Let's Pretend

Today's Scripture

Jesus taught ordinary, messy people to begin their prayers with two enormous words.

Matthew 6:9 — "Pray then like this: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.'"

Romans 13:14 — "But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

2 Corinthians 3:18 — "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."

The Big Idea

When you pray "Our Father," you are claiming to be something you are not yet — a child who naturally trusts and obeys. Lewis says that is not hypocrisy; it is how God grows us up. We dress up as Christ, and Christ himself stands beside us, turning the costume into a character. The pretending is the path.

Reflection

The outrageous cheek of calling God "Father"

Start with what actually happens when an ordinary Christian prays the prayer Jesus taught in Matthew 6:9. The first two words are "Our Father." Stop there. Do you live like a child of God — unanxious, obedient, glad? Lewis is bracingly honest about what we really are when those words leave our mouths:

"If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God... You are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Outrageous cheek — that wonderful British phrase for nerve, audacity, claiming a title above your station. Every time you pray "Father," you are doing it. And here is the surprise: Jesus told us to. He put the audacious words in our mouths on purpose. The command itself assumes we will grow into the costume. Paul says it with a clothing metaphor of his own: "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 13:14) — literally, wear him. And again: "Be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us" (Ephesians 5:1-2). Children playing dress-up in their Father's clothes — with their Father's blessing.

Why pretending works

Now, "fake it till you make it" can sound like cheap advice. Lewis means something deeper, and he starts from a fact you already know:

"Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Think of how anything real gets learned. A child babbling pretend-words becomes a speaker of real ones. A nervous new lifeguard acts calm until calm becomes her reflex. Friendliness you put on for a grumpy morning often becomes actual friendliness by noon. Behavior is not just the fruit of character; it is also the soil character grows in. When John Wesley, still unsure of his own salvation, asked whether he should quit preaching, his friend Peter Böhler gave him advice that changed the history of the church:

"Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith." — Peter Böhler, recorded in Wesley's Journal

Two months later, Wesley's heart was "strangely warmed" at Aldersgate. The acting-as-if had carried him to the real thing. Even a non-Christian observer like Thoreau noticed the underlying law: "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." Every act carves the actor.

But Lewis adds the crucial Christian twist. The moment you consciously dress up as Christ, something diagnostic happens:

"The moment you realise 'Here I am, dressing up as Christ,' it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretence and more of a reality." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Try it and watch. The instant you pray "Our Father," you remember the text you sent in anger, the chore you dodged, the grudge you are nursing. The costume shows you exactly where it doesn't fit yet. Pretending to be Christ is the fastest way to find out precisely where you are not like him — and each discovery comes with an invitation to close the gap right then.

The Person inside the pretense

Here is where today's chapter stops being a self-improvement technique and becomes gospel. If dress-up were all we had, Christianity would be exhausting theater. But Lewis says the game is rigged — in our favor:

"You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

You are not acting alone on an empty stage. The One you are imitating is in the room, working on you while you work at it. This is exactly the Bible's grammar of transformation. "We all... beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image" (2 Corinthians 3:18) — the verb is passive; the Lord who is the Spirit does the transforming while we do the beholding. Paul describes his whole ministry as midwifing this process: "my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!" (Galatians 4:19). Christ formed in you — not pasted on you.

That is the difference between Christian "pretending" and hypocrisy. The hypocrite dresses up to deceive the audience. The disciple dresses up to cooperate with the Tailor — who is letting out the seams, day by day, until the garment becomes skin. "You have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator" (Colossians 3:9-10). Being renewed. Present tense. Under construction.

Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth-century monastery cook who became famous for finding God among the pots and pans, practiced exactly this one-moment-at-a-time cooperation:

"The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen... I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament." — Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

He did each small task as if for Christ, until the as-if quietly disappeared and only the love remained.

When the costume rips

Let's be realistic about what will actually happen, probably before lunch tomorrow. You will pray "Our Father," set out to live like a child of God — and then fail. Snap at someone. Cave to the old habit. Forget the whole project for six straight hours. What then? Is the pretending exposed as fake?

Scripture has remarkably little panic about this. "The righteous falls seven times and rises again" (Proverbs 24:16). Notice who that verse is about: not the failure who falls seven times, but the righteous who falls seven times. What marks God's people is not that they stop falling; it is that falling has stopped being the end of the story. They get up. They get up because of a standing promise: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). Faithful and just — he keeps this promise every single time it is claimed.

Martin Luther taught that this rhythm of falling and rising is not an embarrassing glitch in the Christian life but its actual daily shape. He said every believer's baptism

"...signifies that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts; and that a new man should daily come forth and arise." — Martin Luther, The Small Catechism

Daily drowned. Daily raised. Luther reportedly fought his darkest hours by reminding himself of one fact — I am baptized — not "I am doing well," but "I belong to him." The costume-wearer's confidence was never in the costume.

So when the pretense rips, do not spend the afternoon flagellating yourself; that is just the old self-centeredness wearing a sad mask. Do what children of the house do: go straight back to the Father, say so, and resume the game. In Lewis's terms, even the going-back is part of the dressing up — for going promptly and without despair to a father is exactly what the Son himself would do.

The day the costume becomes you

Where does it all end? John tells us plainly: "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).

Read the two halves. We are children now — the adoption is real, signed in Christ's blood, not pretend at all. And yet what we will be has not yet appeared — the family resemblance is still developing. The Christian life is lived between those two clauses: already his child, not yet his image. So the gospel turn today is this. You are not pretending in order to earn a place in the family; the Son already earned it and gave it to you. You are pretending the way a young prince practices the manners of the court he was born into — clumsy, corrected, beloved, and absolutely certain to grow up. God does not wait for the finished product before he calls you his own. He calls you his own, and that is precisely what finishes the product.

Going Deeper

Today, run Lewis's experiment three times. Morning, midday, and night, pray slowly: "Our Father in heaven." Then pause and ask one question: "If I were fully living as his child, what would I do in the next ten minutes?" Whatever surfaces — an apology, a chore, a kindness, a worry handed over — do that one thing. Three prayers, three small obediences. That is the pretense becoming reality, with Christ himself at your side making it so.