Tuesday Tome - Mere Christianity / Surrender

Tonight, Tuesday, March 12 (7:00pm), I'll be leading the third and final session of the Mere Christianity Book Club at Valley Christian Church. You're invited to join us, even if you have not made it to the two previous sessions. There is really so much to discuss that we'll barely be able to justice to the section of the book we will be considering. Next week, our discussion will focus on the fourth section of the book (Book IV: Beyond Personality).

The study questions I provided at our last gathering turned out to be very helpful in our discussion. If you would like to get a copy of these questions prior to our next meeting, just CLICK HERE to go the our book club page and download the PDF file of the study guide available there (located on the bottom right side of the page).


Here is the closing passage from this special little book:

Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange?

The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Lewis, C. S., Mere Christianity (pp. 226-227), Harper Collins.