Lose It and Find It — We Are His Workmanship

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Very Easily Explained

Lewis makes his charge in one dry clause, and it is more devastating than an accusation of wickedness would have been. Most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained.

He does not say the natural self is monstrous. He says it is predictable. Heredity, upbringing, appetite, temperament, the circumstances a person happened to be handed — run those together and most of what anyone calls their personality has been accounted for. The thing we defend most fiercely as uniquely ours turns out to be largely generic.

Four days ago Le reported seeing her carnal mind from a step above and being amazed how bad and useless it was. Lewis is describing the same discovery in a colder voice. Not bad in the sense of scandalous. Bad in the sense of thin.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Paradox Is Not Lewis's

The shape of the argument — give yourself up and you will get yourself back — did not originate with Lewis. He is restating a sentence of Jesus that appears in all four Gospels.

Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. Not a reward offered for sacrifice. A mechanism described. The grasping is itself the losing. The letting go is itself the finding.

And Jesus gives the physical picture elsewhere: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. The seed that refuses to be buried does not stay safe. It stays alone.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The "I" Is Relocated, Not Deleted

This is where the verse guards Lewis from being misread. Paul writes it is no longer I who live — and then, in the very same sentence, the life which I now live.

The "I" does not vanish. Paul keeps using it. He goes on to say Christ loved me and gave Himself for me — the most personal pronouns in the letter, placed immediately after the announcement that the old self is dead.

This is not absorption. It is not the self dissolving into God like salt in water. Le read the true version on August 7: the mind of Christ is had, not merged into. What Lewis and Paul describe is a self that has stopped trying to be its own source — and discovers it can finally be a self.

Paul says it in three words elsewhere, and they are worth memorising: by the grace of God I am what I am. Both halves stand. He is genuinely someone. And he did not supply it.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Three Witnesses, Sixteen Centuries

This journal has now heard the same finding from three men who could not have coordinated it.

Kempis, in the spring: by loving myself amiss, I lost myself; by seeking You alone, I found both myself and You.

Augustine, on July 2: Where was I when I was seeking You? You were before me, but I had gone away from You; nor did I find myself, how much less You.

Lewis, this morning: it is when I give myself up to His Personality that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

A fifth-century African bishop, a fifteenth-century Dutch monk, and a twentieth-century Oxford don. Different centuries, different languages, no possibility of collusion in the case of the first — and the identical report. Leave God and you lose yourself in the bargain. Return and both are handed back together.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Why It Works That Way

The paradox stops being strange once you ask where a self comes from in the first place. No creature is its own origin. Nothing in creation supplies its own existence, and nothing keeps going by drawing on itself.

Smith gave the picture five days ago: the branch in the vine, the member with the head, the building with the foundation. And the note that morning was that only one of the three actually feeds. A branch cut off does not become more itself. It becomes firewood. Not because branches are worthless — because a branch was never designed to manufacture sap.

So when Lewis says giving yourself up makes you more yourself, he is not describing a spiritual trick. He is describing what happens when a derived thing reconnects to what it derives from.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Name No One Else Knows

If the fear behind all this is that surrender means becoming interchangeable — one anonymous soul among millions — Scripture answers it with a promise so particular that no one else can even read it.

A new name written which no one knows except him who receives it. The most individual thing ever given to a person is given at the far end of surrender, not withheld because of it.

This journal met that verse on July 26, in the study on living stones: the Builder does not build with anonymous material. He knows every stone by a name He alone chose. Lewis's argument and that white stone are the same claim. Real individuality is not something a soul achieves by holding on to itself. It is something handed over, personally, by Someone who had it to give.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — We Are His Poem

The word translated workmanship is poiēma — the root behind the English word poem. And it appears only twice in the New Testament. Here, of people. And in Romans 1:20, of the created universe.

God has two of these. The cosmos — and the people He remakes in Christ. They are put in the same category of work.

And this answers the fear Lewis raises. If surrender means being taken over, does a person become generic? Nobody has ever called a poem generic because a poet wrote it. Being authored is not the opposite of being particular. It is the reason it is particular. The more skilled the hand, the less interchangeable the piece.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Created, Not Repaired

Created in Christ Jesus. The verb is the one used in Genesis for the making of the world — not mended, not adjusted, not improved. Created.

Which is precisely what Le saw on August 7. She found the carnal mind not merely faulty but useless — and Paul had already ruled out repair: the carnal mind is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.

So the remedy was never renovation. A thing that cannot be fixed has to be made new. Lewis's "real personality of my own" is not the old self polished up. It is a poem where a heap used to be.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Works Changed Position

Watch what happens across two verses. Verse 9: not of works. Verse 10: for good works.

The works have not been abolished. They have been moved. They were in front of salvation, trying to produce it; now they stand behind it, produced by it. Cause has become consequence.

Which is the same order this journal keeps finding. Nearness before blessing, not after — Smith, five days ago. Sight before strength — Ephesians 1, six days ago. The mind before the walk — August 7. Every time, the thing we are tempted to put first turns out to belong second.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Prepared Beforehand, to Walk In

And the last clause is the one to carry into this particular fortnight. Which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

The good works are not assignments to be invented. They were laid out in advance — already there, already fitted. The verb is walk, the same word studied on the seventh: a gait, taken step by step, through ordinary hours. Paul's picture is not of a soul designing a mission. It is of a soul walking into work that was already waiting.

Nine days from a country this household has not yet lived in, that is not a small sentence. Whatever is to be done in Brittany was prepared before the van is loaded. It does not have to be foreseen, engineered, or worried into existence. It has to be walked into.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Boring

Lewis said predictable. Le adds a sharper word: boring. And it is the better one, because it names why predictability matters.

Sin advertises novelty and delivers repetition. It presents itself as the adventurous option and then does the same thing it did last time. Le described the mechanism herself in July, without meaning to: under stress, I tend to go back to my old nature. Back. The old self has one move, and it makes it again.

Now look at what stands at the foot of every page of this journal. His mercies are new every morning. New — the exact thing the natural self can never be. The old nature repeats. The mercies do not. That contrast has been printed at the bottom of these entries for eighty-five days.

And Le's last three words are the whole argument in miniature. The "I" is relocated. Not erased, not dissolved, not made anonymous — moved. Out of a self that could only repeat, and into a Life that is new every morning.