Mere Christianity

Last week at my new home church, Harvest Bible Chapel, they opened the service with a video testimony of one of the worship leaders. He had achieve success in the music business at a young age when his band, the Smoking Popes, was signed by a major record deal. In usual Behind The Music fashion, he quickly got swept up in alcohol and drugs and a feeling of loneliness. He eventually turned his life around and dedicated his life to serving Christ through his music, and he attributed this to reading C.S. Lewis's masterpiece Mere Christianity.

After hearing his story, I felt inspired to read Mere Christianity again. I first bought and read the book as a senior in high school, at that time in life where I began to think and ask questions and doubt everything I'd ever been taught about everything. Reading Mere Christianity was the single most impacting event that transformed my faith, and it did so for three reasons:
1. It reestablished my beliefs.
The book begins assuming the reader is starting with a clean slate. It begins with a proof of a Creator, builds upon that foundation to defend that Creator as the God of the Old Testament, and eventually the Jesus of the New Testament. This is perfect with any doubts of God's existence or Christ's divinity.
2. It reaffirmed my faith.
I knew I was a Christian. I knew I believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God. But I really didn't know why I believed that other than I had been told those very things from birth. Lewis explains things in such a way that I felt silly for ever doubting the basic tenets of Christianity.
3. It revitalized my confidence in Christianity.
Lewis's wisdom and intellectual power made me feel proud to be able to call myself a follower of Christ. Not only that, but his numerous expressions of God's love for His children made me all the more excited to be counted as one of His.

So after I removed Mere Christianity from my shelf, blew off the dust that had accumulated, and began reading it again, I shouldn't have been surprised by its continued relevancy in my life, even though I am 5 years wiser, spiritually and otherwise. But I was.

Lewis's writing voice continues to amaze me. Even after four years of undergrad level study in the areas of English, in which I read unceasingly, and Writing, in which I study the art of shaping sentences. His command of the English language is impressive, powerful, and smile-inducing. And even though I consider my walk with Christ light years beyond what I was as I read Mere Christianity for the first time, this read through is not without its lessons.

For example, in his "What Christians Believe" section, Lewis comments on the three ways in which we enter in the "new life" of Christianity, baptism, belief, and communion, as ways in which we "share the humility and suffering of Christ." And by participating in these sacraments, we are "keeping up a life [we] got from someone else." A life, Lewis calls a "Christ-life" because it is like "Christ operating" through us, which we causes us to do "good," but one which we can lose if we don't keep it up.

We are the body of Christ, as Romans 7, Corinthians 11, and Lewis explain ("we are the physical organism through which Christ acts"), and the three processes in which we maintain His body are metaphors for how we maintain our earthly bodies. Belief is the mental process through which we spread this new life of Christ in us. Baptism and Holy Communion are the physical, or "bodily" acts which spread life: baptism, the cleansing and purification of the body, communion, the nourishment of the body.

I always knew communion and baptism, and, of course, belief, were important aspects of a continually growing Christian life. And I always approached every one of these processes with reverence, but not until reading Lewis's description of why these rituals are significant did I really "get it." Never again will I view them without the respect and seriousness they really deserve.

Now I'm finding myself craving the Word more, and looking forward to learning more lessons from Lewis.