When C. S. Lewis was seventeen, he wrote the following words to a friend:
“I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best.”
Fifteen years later he wrote another letter to the same friend. In that note he said:
“Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things,’ . . . namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”
That’s quite a turnaround. And by Lewis’ own account, it took him most of the fifteen years between those two letters to arrive at being a devoted follower of Jesus. His friendship with Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien played a role in Lewis’ conversion.
But strictly speaking, Tolkien did not logically demonstrate to Lewis that Christian doctrine is objectively true. Instead, I imagine that their friendship edged Lewis toward a deeper, more vulnerable honesty about his own life. Lewis yearned for a full-hearted life, a life that his atheist worldview had been unable to support.
Anne Lamott gives us a glimpse of the contours of a full-hearted life in what she says about her friend Tim:
[Tim] craved a reset, freedom from the same ten worries and concerns, freedom from the same ten things he was mad about, freedom from the obsession with the bathroom scale. Freedom from the perfectionism, the disappointment in himself, the dissatisfaction that has run like an underground river through him for a lifetime. Freedom from dragging this all along with him everywhere like a dinosaur’s tail. He longed to feel more peaceful, more present and alive. (Anne Lamott. Somehow: Thoughts on Love, p. 28).
An honest acknowledgment of our desire for a full-hearted life, and the realization that we are powerless to achieve it all on our own, can open us to the work of the Holy Spirit.
The risen Jesus comes to dwell within our hearts and to walk with us along life’s winding path. That’s who the Holy Spirit is. The crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is Jesus up close and personal for you, for me, and for anyone who will actually take notice of and respond to his presence.
Jesus taught his friends to think of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth. In other words, the Holy Spirit helps us to see things as they really are. Here’s how Lewis put it much later:
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”[1]
Jesus himself was a bit more specific. He said that the Spirit of Truth “will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.” (John 17:8) Or to put that a little differently, the Spirit reveals to us the truth about sin, righteousness, and judgment. Let’s look at each one in turn.
The Truth about Sin
The truth about sin is the truth about being human. God created everyone in the divine image. That means that each and every human being yearns not just to be loved by somebody else, or to find just that one special person to love. Whether we realize it or not, we yearn to be loving because it’s just who we are.
To be human is to have a sense of and a desire for a full-hearted life. To love God with all we’ve got and to love our neighbor as if we shared a common circulatory system. And yet, we can’t quite seem to pull that off with any consistency.
Paul put it sort of bluntly: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) We need a power greater than ourselves to save us from ourselves. To quote Paul again: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25) And this brings us to the truth about righteousness.
The Truth about Righteousness
Many non-Christians, and a number of thoroughly secular people, acknowledge that Jesus was a gifted teacher and that he set an example of compassion, justice, and moral courage. But there have been many remarkable spiritual teachers and scores of moral exemplars.
What sets Jesus apart is that he is God incarnate. The force of his teaching and the appeal of his example derive ultimately from who he is. Jesus is the power of divine love itself. And only God’s love has the power to radically transform the human soul.
The Spirit dives into our inner life and transforms us. Through the prophet Ezekiel we hear God’s promise to those who will receive it, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you.” (Ezekiel 36:26-27a) In the Holy Spirit, Jesus makes good on that promise.
Sometimes we think of righteousness as doing what is right: obeying the moral law. However, righteousness is relationship. It is our personal relationship with the risen Jesus. That relationship changes our spiritual DNA.
We are no longer half-hearted but full-hearted. At least, we’re heading in that direction. We begin to do what we really want to do. To love because that’s who we are. Righteousness is a state of soul that results from our relationship with Christ. We do what is right because Jesus has made us righteous. And this brings us to what the Spirit teaches us about judgment.
The Truth about Judgment
You may know people who think of God’s judgment as a sort of moral accounting. God watches our every move, assessing the moral quality of everything we do and everything we leave undone.
In the end, the Spirit of Truth helps us to say yes joy.
At the end our lives, God adds up the naughty and the nice columns of our moral ledger. Depending upon the bottom line, you get perdition or salvation. It’s all about you or me doing the right thing frequently enough to pass the celestial audit.
But remember that righteousness is not doing the right thing. To put it briefly, righteousness is the state of the soul that has said yes to making our relationship with Jesus the cornerstone of our life. Right action emerges from that soul. That is what led C. S. Lewis to say this about judgment:
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. [For] those who knock it is opened.” (from The Great Divorce)
In the end, the Spirit of Truth helps us to say yes to a full-hearted life.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses, “Is Theology Poetry?” (New York: HarperCollins, 1949, 1976, 1980) p. 140.
Well said, though I would disagree with that last part. Our ability to rebel in sin is not greater than God's ability to redeem and carry out his purpose, as he himself states emphatically and repeatedly throughout Scripture. Nor does the idea of God not want to violate our free will even make sense in that context (ignoring for a moment that such an idea is not supported by Scripture at all).
For no one, of their own free will, chose to be created and placed into a world where the possibility to damn themselves eternally was there if they did not choose the right path or discover the right truth. No one chooses hell unless they are incredibly mentally and spiritually damaged, but is God not a perfect healer? Is he not a perfect teacher of truth and a provider of wisdom?
Just goes to show that over time we all alter our opinions on stuff, sometimes not always for the better but hopefully more often then not it will be.