Hi everyone, and welcome back to another session on Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. My name is Chris Fogel, and I am a writer and a pastor at a small church in Southern California called House of Grace. And I've been reading to you from Mere Christianity. We are on the tail end of book three, which is on Christian behavior. And we're going to be reading chapters 9, 10, and 11. which for our purposes are 19, 20, and 21, and they are Charity, Hope, and Faith. And this could be a little bit confusing, because C.S. Lewis split faith into two chapters. The second one is going to be in the next recording session, and that'll be chapter 12 of book 3, or our chapter 22. I kind of debated on whether to put both of the faiths together in this one, but for a couple reasons that I'll mention at the end, I did not decide to do that. This recording might be a little bit shorter than our other ones, but we are going to start off with charity, which is chapter 9, or for our purposes again, chapter 19. I said in an earlier chapter that there were four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues. The three theological ones are faith, hope, and charity. Faith is going to be dealt with in the last two chapters, and by that he means that it will be the last two chapters of book three. Charity was partly dealt with in chapter 7, but there I concentrated on that part of charity which is called forgiveness. I now want to add a little more. First, as to the meaning of the word. Charity now means simply what used to be called alms, that is, giving to the poor. Originally, it had a much wider meaning. You can see how it got the modern sense. If a man has charity, giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he does, and so people came to talk as if that were the whole of charity. In the same way, rhyme is the most obvious thing about poetry, and so people come to mean by poetry simply rhyme and nothing more. Charity means love in the Christian sense. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state, not of the feelings but of the will, that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves and must learn to have about other people. I pointed out in the chapter on forgiveness that our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good, in the same way Christian love or charity For our neighbors is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We like or are fond of some people and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural liking is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous. Natural liking or affection for people makes it easier to be charitable towards them. It is, therefore, normally a duty to encourage our affections, to like people as much as we can, just as it is often our duty to encourage our liking for exercise or wholesome food, not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it. On the other hand, it is also necessary to keep a very sharp lookout for fear our liking for some one person makes us uncharitable or even unfair to someone else. There are even cases where Our liking conflicts with our charity towards the person we like. For example, a doting mother may be tempted by natural affection to spoil her child, that is, to gratify her own affectionate impulses at the expense of the child's real happiness later on. But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are cold by temperament. That may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin, and it does not cut them out from the chance or excuse them from the duty of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor, act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is indeed one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his gratitude, you will probably be disappointed. People are not fools, they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off or patronage. But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made like us by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more, or at least to dislike it less. Consequently, though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or likings and the Christian has only charity. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he likes them. The Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on, including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning. This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them. Afterwards, they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate, and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become, and so on in a vicious cycle forever. Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible. Some writers use the word charity to describe not only Christian love between human beings, but also God's love for man and man's love for God. About the second of these two, people are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, if I were sure that I loved God, what would I do? When you have found the answer, go and do it. On the whole, God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings, and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will, we are obeying the commandment thou shalt love the Lord thy God. He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins or our indifference. And, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to him. And that ends chapter 19. So we move into the next chapter called Hope. Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not, as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objectives, you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more. Food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall Never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more. Most of us find it very difficult to want heaven at all, except insofar as heaven means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained. Our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want and want acutely something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job, but something has evaded us. Now, there are two wrong ways of dealing with this fact, and one right one. And now Lewis is going to give us the first two wrong ways. The first one, the fool's way. He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he had tried another woman or went for a more expensive holiday or whatever it is, then this time he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman through the divorce courts, from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is the real thing at last, and always disappointed. And now here's the second one. the way of the disillusioned, sensible man. He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. Of course, he says, one feels like that when he's young, but by the time you get to my age, you've given up chasing the rainbow's end. And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much and repress the part of himself which used to, as he would say, to cry for the moon. This is, of course, a much better way than the first and makes a man much happier and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig. He is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls adolescence. But, on the whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably. It would be the best line we could take if man did not live forever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there, waiting for us, supposing one really can reach the rainbow's end, in that case, it would be a pity to find out too late, a moment after death, that by our supposed common sense, we have stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it. And now here's the third one, which he would call the right way. The Christian Way The Christian says, creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger. Well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim. Well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire. Well, there's such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise or be unthankful for these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country. which I shall not find till after death. I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside. I must make it the main object of my life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same. There is no need to be worried by fastidious people who try to make the Christian hope of heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery, harps, crowns, gold, etc., is, of course, a merely symbolic attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because, for many people, not all, music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendor and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of heaven, gold does not rust, and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs. And with that, C.S. Lewis has pretty much dropped two mics in about one paragraph. So that ends chapter 10, and we'll move into the first of the faiths. And he will briefly tell us a little bit about the