Zoe Life: It is God Who is Working in You

C.S. Lewis says the height of what we know here is biological life: the ability to feel emotion, think, reason, and imagine all included. But what we are incapable of enacting on our own is a different sort of life-the life that is found in God-which he gives the name zoe. When Jesus bridges that gap separating us from the source of all goodness and life, God calls us his children, and invites us to participate in this new kind of spiritual life.

The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentance. The first half is, 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling'--which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, 'For it is God who worketh in you' (122 Mere Christianity).

"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes" (123 Mere Christianity).

"Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because he has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of heaven is already inside you" (121).



Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.