Killing the root

“We may, indeed, be sure that perfect [fill in any attribute you wish to name – charity, humility, courage, truthfulness, joy, etc.] will never be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.” C.S. Lewis.

I came across this passage by C.S. Lewis the other day while reading his book “Mere Christianity” for the first time. (Why I didn't read it sooner, I have no idea, but I wish I had. It examines some of Christianity's most complex puzzles and explains them very clearly from a Christian perspective.) It is amazing how perfectly some of the passages describe the struggles I have already or am currently going through, and I have no doubt the same would be true for almost everyone who has ever tried to live the Christian life. Time after time he hits the nail on the head and I find myself saying “exactly!” only to realize that he wrote it a long time before I was born. It kinda burst my bubble to realize that all my “original” thoughts weren't original at all – probably not a bad thing for me to realize – but it was also encouraging to realize that the struggles people were going through a hundred years ago are not really any different than the ones we go through today, just in a different context. However, I don't say all this to promote C.S. Lewis or his book but only to point out that “There hath no temptation taken you but as is common to man” and that C.S. Lewis was uncommonly good at putting these temptations and the lessons learned into words.

Anyway, when I saw this passage it reminded me that God is not so worried about the sin as He is about the problem that is causing the sin. God always goes for the root of the problem. Whereas you and I would be happy to merely chop off the visible part of sin just below the surface and be done with it quickly, God chooses the slower method of killing sin from the root up. As Lewis pointed out, this can be extremely discouraging, staring at the slowly wilting weed of sin and wishing and praying fervently that the visible part would just go away, but in the end God is not worried as much about the way sin manifests itself as He is about the weakness that allows it to spring up in the first place. After all, He is not looking for a quick cure for the sin, He is looking for a lasting cure for the sinner. To be sure, God doesn't like the sin any more than we do – in fact He likes it a lot less – but He will allow it as long He knows it is teaching us how to better deal with sin in the future. I know I have found this to be very true in my own life, and while I would not like go back to those times of defeat, time after time and day after day to the same sins, I do not regret going through them only because I see that they have now worked for my good. It was helpful to be reminded that Christianity is not about never falling but about learning how to get back up. Proverbs 24:16 puts this very nicely when it says a man can be just and still fall seven times, provided that he gets back up every time. Getting back up. . . that is the skill God wants us to learn and He will let us fall as many times as necessary until we learn how to do it properly. As a friend of mine pointed out to me recently you don't have to be frustrated with the fact that you can't reach perfection, rejoice in the fact that you don't have to and then get as close to it as you can.

Mike