

 

The Scripture speaks of “being born again” and about “putting on Christ” and “Christ being formed in us”.  This isn’t just a fancy way of saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out.  It means so much more. 

 

The Bible means that a real Person, Christ, here and now, in the room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you.  It is not a question of a good person who died two thousand years ago.  Christ, the Son of God is the Alpha (beginning) and the Omega (ending) of time. (Revelations 22:13)   He is alive today and is coming and interfering with you.  Killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has.  If all goes well, He will turn you permanently into a new little Christ, an eternal being, something we can only imagine!

 

We cannot by direct moral effort, give ourselves new motives.  After the first few steps in the Christian life we realize that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can only be done by God.  We think we are doing everything to change ourselves, but of course it is God who does everything in us.  But we at most allow it to be done to us.  Jesus became a man for no other purpose but to draw people to Himself.  The whole universe was made for Christ and everything is to be gathered together in Him. 

You might say that it is God who also does the pretending.  God sees before Him a self-centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human being.  But He says, ‘Because of her faith in Me I am her Father’.  She is My child- My righteous child!

 

  God looks at you as if you were righteous.  And Christ stands beside you making you righteous, His righteousness covering you.  Scripture says that we will never sin again after we die and go to heaven. Christ will have finished the job on us by then. God who see the beginning from the end can see us now as we will be in all eternity – a righteous saint.

 

  The idea of divine make-believe sounds rather strange.  But is it so strange really?  A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.  And we treat our dogs as if they were ‘almost human’ and that is why they really become ‘almost human’ in the end. 

The ideas in this blog were taken from C.S. Lewis’s book, “Mere Christianity”.