“[To have Faith in Christ] 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.”
EXODUS 11-12
12“On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. 13The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.(12:12-13)
MATTHEW 18:21-35
32“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.35“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
12“On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. 13The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.(12:12-13)
JOURNAL
C.S. Lewis helped save me from a lot of doubt. The good kind of doubt that forces you to stop pretending, the kind that makes you wrestle with whether what you believe actually holds up under pressure. Mere Christianity came to me at a time when the Bible felt disconnected, confusing, and sometimes impossible to reconcile with the real world. His reasoning pulled me out of the trap of thinking faith meant shutting my brain off. It also helped heal some of the toxicity I picked up from conservative Baptist theology, where fear and performance were often dressed up as holiness.
His words hit me again today, especially this idea that trusting Christ means trying to do what He says, not in order to earn salvation, but because salvation has already begun working its way into you. It is the difference between obedience as pressure and obedience as response. The difference between living terrified of failing and living steady because grace is already holding you. Lewis calls it “a less worried way,” and that phrase feels like oxygen to me. I want that kind of faith. Not lazy faith, not careless faith, but confident faith. The kind that obeys because heaven has already started flickering on the inside.
Reading Exodus 11 and 12 today brings me back to the places where my faith still strains. These are hard passages. The death of the firstborn is not easy for me to sit with, and I cannot pretend it is. It bothers me deeply to think of children suffering because of the rebellion and pride of one man. I have spent years skimming these sections, brushing them aside, telling myself not to think too hard about it. But it is in the text, and if I am going to be honest, it confronts something in me. It confronts my desire to only accept a God who fits neatly inside my expectations of what is fair.
And yet, even in that heaviness, I see the blood on the doorposts and I cannot miss the symbolism. Judgment passing over. Protection given. A rescue that did not come because anyone deserved it, but because God provided a covering. The whole story feels like a shadow that stretches forward to Christ. I do not understand every detail, but I can see the pattern. God is not casual about evil. God is not indifferent to suffering. God is also not obligated to fit inside my limited ability to judge what is right.
Then I read Matthew 18 and it cuts in a different way. The parable of the unforgiving servant makes perfect sense to me in theory, but it exposes me in practice. I understand canceling a financial debt. I understand that concept. What gets me is the invisible debt I collect from people mentally. The debt of appreciation. The debt of recognition. The debt of them noticing my effort, my kindness, my sacrifice. When I feel unseen, something in me keeps score, and it hardens me slowly. I may not say it out loud, but internally I start thinking, “You owe me.” That kind of debt is poisonous because it does not just affect one relationship, it affects my heart toward life itself.
Jesus is not soft about it. He says forgiveness has to come from the heart. Not performative forgiveness. Not polite forgiveness. Not forgiveness that keeps a weapon hidden behind the back. Real forgiveness. Over and over. Not seven times, but seventy-seven times, meaning it is meant to become a way of living, not a one-time event. The sobering part is that Jesus ties my willingness to forgive to my understanding of what I have been forgiven. If God has canceled my debt, then my grip on everyone else’s debts is completely out of place.
I think all of it circles back to one central question: do I trust the heart of God more than I trust the heart of man? Because people will fail me. That is guaranteed. Some will do it accidentally and some will do it intentionally. Some will disappoint me in small ways and some will wound me in ways that change me. But my identity cannot be built on being treated fairly by other humans. My hope cannot depend on people behaving the way I wish they would. If it does, I will always be unstable, always angry, always hungry for something this world cannot consistently provide.
This is why Lewis matters so much to me. He reminds me that faith is not pretending life is easy or that the Bible makes promises it never actually makes. Faith is not bargaining with God for a protected life. Faith is entrusting myself to Christ and obeying Him from a place of being rescued, not from a place of trying to earn rescue. That is the only kind of Christianity that can survive real suffering and real disappointment. It is the only kind of faith that can stare at hard passages and still say, “God, I do not understand, but I trust You.”
Jesus said it plainly. In this world we will have trouble. He did not hide that. He did not soften it. But He also said to take heart because He has overcome the world. That is what I want today. A faith that is less worried. A faith that does not keep score. A faith that is not built on outcomes. A faith that obeys because heaven has already begun its work in me.
