Charity and Hope

Today's Scripture

Lewis now reaches the two virtues that point beyond this world: charity, the love that acts, and hope, the longing that aims at heaven.

1 Corinthians 13:13 — "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

Ecclesiastes 3:11 — "He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."

Philippians 3:20 — "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ."

The Big Idea

The theological virtues — faith, hope, and charity — are called that because they come from God and aim at God. Today Lewis takes two of them. Charity is love as action: behave as if you loved someone, and real love follows. Hope is love's homesickness: the ache for a country we have never seen, planted in us by the God who made us for himself.

Reflection

Love is something you do

First, a translation problem. Charity now mostly means donating money. But in older English it meant love — and not love as a warm feeling, but love as a settled habit of the will. Charity is wanting and working for another person's good whether or not you happen to like them. That is why Paul can rank it above everything: 1 Corinthians 13:13 — "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

This immediately creates a problem. Feelings cannot be ordered up on demand. If charity were a feeling, commanding it would be like commanding you to enjoy broccoli. Lewis's answer is the most practical advice in Mere Christianity:

"Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Act as if. Do not wait for the feeling; do the deed, and the feeling tends to follow. This is not hypocrisy — hypocrisy is acting kindly to deceive someone. This is more like physical therapy for a weak limb: the motion comes first, strength comes after. John says exactly the same thing: 1 John 3:18 — "Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth." Love, in the Bible, is something you can watch somebody do.

Try it somewhere ordinary. There is someone — at school, at work, in your own house — who simply rubs you wrong. The experiment: do them one concrete kindness today. Save them a seat. Ask a real question and listen to the whole answer. Take their chore without announcing it. Lewis predicts what you will find if you keep at it:

"The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on — including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The world's love is a thermometer — it just reports the temperature it finds. Christian charity is a thermostat — it changes the temperature. And the change works in both directions, which is why this secret is also a warning: treat someone with contempt, and you will find yourself despising them more. Every act of kindness or cruelty is training your heart toward the next one.

But where does the strength for all this acting-as-if come from? Not from us, ultimately. 1 John 4:19 — "We love because he first loved us." Before we ever performed one act of charity, God performed the greatest one in history toward us. Our love is an echo. Charity is called a theological virtue — a God-given one — because it enters from outside, like light through a window.

Made for another world

Now to hope — and immediately Lewis has to clear away a misunderstanding, because to modern people "hoping for heaven" sounds like avoiding real life:

"Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Hope, in the Bible, is not crossing your fingers. It is confident expectation of what God has promised — and Christians are commanded to practice it the way athletes practice sprints.

But why believe heaven exists at all? Here Lewis builds one of his most famous arguments, and he starts from something every person on earth has felt: the strange ache that nothing in this world fully satisfies. You know this feeling. It is the day after Christmas, sitting among the opened presents you waited weeks for, aware of a small hollow place the presents did not fill. It is the vacation that was wonderful but somehow not it. The Bible names this ache: Ecclesiastes 3:11 — "he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." Eternity in the heart — a built-in longing too big for the world.

Lewis asks: what do longings normally tell us?

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Hunger does not prove a baby will get dinner tonight. But hunger does prove that food exists — that the baby lives in the kind of universe where eating is a real thing. Now follow the logic to its destination, in the most quoted sentence Lewis ever wrote:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The ache is evidence. Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy that deepest desire — only to wake it up, the way the smell of dinner cooking is not the meal. Augustine compressed the same discovery into the most famous sentence he ever wrote, fifteen centuries earlier:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." — Augustine, Confessions

The restlessness is homesickness. And Scripture says the heroes of faith read their own ache exactly this way. Hebrews 11:13-16 describes Abraham and Sarah as people who "acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth," and then: "But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city." A better country. Jonathan Edwards preached a whole sermon on living as those travelers, and named the destination precisely:

"God is the highest good of the reasonable creature; and the enjoyment of him is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied." — Jonathan Edwards, The Christian Pilgrim

Heaven is not ultimately golden streets. Heaven is God himself — the thing the ache was always about.

Heavenly minded, earthly good

Here comes the objection: doesn't all this heaven-gazing make people useless on earth? Dreamers with their heads in the clouds while the world burns? Lewis answers with history:

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

He is right. The people who built hospitals, freed slaves, taught the poor to read, and nursed plague victims when everyone else fled were overwhelmingly people drunk on the hope of heaven. It makes sense once you think about it: people who fear death serve cautiously. People certain of resurrection can afford to be reckless in love. So Lewis lays down the rule:

"Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Aim at heaven and earth gets thrown in — like a runner aiming past the finish line and so running faster through it. Paul gives the same command: Colossians 3:1-2 — "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth." Notice that this command sits at the top of a chapter full of intensely earthly instructions — about honesty, kindness, family, work. Minds set on heaven produce hands that are useful on earth. N.T. Wright explains why the connection is not an accident:

"Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven." — N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Hope is not evacuation. It is the advance party of the new creation, planting flags of heaven — every act of charity is one — in the soil of the present world.

The two virtues meet at the empty tomb

Look at what we have found today. Charity: act as if you loved, and love comes. Hope: follow the ache, and it leads home. Now see how the gospel joins them, because neither virtue can stand on willpower alone.

Our charity is borrowed fire. 1 John 4:19 again — "We love because he first loved us." God did not wait to feel warmly about a lovable world. While we were still his enemies, he acted as love acts: he gave. The cross is charity in its purest form — deed and truth, not word and talk. When you act kindly toward the person you do not like, you are not pretending. You are imitating your Father, and joining a love that was headed toward you long before you wanted it.

And our hope is anchored fact, not mood. 1 Peter 1:3 — "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." A living hope — because it rests on a man who is alive. The other country Lewis spoke of is not a wish; its King has already been seen, touched, and watched eating breakfast on a beach. That is why Romans 5:5 can promise that "hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." The desire no experience in this world can satisfy will be satisfied. Philippians 3:20 — "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." You were made for another world — and the door to it stands open, because Jesus walked out of a tomb and left it that way.

Going Deeper

Run both experiments today. First, charity: pick the person you find hardest to like and do them one concrete, secret kindness — no credit, no announcement. Notice what happens in your heart afterward, even faintly. Second, hope: tonight, name one longing that nothing has ever quite satisfied — write it in a sentence. Then tell God you accept Lewis's explanation: I was made for another world. Ask him to turn that ache into a compass for the week ahead.