Lose Your Life and You Will Save It

Excerpt from Mere Christianity

At the begin­ning I said there were Per­son­al­i­ties in God. I will go fur­ther now. There are no real per­son­al­i­ties any­where else. Until you have giv­en up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Same­ness is to be found most among the most ​“nat­ur­al” men, not among those who sur­ren­der to Christ. How monot­o­nous­ly alike all the great tyrants and con­querors have been: how glo­ri­ous­ly dif­fer­ent are the saints.

But there must be a real giv­ing up of the self. You must throw it away ​“blind­ly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real per­son­al­i­ty: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own per­son­al­i­ty is what you are both­er­ing about you are not going to Him at all.

The very first step is to try to for­get about the self alto­geth­er. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are look­ing for it. It will come when you are look­ing for Him. Does that sound strange? The same prin­ci­ple holds, you know, for more every­day mat­ters. Even in social life, you will nev­er make a good impres­sion on oth­er peo­ple until you stop think­ing about what sort of impres­sion you are
mak­ing. Even in lit­er­a­ture and art, no man who both­ers about orig­i­nal­i­ty will ever be orig­i­nal: where­as if you sim­ply try to tell the truth (with­out car­ing twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become orig­i­nal with­out ever hav­ing noticed it. The prin­ci­ple runs through all
life from top to bottom.

Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Sub­mit to death, death of your ambi­tions and favourite wish­es every day and death of your whole body in the end: sub­mit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eter­nal life. Keep back noth­ing. Noth­ing that you have not giv­en away will ever be real­ly yours. Noth­ing in you that has not died will
ever be raised from the dead. Look for your­self, and you will find in the long run only hatred, lone­li­ness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him every­thing else thrown in.