Conformed to his Image

In Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis explains how the incarnation is God's answer to the problem of humanity's fall into sin:

"Unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all--to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.

"But supposing God became a man--suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person--then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all." Mere Christianity, Book II, chapter 4, paragraphs 8 & 9.

All that is left for us to do is to accept the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf and allow God, by the Holy Spirit, to conform our lives to the image of Christ, the one who was born in poverty, lived a selfless life, gave up his life for sinners, and rose again.

"For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers." Romans 8:29

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Will Vaus

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