Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

All right, this week we're looking at one of my favorite books from one of my favorite authors of all time, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. So specifically, we're going to dig into some passages from the book that aim straight at a man's heart and are anchored in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So far this week, we've looked at the natural law, the cost of perfection, and yesterday we got into Lewis's trilemma concerning Jesus, that he is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. And specifically, we talk about how Jesus didn't really leave the door open to speculation on this point. He didn't let people think of him as a great moral teacher or some guru. He explicitly claimed to be God and claimed that perfect righteousness came through belief in him only. Today we are going to count the cost of belief in Jesus. And in order to do that, let's read the following passage from Book 4, Chapter 10 of Mere Christianity. He meant what he said. Those who put themselves in his hands will become perfect, as he is perfect, perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain. I think this is the right moment to consider a question which is often asked. If Christianity is true, why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians? What lies behind that question is partly something very reasonable and partly something that is not reasonable at all. The reasonable part is this. If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions, if he continues to be just as snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before, then I think we must suspect that his conversion was largely imaginary. And after one's original conversion, every time one thinks one has made an advance, that is the test to apply, fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in religion mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better. Just as in an illness, feeling better is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up. In that sense, the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results. Christ told us to judge by results. A tree is known by its fruit, or as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we Christians behave badly or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The wartime posters told us that careless talk costs lives. It is equally true that careless lives cost talk. Our careless lives set the outer world talking, and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself. But there is another way of demanding results in which the outer world may be quite illogical. They may demand not merely that each man's life should improve if he becomes a Christian, they may also demand before they believe in Christianity that they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps, Christian and non-Christian, and that all the people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second. This is unreasonable. So in this section, Lewis is putting nice guy Christianity in the crosshairs. And if you read the entire book, which you definitely should, you can easily surmise that Lewis has a disdain for people that focus on this, you know, kind of soft, effeminized, say for the whole family version of Christianity that people settle into. So on my main show, Undaunted Life, at the beginning of every year, I make a list of the ways to avoid being a crappy man for that year. Number five this year was a new one to the list. Don't let being nice get in the way of doing the right thing. Now I put that on there because I was constantly seeing examples from Christians, whether I knew them or you know just saw them in public or something like that, where they would keep their mouths shut in a myriad of circumstances where image bearers of God were being harmed or about to be harmed, right? So it's it was a derivative of the nonsense nostrum from most of our childhoods, which is if you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all. Well, screw that. I mean, we're not called to be nice. That is not the supreme ethic. We are called to be holy, to be set apart. I mean, go back to the book of Leviticus where God is speaking to Moses at the beginning of Leviticus 19, verse 2, speaking to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. Now don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying, all right, guys, here's your license to act like a complete jerk all the time. No, that's not what I'm saying. But guess what? If you give your life to Christ, and not just some of your life, but all of it, it's going to require some things from you. As Jesus said in John 14, 15, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And so whenever you are eyeball to eyeball with anyone, your spouse, your favorite kid, your least favorite kid, your boss, your buddy, your pastor, whoever, your primary call to action is not be nice no matter what. It's be holy no matter what. Keep the commands of God no matter what. And some people will call you mean, and some people will call you judgy, and some people will say that you're not loving people. But the reality is that you cannot love people well if you allow them to stay slave to their sin. And in order to get some people to realize that, you can't always be nice about it. Because if you are a Christ follower, a disciple of Jesus, you have the hope of heaven. And you should want that for them too. More on that tomorrow as we wrap up the week.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Before you go, if you want to help equip other men for the fight, share this podcast around and leave us a five star rating and review. Stay sharp.