Being Good

Lately I've sensed the pulls of laziness, selfishness and competitiveness in myself. As I've been working to fight them this quote has become more real to me:

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...

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.

...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.

C.S. Lewis

Mere Christianity, p. 142, italics added

And I might add: thus, the only one to deliver us from temptation. I'll couple this with something else Lewis said.

...a Christian is a not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good...the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us...

Mere Christianity, p. 63, italics added