Counting the Cost

Big idea

Summary

This chapter answers readers troubled by Christ's command 'Be ye perfect,' which some had read as a threat: fail to reach perfection and receive no help at all. Lewis reframes the saying entirely. Christ is not setting a bar a person must clear before assistance arrives; he is describing the only kind of assistance on offer. Whatever partial fix a person requests, the help that actually comes aims at nothing less than total transformation.

Lewis illustrates this with a childhood memory of avoiding his mother about a toothache, not because she would withhold the aspirin but because she would also march him to the dentist, who would inevitably find other problems to address along the way. Christ works the same way: people bring him one embarrassing habit to cure, and he cures it, but he does not stop there; asking him in means agreeing to the full treatment, whatever that eventually requires.

Borrowing George MacDonald's line that God is 'easy to please, but hard to satisfy,' Lewis holds together two truths that might seem to conflict. On one hand, God delights in the smallest, most stumbling effort toward goodness, the way any father is thrilled by a baby's first unsteady steps. On the other hand, he will not rest until that same person reaches a glory Lewis calls becoming 'gods,' language he draws directly from Scripture.

The chapter closes with MacDonald's extended image of the soul as a house under renovation. At first God's repairs make obvious sense, fixing drains, patching a roof, but soon the demolition seems excessive and painful, because he is not restoring a cottage; he is constructing a palace he intends to inhabit himself. Lewis uses this to explain why the Christian life often grows harder, not easier, once early faults are corrected: God is not finished, and never intends to be, short of complete transformation.

Key points

• Christ's command to 'be perfect' is not a condition for receiving help but a description of the only kind of help he offers.
• Lewis's dentist analogy shows that asking Christ to fix one obvious problem invites him to address everything else as well.
• 'Counting the cost' means recognizing upfront that surrender to Christ has no ceiling short of complete transformation.
• Present failures do not disqualify a believer; Christ meets small, faltering steps with patience, since he is 'easy to please, but hard to satisfy.'
• The stages of embryonic development illustrate that God has already remade each person through transformations they could not have imagined beforehand, so a further, higher transformation should not surprise anyone.
• Suffering and disruption after conversion often signal God pushing a person toward a harder, larger version of holiness, not divine neglect.

Illustrations & analogies

• A childhood toothache and an unavoidable trip to the dentist picture how asking Christ for relief from one sin invites a far more thorough treatment.
• A baby's first unsteady steps, contrasted with the firm walk expected of a grown son, capture how God delights in small efforts while still aiming at full maturity.
• The earlier, almost vegetable- and fish-like stages of human development before birth illustrate that people have already been transformed in ways they could not foresee, which makes a further transformation plausible.
• George MacDonald's image of a house being rebuilt into a palace, with confusing and painful construction along the way, pictures why the Christian life can grow harder rather than easier over time.

Notable lines

God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.

C. S. Lewis Book IV, Ch. 9 — Counting the Cost

He is the inventor, we are only the machine.

C. S. Lewis Book IV, Ch. 9 — Counting the Cost

You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.

C. S. Lewis Book IV, Ch. 9 — Counting the Cost

Related Scripture

• Matthew 5:48
• Matthew 3:17
• Psalm 82:6
• John 10:34

For reflection and discussion

1. Lewis says that if you give this 'dentist' an inch, he will take an ell. Where in your own life has asking God to fix one thing led him to address something you were not expecting?
2. How do you hold together the idea that God is 'easy to please' with small, faltering efforts, and yet 'hard to satisfy' with anything less than complete transformation?
3. MacDonald's image pictures God building a palace rather than repairing a cottage. What in your life currently feels like unnecessary demolition that might actually be part of something larger?