A Response To The Post "Sanctification & Holiness" By 7-10 Brownfish

I found an article on this subject by a man named Jerry Walls. Well....it's not only about Holiness and Santification but on what C.S. Lewis thought about the subject and how it relates to us. By the way, Lewis is one of my favorite authors. He tackles stuff like this early and often. I thought about writing a few things down as a response to your post but after reading this piece I really had nothing fresh to say. I tried to post it as a response to the post but unfortunately I was limited to 4,000 characters. Needless to say I picked out the good parts and have posted them below. I will also post a link to the site where I found the article. Drink this in.....it's good stuff man!

While Lewis is best known as an apologist for the faith in an age of unbelief, many of his writings are extremely valuable for persons who are already believers and who want to grow and mature in their faith. Indeed, Lewis could be a very rich resource for Christians of any tradition who want to recover this vital component of biblical faith.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis communicates the significance and value he places on holiness as he recounts the impact he felt reading Phantastes, a fantasy novel written by George Macdonald, a 19th century Christian writer. Lewis was a teenager at the time—atheistic in his beliefs, but searching for a meaningful philosophy of life. He was deeply interested in classical fantasy and mythical literature because of its ability to arouse in him a longing or desire for a dimension of reality beyond the material. Macdonald's novel had this effect on him, but it did more. For the first time in his life, he was attracted by the quality of holiness, although he says he did not realize what it was that was attracting him at the time. Lewis also described the importance of the experience in The Great Divorce, as he imagines meeting Macdonald in heaven: "I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connection with it, how hard I tried not to see that the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness."

It is surely significant that Lewis, in retrospect, identified holiness as the quality which first captivated him in Macdonald's writings, and it is equally significant that he also confesses that he was reluctant to admit its connection with Christianity. This is a common theme in Lewis's writings. Christianity is powerfully attractive at a profound level, yet it repels us at another level. The quality of holiness is both beautiful and fascinating in its supernatural dimension, and it stirs the hope in our hearts that there is more to life than the material and physical. But at the same time, it is disconcerting in its moral dimension, because it exposes our sinfulness and calls us to a thorough transformation which is at times threatening—even painful.
Lewis develops this point many times in his writings, perhaps nowhere more clearly and eloquently than in Book IV of Mere Christianity, chapters 4-11. It is very important to notice that Book IV as a whole is about the doctrine of the Trinity. This is precisely where the idea of salvation and sanctification should be located. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a matter of abstract speculation which has little to do with the daily business of Christian living. Rather, it is the essential content as well as context in which the Christian life make sense. It illumines the reason the Son of God became a man and gives insight into how this affects our salvation. Lewis puts it as follows: "Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ ... Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us…Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else."

Lewis had little patience with the modern tendency to trivialize Christianity by reducing its extraordinary claims to mundane, ordinary ones. Christianity is about a real relationship with a real, supernatural God. It is about nothing less than being brought into the eternal life of the Trinity through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. And this is what sanctifies us and makes us holy. Notice what Lewis says happens when we share in the life of Christ. "We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us."

Lewis is quite emphatic that salvation is not merely about the forgiveness of our sins, as crucial as that is. As we grow in our Christian life, he observes that: "We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are" (my emphasis). Particular sinful acts can be forgiven, but our sinfulness itself, which is the root of particular actions, needs different treatment. For our sinfulness to be cured, we need radical moral and spiritual transformation.

Lewis recognizes that our natural tendency is to rest content with forgiveness, or with merely a measure of progress in the moral arena. We would like God to help us with some of our more embarrassing or annoying sins, and then we would be satisfied. But God has other plans in mind. Lewis drove this point home in several passages in which he employed a number of vivid and memorable images, such as the following: "He [Jesus] never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, Be perfect, He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to team to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

What this means is that ultimately we have only two options: either the literal perfection which results when our sanctification is complete, or damnation. Damnation is the mirror image of sanctification. It is the consequence of thoroughly refusing to love God closing ourselves off entirely from the Holy Spirit. These are our only two choices. "We must be hatched or go bad." This is not to endorse the extreme views of some who have preached "holiness or hell" in such a way as to assert that if one is not entirely sanctified in this life, then he will be lost. God is a gracious and merciful Father who patiently and lovingly pursues his project of perfecting us. If we have opened our life to God, we can trust him to finish the job.

The only thing which can prevent God from completing his work of perfection in us is our unwillingness to allow him. Lewis is quite emphatic about the fact that we remain free in the process of sanctification and that our perfection goes forward only as we cooperate with God's grace. This often requires definite acts of faith and surrender on our part. Lewis illustrates this graphically in The Great Divorce. In a famous scene, Lewis describes a ghost who shrinks back from the life of heaven because of the interference of a little red lizard on his shoulder. The lizard (which represents lust) whispers in his ear to discourage him by telling him that he cannot possibly be happy without him, even go on living. An angel offers to silence the lizard. Initially the ghost agrees, until he learns that the angel means to kill it. Then the ghost retreats: "Honestly, I don't think there's the slightest necessity for that. I'm sure I shall I be able to keep it in order now. I think the gradual process would be far better than killing it."
The angel assures him, however, that the gradual process will be of no use in this case and says: "I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your permission?" Eventually, after a dramatic struggle, the ghost agrees to allow the angel to kill it. When he does so, a remarkable thing happens. The lizard is transformed into a shining stallion, on which the ghost, likewise transformed into a substantial person of radiant beauty, rides off into the glory of heaven. Lewis draws the following lesson: "Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death ... Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed."

This underlines the crucial point that holiness represents our true satisfaction and fulfillment, just as sin represents our destruction and misery—despite its seductive promises. In "The New Birth" Wesley wrote that "it is not possible in the nature of things that a man should be happy who is not holy" (Works, 1985, 2:195).

What lessons can be learned from Lewis by those who wish to recover the biblical doctrine of holiness? First, we cannot begin to appreciate the depth and power of this concept unless we see it in its larger theological context. Too often the idea of holiness has been construed as a relatively peripheral matter or a doctrinal distinctive of certain sectarian denominations. It is worth emphasizing that in a book about "mere Christianity"—the classical faith of the Church—Lewis insists that Christianity is about nothing other than God's offer to make us like Christ. Moreover, he explains the great doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation in just these terms. Holiness is not a sideline issue or the concern of only those with esoteric interests, but rather, it is the heart of the faith.

Second, Lewis very effectively reminds us that the process of sanctification will not go forward without our cooperation, and that moral change requires some painful choices on our part. If heaven is our goal, there can be no compromise with the various lizards on our shoulders.

Third, Lewis shows that the holiness which God requires of us is far better than anything we might, in our shortsightedness, vainly prefer to it. If we are to recover the power of the message of holiness in our generation, this is an essential key. Like Lewis we need to understand and exemplify the attractiveness of holiness in all of its splendor. It is worth remembering that Lewis first encountered holiness in reading imaginative literature. Might we employ more creativity and imagination in our efforts to display holiness in all its splendor? Certainly this includes the moral renewal which we desire, but it is more than that. It is also a vision of the beauty and meaning of life which answers to our deepest longings for happiness and satisfaction.
In our age, as in every age, people are longing for happiness, not realizing that what they are looking for is holiness. Like C.S. Lewis when he first read Macdonald, they typically do not know the name of what they are looking for. It is our evangelistic and theological task to help our generation name its deepest longings. A fresh reading of Lewis would be a good step in that direction.

http://www.goodnewsmag.org/library/articles/walls-mj95.htm