C.S. Lewis helped save me from a lot of doubt. The good kind of doubt that forces you to stop pretending, the kind that makes you wrestle with whether what you believe actually holds up under pressure. Mere Christianity came to me at a time when the Bible felt disconnected, confusing, and sometimes impossible to reconcile with the real world. His reasoning pulled me out of the trap of thinking faith meant shutting my brain off. It also helped heal some of the toxicity I picked up from conservative Baptist theology, where fear and performance were often dressed up as holiness.
His words hit me again today, especially this idea that trusting Christ means trying to do what He says, not in order to earn salvation, but because salvation has already begun working its way into you. It is the difference between obedience as pressure and obedience as response. The difference between living terrified of failing and living steady because grace is already holding you. Lewis calls it “a less worried way,” and that phrase feels like oxygen to me. I want that kind of faith. Not lazy faith, not careless faith, but confident faith. The kind that obeys because heaven has already started flickering on the inside.
Reading Exodus 11 and 12 today brings me back to the places where my faith still strains. These are hard passages. The death of the firstborn is not easy for me to sit with, and I cannot pretend it is. It bothers me deeply to think of children suffering because of the rebellion and pride of one man. I have spent years skimming these sections, brushing them aside, telling myself not to think too hard about it. But it is in the text, and if I am going to be honest, it confronts something in me. It confronts my desire to only accept a God who fits neatly inside my expectations of what is fair.
And yet, even in that heaviness, I see the blood on the doorposts and I cannot miss the symbolism. Judgment passing over. Protection given. A rescue that did not come because anyone deserved it, but because God provided a covering. The whole story feels like a shadow that stretches forward to Christ. I do not understand every detail, but I can see the pattern. God is not casual about evil. God is not indifferent to suffering. God is also not obligated to fit inside my limited ability to judge what is right.
Then I read Matthew 18 and it cuts in a different way. The parable of the unforgiving servant makes perfect sense to me in theory, but it exposes me in practice. I understand canceling a financial debt. I understand that concept. What gets me is the invisible debt I collect from people mentally. The debt of appreciation. The debt of recognition. The debt of them noticing my effort, my kindness, my sacrifice. When I feel unseen, something in me keeps score, and it hardens me slowly. I may not say it out loud, but internally I start thinking, “You owe me.” That kind of debt is poisonous because it does not just affect one relationship, it affects my heart toward life itself.
Jesus is not soft about it. He says forgiveness has to come from the heart. Not performative forgiveness. Not polite forgiveness. Not forgiveness that keeps a weapon hidden behind the back. Real forgiveness. Over and over. Not seven times, but seventy-seven times, meaning it is meant to become a way of living, not a one-time event. The sobering part is that Jesus ties my willingness to forgive to my understanding of what I have been forgiven. If God has canceled my debt, then my grip on everyone else’s debts is completely out of place.
I think all of it circles back to one central question: do I trust the heart of God more than I trust the heart of man? Because people will fail me. That is guaranteed. Some will do it accidentally and some will do it intentionally. Some will disappoint me in small ways and some will wound me in ways that change me. But my identity cannot be built on being treated fairly by other humans. My hope cannot depend on people behaving the way I wish they would. If it does, I will always be unstable, always angry, always hungry for something this world cannot consistently provide.
This is why Lewis matters so much to me. He reminds me that faith is not pretending life is easy or that the Bible makes promises it never actually makes. Faith is not bargaining with God for a protected life. Faith is entrusting myself to Christ and obeying Him from a place of being rescued, not from a place of trying to earn rescue. That is the only kind of Christianity that can survive real suffering and real disappointment. It is the only kind of faith that can stare at hard passages and still say, “God, I do not understand, but I trust You.”
Jesus said it plainly. In this world we will have trouble. He did not hide that. He did not soften it. But He also said to take heart because He has overcome the world. That is what I want today. A faith that is less worried. A faith that does not keep score. A faith that is not built on outcomes. A faith that obeys because heaven has already begun its work in me.
33“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
JOHN 16:33
JOHN 16:33
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