Life as a Christian

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says, “Give Me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and there, I want the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked- the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

Christian way is both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have noticed, I expect, that Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, “Take up your cross”- in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in the concentration camp. Next minute he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”. He means both. And one can just see why both are true.

But it is far easier than what we are trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “Ourselves”, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good”. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way- centered on money or pleasure or ambition- and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly, chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

-Clive Staples Lewis "Mere Christianity"