Faith (Faith and Works)

C.S Lewis gives an in depth discussion on works and faith of Christ. Works without faith is dead. Faith without works is dead.

There are many things in Christianity that can't be understood until your journey to Christ has been traveled for a while. Our understanding of Christianity changes as we travel and grow in Christ and everyone's journey is different.

What God cares about is not exactly our actions but for us to be a certain kind of person or quality of person. If you are right with Christ, you will be right with all his creatures. Any child can learn to say and repeat something he is taught about Christ but can not really discover God's law without living it, failing, and continuing to try and live it. The road to God is a road to moral effort and to not try but to put faith in God. You never know God's path for you until you have looked back and can see it behind you.

Leave it to God... He who puts all his trust in Christ, that Christ will make man more like himself, see that he will make us like himself, son's of God, Christ like. Christ offers something for nothing and everything for nothing.

The difficulty is to reach that point where we recognize that all we have done and can it is nothing. Again, you can say that no temptation is overcome until we stop trying to overcome it but then you could not stop trying in the right way until you have tried your very hardest. To hand over everything to Christ does not mean to stop trying. To truly hand yourself over to Christ must follow to obey him but to try in a new way, a less worried way, not doing things as a reward but wanting to act in a certain way because heaven is already in you.

Asking which is better, good actions or faith in Christ, is like asking which blade on a pair of scissors is necessary. A serious moral effort and faith in Christ bring good action. Good action with the idea that heaven can be bought by giving money to the church, for example, is nonsense and would only be commercial speculations. Also on the other hand, faith without taking notice to what Christ says and trying to do as he asks, is not faith at all.

Workout your own salvation with fear and trembling... For it is God who workith in you... What does God do and what does man do? This way of thinking is wrong. God is inside you as well as outside you. Even if we could understand it, I'm not sure we could articulate it in our language.