Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley
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“No doctrine…. seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result when you go away from the debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the reality–from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.”
-C.S. Lewis
It is easier to defend Christianity than to embody it. It is easier to defend the principles and doctrines of Christianity than to live them out in the Spirit by which they were meant to be lived. As a believer who finds himself trying to do both these things, I have personally come to better understand recently what Lewis is saying here. I would add to his thesis that a prideful anger can also be manifest in “Defending the Faith,” which makes the most eloquent argument do more harm than good to both the one giving it and the one hearing it.
After 26 years as a hopefully earnest follower of Christ, I find my mental faculties undiminished in my efforts to communicate the truth of what I believe. In fact, logically enough, I may be more intellectually “proficient” as an apologist for my faith now than at any other time that came before. Usually an observant Biblical Christian does gain more “head-knowledge” as the years go by. Unfortunately, what may not be simultaneously gained is a deeper practical devotion to God which manifests itself in the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Many of these fruits have eluded me, even a quarter century after my conversion, and I find the most concerning reality to be the fact that having any of them depends on what is really the most important “fruit.” The one in question is a deep personal knowledge of and love for God rooted in true dependence on His Holy Spirit.
This lack of felt closeness to the One I call my Lord has been a concern throughout my Christian life. I will not go deeply into the reasons I think the problem exists for me. I suspect that many of you who are reading this can relate to the problem yourselves, and you may already be quite familiar with some of those reasons. They range from grappling with the many distractions of the age we live in to unconquered indulgence in various sins to fears about what might actually happen if I truly did die to myself in order to live for Christ.
But for the purposes of this essay what I would prefer to specifically focus on is the effect this condition can have on my outward witness. Believers are called to “tell the truth in love.” This is virtually impossible to accomplish if we are not living deeply and experientially in the love of God. We may tell someone why to believe in Jesus with great eloquence and impeccable argument, but if they do not simultaneously sense that we truly love them as a human being made in the image of God, as a precious individual for whom our Lord died, then we are doing them no good!
To the degree I am not communicating love to the person I am telling about Christ, my witness is compromised, often fatally I suspect. I have found, to my shame, that I sometimes find myself witnessing in an angry way, and that the anger is often the result of my own sinful pride. I can be defensive because of my concern over being rejected. I can be sharp with someone because of my own frustration at not being able to “make them see” the truth of the Gospel. In both cases the “witness” becomes more about me than about loving someone into the Kingdom of God.
The answer to my problem circles back to Lewis’s quote. I tend to believe that most of our challenges in truly going deeper into the Christian life are, as he implies, simply a matter of relying on ourselves rather than the One who created and redeemed us. Anger, pride, defensiveness: all these are symptoms of relying on my fallen human nature, my “flesh,” rather than relying moment by moment on the presence and power of Christ in my life.
I still am not sure how to be that reliant and therein lay my challenge. I need to decrease and He needs to increase. Until that happens to a far greater extent than it has in my life thus far I will not be able to help others to the degree I both need and want to help them. Perhaps the most important thing I can do is simply to seek God to a greater degree than I have in the past, though that is always easier to propose than to actually do.
Fortunately, as Jesus Himself said, “with God all things are possible.”
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