The Greenhouse Effect

"To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you." Mere Christianity

As I said yesterday, C. S. Lewis sees the relationship between faith and works in terms of a time sequence. We must begin with works, with an ardent attempt at moral living. Only by doing so do we realize how little we are capable of. That's when faith kicks in. When we realize we can't live the life God created us to live then we give it up and start trusting God in Christ to live through us. It is at this point that works come back into play. If we have really given our lives to Christ in faith then we will try to obey him, but in a new way. We will seek to live out the Christ-life, not by our own power, but by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lewis makes it quite clear: the good we do as Christians doesn't come from ourselves, but from the Christ-life, from the Holy Spirit, inside us. God doesn't love us because we are good. He makes us good because he loves us.

Here Lewis uses the beautiful illustration of the greenhouse. Lewis had a greenhouse at his home in Oxfordshire and may have been looking at that very greenhouse when he penned these words: "the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it." Just so, we do not attract the Son of God because we are bright, morally pure creatures. But when the Son of God shines upon us he makes us bright, pure creatures he can use for his own glory.

"And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." 2 Corinthians 3:18

Thank you Father

for shining the light of your Son in my life

so that I might reflect your glory to others

by the power of your Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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Will Vaus

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