Day 18 of 28
Morality and Psychoanalysis
The Choice Beneath the Feeling
Scripture Readings
Today's Scripture
1 Samuel 16:7 — "But the Lord said to Samuel, 'Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.'"
Luke 21:1-4 — "Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. And he said, 'Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.'"
The Big Idea
Every person starts with raw material they did not choose — temperament, upbringing, wiring, wounds. Psychology studies the raw material. Morality is about what you do with it. People grade each other by the visible result. God grades the invisible choice. That one difference rearranges everything about how we judge others, and ourselves.
Reflection
The hand you were dealt
In a chapter that sounds like it was written last week, Lewis takes up psychology — and surprises readers by not attacking it. Understanding your temperament, your childhood, your anxieties: all of that is useful, he says, the way medicine is useful. But it answers a different question than morality does. Psychology explains the cards in your hand. Morality is about how you play them.
Two people face the same situation — say, an insult in front of friends. One was raised in a calm, safe home and has steady nerves. The other grew up dodging a violent father and has a temper like dry grass. The first stays pleasant without effort. The second goes silent, hands shaking, and barely manages not to explode. Who behaved better? Every onlooker says the first. Lewis says heaven may be applauding the second.
"Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 4
This is exactly what God told the prophet Samuel when he was busy being impressed by a tall, kingly-looking young man. 1 Samuel 16:7 — "For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." We have no instrument that measures hearts. God needs none.
Two coins that outweighed a fortune
Jesus once sat where he could watch people give. Rich donors dropped in large gifts. Then a widow put in two coins worth almost nothing. Luke 21:3-4 — "Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."
More than all of them. Jesus was not rounding up to be nice. He was using a different scale — one that weighs what a choice costs, not what it produces. On that scale, two coins from an empty purse outweigh a sack of gold from a full one. Lewis applies the same scale to character:
"When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 4
A tiny kindness from a ruined childhood may outweigh a martyrdom from a comfortable one. If that offends our sense of fairness, it is because we have been grading on the wrong curve. Luke 12:48 — "Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required." Got good raw material? More is expected of you, not less.
"We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 4
This, Lewis says, is why Jesus commands what he commands in Matthew 7:1-2 — "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you." Not because right and wrong are fuzzy, but because you cannot see the one thing God grades: what this exact person, with this exact history, did with the hand they were dealt. You are reading the scoreboard without knowing the handicaps.
A warning for the naturally nice
Now Lewis turns the lens around, and it gets uncomfortable. If God judges raw material plus choice, then being "a nice person" might be evidence of nothing at all. Maybe you are simply playing easy cards.
"Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 4
Read that twice. The polite, even-tempered churchgoer coasting on a fortunate childhood may stand lower, on God's scale, than the foul-mouthed struggler crawling upward an inch a year. Niceness can be costless. And costless virtue earns nothing.
Worse, we cannot even audit ourselves reliably. Jeremiah 17:9 — "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" Our motives ghost-write our explanations. We call our cowardice "peacemaking" and our pride "standards." Only one examiner sees all the way down: Hebrews 4:12-13 — the word of God is "discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account."
That should end forever the favorite indoor sport of comparing ourselves to others. Tim Keller describes the freedom on the far side of quitting:
"The essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less." — Tim Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness
The right response to a deceitful heart is not endless self-inspection. It is handing the inspection over: Psalm 139:23-24 — "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!"
The choice that is making you
Why do these small, invisible choices matter so much? Because, Lewis says, they are not just choices. They are construction.
"Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 4
Take your life as a whole, Lewis continues, and all those innumerable choices are slowly turning you into either a heavenly creature or a hellish one. Nobody becomes either overnight. We become them at the speed of ordinary Tuesdays — one resentment fed or starved, one truth told or shaded.
If that were the whole story, it would be terrifying. Our raw material is damaged, our hearts deceive us, and every choice compounds. But the gospel does not leave us alone with our raw material. Augustine, a man who knew his own wiring was bent, prayed the boldest prayer in his Confessions:
"Give what you command, and command what you will." — Augustine, Confessions, Book X
Command anything, Lord — just supply what you demand. And God does. Philippians 2:12-13 — "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." You make real choices, and underneath them God is supplying the very willing. Christ took on our raw material — real flesh, real temptation, real exhaustion — and played the hand perfectly, then died for every hand we have misplayed. John Newton, the former slave trader, measured his progress honestly:
"I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am." — John Newton
That is the report card grace writes: not yet what I ought to be; no longer what I was. God sees your two coins. He knows what they cost you. And in Christ, he is not your auditor anymore. He is your Father.
Going Deeper
Today, retire one comparison. Pick the person you most often measure yourself against — favorably or unfavorably — and consciously stop scoring the match. Instead, pray Psalm 139:23-24 for yourself ("Search me, O God") and Luke 12:48 over your own advantages: "I was given much; what is being required of me?" Then make one small, costly choice in your hardest area — the place where your raw material is worst. Two coins are enough. God counts cost.
Key Quotes
“Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.”
“When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.”
“We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”
“Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends.”
“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.”
“The essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.”
“I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.”
“Give what you command, and command what you will.”
Prayer Focus
Thank God that he judges you by your choices, not by the hand you were dealt — and that in Christ he forgives even the choices. Pray for one person whose behavior you find easy to despise, asking God to show you their raw material. Then ask him to search your own heart, since you cannot fully read it yourself.
Meditation
In Luke 21:1-4 Jesus says the widow's two coins outweighed the large gifts of the rich, because he measured what it cost her. Where in your life might God be counting cost rather than size?
Question for Discussion
Lewis suggests that a naturally cruel person who manages a tiny act of kindness may be doing more in God's eyes than a naturally kind person who gives up their life. Does this feel fair to you? How should this reshape the way your group judges one another's spiritual progress?