Highlights: Ep. 33 | Mere Christianity | Part 12 | Failure - A Defining Moment
“The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail… God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits.”
It’s a necessary and defining moment for anyone wanting to walk in new life with Christ.
“So, If you were to die tonight and God were to ask you why he should let you into his heaven, what would your answer be?” (James Kennedy, Evangelism Explosion)
We can never be saved by our doing…only by his dying. This is the starting point, the defining moment for anyone who wants to be in a right relationship with God. “
We cannot be in right relation with God until we have discovered the fact of our own bankruptcy.”
Whether we are being changed from a dragon to a boy…from a sinner to a son of God…we must “let him do it.
“Handing everything over to Christ does not mean that you stop trying. To trust him means, of course, trying to do all that he says…but trying in a new way…not doing these things in order to be saved, but because he has begun to save you already.”
“The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’ - which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions. But the second half goes on, ‘for it is God who works in you’ - which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised.”
"Out of faith in him good actions must inevitably come…if what you call your faith in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what he says, then it is not faith at all.”
It’s not faith plus works. It’s faith that works. We are saved by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone.
Once we’ve said, “I do” to Jesus Christ we become God’s children. From then on our relationship doesn’t rest on how we’re feeling or on how we’re behaving at the moment. It rests on the fact of the promise we made and the fact of the promises that God has made in response. Faith rests on those facts not our feelings.
“Christianity seems at first to be all about morality…duties and rules…guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things…Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one’s eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people’s eyes can see further than mine.”