two faiths here that he's going to be talking about, but just to kind of help you. I'm only going to do this first faith, which is more about belief in the doctrines of Christianity. and not move into the second faith. I was kind of thinking about putting them both together, but then I've been doing three chapters at a time, and if I were to do this fourth one, then it would throw off the whole count at the end, because we still have one more book to go within the main book of Mere Christianity. So I'm just going to keep this first chapter on faith, and we'll do the second one next time. And I think that's kind of good too, because you'll have to switch over to the final chapter of Book 3, which is also titled Faith. I don't know why he called both chapters Faith, but anyway. And the second one, it'll be good for you to kind of have to pause in between listening to the one that you're listening to right now and the next one. And maybe that'll help you kind of have the idea that we're about to read through on the initial first type of faith maybe kind of firmly seated in your mind. So anyway, without further ado, although I will take a quick drink of water, We'll go ahead and get started on chapter 11, which I believe is chapter 21 for those of us who have been reading straight through. So, we will start on the first faith. I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call faith. Roughly speaking, the word faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense, it means simply belief, accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people, at least it used to puzzle me, is the fact that Christians regard faith, in this sense, as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue. What is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement. Not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence, that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad, but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid. Well, I think I still take that view, but what I did not see then, and a good many people do not see still, was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true, it will automatically go on regarding it as true until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced, by good evidence, that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap that horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I'm going to choke and I'm afraid that they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith. On the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side, and emotion and imagination on the other. When you think of it, you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret, and ought not to be trusted. But when he finds himself with her, his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, perhaps she'll be different this time, and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water. He has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water, or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down. Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of people who do not believe it. and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else, there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair. Some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again, his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I'm not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced, and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments when a mere mood rises up against it. Now faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable. But when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue. Unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist. but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently, one must train the habit of faith. The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And, as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument. Do not most people simply drift away? Now I must turn to faith in the second or higher sense, and this is the most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back to the subject of humility. You may remember I said that the first step towards humility was to realize that one is proud. I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely, or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No one knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current, that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to talk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it, and Christ, Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail. If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If there was any sort of a excuse me, if there was any idea of a sort of bargain, any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debt so that it was up to Him in mere justice to perform His side, that has to be wiped out. I think everyone who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam or of a bargain in his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find it blown into bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a failure and they give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded. In fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a passing mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt. Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you could not give Him anything that was not, in a sense, His own already. so that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, Daddy, give me six pence to buy you a birthday present. Of course the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is six pence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries, God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of faith in the second sense. And that ends the first chapter on faith. So we will go ahead. Before we end our time, I was really thinking about how C.S. Lewis was talking about something that I just wanted to mention. It just popped into my mind. And he was talking about how people who initially believe in Christianity can kind of, because they drift away from it, think that Christianity has failed or believe that they're not Christians and that it's not worth it or whatever. But that really reminded me of the parable of the soils. And I don't remember the exact scripture reference. I think I remember it, but I don't want to just say it off the top of my head. But anyway, you can look it up. Really easy to find. Google it. But Jesus is just talking about the different types of soil. And there are four different kinds. And really, it's the person's heart. And Jesus is the sower. And he goes out and he throws out the seed. And the seed is the word of God. And it speaks to people. And there's three different types of people who will kind of receive the word, but then they give it up or whatever. And then the fourth type, the seed falls on good soil. And it's a struggle and everything, but that seed plants in their heart and It grows, and it matures, and it's an awesome thing. And then the person needs to bear fruit. And so that's where they've become dedicated to it, and they've reminded themselves, and they've done the different things that Louis was talking about where, you know, you've got prayer and reading the religious texts and going in, might I add, to a physical church even though it's difficult. It's not as easy as just jumping online and watching a sermon or listening to a Christian podcast or something like that. But it's really getting into the trenches and going to a physical church because people suck. Christians suck. And it is really difficult to be friends with them and to interact with them. But that is where the rubber meets the road. And that is where you start to interact with them. And then you do ministry with them and you impact other people who may or may not be Christians. And that is where the seed is planted. And Jesus kind of finishes up that parable of the good soil by being able to say that Christians will bear fruit, some 30, some 60, some a hundredfold. And so you don't bear fruit by not retaining that seed in your heart and accepting Jesus as your Savior and being able to withstand just sort of drifting away from those things. And then that fruit is super important. We're not just Christians. And we're like, yeah, we get into heaven, and then the rest of this life is just eating cake and waiting, you know, to be able to go to heaven. But there's some work there in it, too. So, sorry if you weren't expecting a bit of a soapbox sermon there, but it's kind of in my nature, and it was something that just popped into my head, so I thought I'd share it with you. Plus, these three chapters were a little bit shorter, so might as well fill the time with something good from the Bible. So anyway, have a great day, and I'll try and get to the next three chapters as quickly as I can, and then we'll be moving into the final book, Book Four. So, have a great day, and God bless.