I promised a follow-up of my article on “Chapter Two of the Christian Life.” In it I talked about the necessity, once grace has begun to work in us, of working ourselves. I listed nine disciplines or areas of growth that I wanted to talk about.  My purpose is not to load people up with guilt or to get people to try to achieve grace through effort.  My purpose is to encourage all of you who, like me, have asked, “Now what?”  Now we begin the training in Christian living.

To lay the foundation for all the disciplines I plan to talk about, I need to start with the two most basic:  humility and obedience.  I call them disciplines, and they are:  when learned and practiced, however imperfectly, they will train us in right living.  But they are not only the means to right living, they are the goal of right living.  In other words, we need to practice humility and obedience in order to, well, practice humility and obedience.

So they are virtues to be acquired, not just disciplines to develop virtues.  And how are virtues acquired?  Aristotle said (and C.S. Lewis and I agree with him) that virtues are acquired through acting as if you possessed internally the virtue that you are trying to exhibit externally.  We learn virtues the same way we learn swimming or playing guitar.  We do the activity we want to learn.  We are terrible at it to begin with, but we know that through directed and continued effort we will eventually get better at swimming or guitar.  In fact, we will eventually become a swimmer or a guitar player.  The skill will become so internalized that it is no longer an effort we make but a quality of our very nature.

This practice in virtue can feel like hypocrisy, as we pretend to a quality that we don’t possess.  We act kind, even when we want to rage; we pretend courage, even when our knees are shaking.  Galatians 3:27 talks about putting on Christ, or clothing ourselves with Christ, and this is the same thing:  we put on something we are not, but we will grow into the thing we put on. It’s just like getting in the water and splashing around as if we were swimmers, when we’re really not yet.  This is the only way we will become virtuous people.  No amount of intellectual assent or pleasant fantasy will train us to respond with love when suddenly confronted with hate or to act with courage when facing something terrifying.  Only habit built up by training will enable us to acquire virtues and ultimately to become virtuous.

Let me say loud and clear that the purpose of growth in virtue is not to buff up our character so we can look good and avoid embarrassment.  The purpose of growth in virtue is to become like Christ.  He is our model of virtue, and he gives us the desire and strength to persevere.  I’m not offering another feel-good, look-good program.  I’m just trying to answer the “How?” we all ask when confronted with Christ’s commands to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.  And I will answer it, insofar as I can, by drawing mostly on the wisdom of others much farther along the road to perfection than I am.Continue reading “Chapter Two Continued: Humility and Obedience”