The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because he was God, surrender and humiliation because he was man. Now the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in his conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than trying to follow his teaching. People often ask: when the next step in evolution - the step to something beyond man will happen. Well, on the Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ a new type of man appeared; and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us. How is this done?
There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and the Lord's Supper...Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief and the Holy Communion as things that I will do instead of my own attempts to copy Christ. Your natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it; but always remember you are not making it , you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put in him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam - he is nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And it has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing the body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurts, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out."
CS Lewis
Mere Christianity
There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and the Lord's Supper...Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief and the Holy Communion as things that I will do instead of my own attempts to copy Christ. Your natural life is derived from your parents; that does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it; but always remember you are not making it , you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put in him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam - he is nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And it has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing the body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurts, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out."
CS Lewis
Mere Christianity
