Lewis builds toward his great climax: God is not in the business of improving our old selves — he is in the business of replacing them with something entirely new.

Discussion Questions

6 questions

1.In 'The Obstinate Toy Soldiers,' Lewis describes the Incarnation as God becoming a wooden soldier in order to turn wooden soldiers into real people. What does this earthy image capture that more technical atonement language might obscure?

2.In 'Let's Pretend,' Lewis returns to the 'pretending' theme: saying the Lord's Prayer ('Our Father') when you barely believe it is a form of pretending — but a pretending God uses. What is the difference between this and hypocrisy, and how does this chapter deepen what he said in Book II?

a.Is there a prayer you say regularly that still feels like pretending? What does Lewis say to do with that?

b.How does the Lord's Prayer ('Our Father') pull us into the divine life — the relationship of the Son to the Father — in a way we didn't necessarily initiate?

3.In 'Is Christianity Hard or Easy?,' Lewis says the 'ordinary' Christian life — trying to be a bit better than you were — is actually harder than full surrender. The yoke is easy only when you give everything. Does this match your experience? Why does half-commitment feel more exhausting than full commitment?

4.In 'Counting the Cost,' Lewis famously writes that Christ will not rest until he has made you perfect — he is not content to fix the house but plans to rebuild it entirely. He uses the image of a house being knocked down and rebuilt as a palace. How does this reframe painful providences — the ways God disrupts our comfortable small lives?

5.In 'Nice People or New Men,' Lewis makes the provocative claim that a 'nice' non-Christian may produce better external behavior than a struggling Christian — but that the Christian is being given something the nice non-Christian has not got at all. What is that something, and why does it matter more than niceness?

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