Resistance Is Not Futile
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.” (CS Lewis). The picture that CS Lewis presents of the difficulties of resisting evil is not particularly encouraging. For every hour that we resist, the temptation only gets stronger and stronger, the furnace of affliction only gets hotter and hotter. If this were the end of it, we would have every right to despair. But just as the temptation gets stronger, so too does our ability to resist get stronger. This is a universal truth. In electrical conductivity, when there is an increase in the flow of electrons through a wire, the metal wire conducting electricity begins to heat up. As it heats up, the metal becomes more resistant. If electricity continues to flow through the hotter wire, the wire will heat up more and increase its resistance further. It is the same with our souls. The more we resist evil, the hotter our furnace of affliction will become, but our power to resist will grow in direct proportion to how hot it is getting. Resisting evil is never fun nor easy, but neither is it futile. Our Savior will not abandon us. He can not always take the burden from us, but He can help us to resist for as long as choose to, and the hotter it gets, the more power He gives us to resist. It is true that if we give in to temptation after only five minutes, we would not know how strong the temptation would be after an hour, but by the same token, we would not know how strong we ourselves would be after an hour.This is how we grow. God increases our capacity to resist evil in direct proportion to the force of the evil we are resisting. I know that however strong a temptation is that we are facing, through Christ’s grace we can be made to be stronger still.
