The following was written by COS Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) intern Charlotte Streff.
Have you ever accidentally sliced yourself with a knife in the kitchen? No doubt, you reacted to the pain by pausing your current activity of chopping up food for dinner (which had momentarily become unimportant) to attend to your injury. The first thing you probably did was pray for the pain to stop while you washed and bandaged your hand, then attempted to enlist someone else in your family to finish the chopping (since your fingers had all they could take for one day).
As stated above, the initial human instinct when we feel pain is to tend to our wounds as soon as possible. If you do not possess natural instinct as pictured in this example, then read no further; the following conversation does not apply to you. However, if you were born with natural instinct (like the other 8.2 billion people in the world), then read on.
In his work “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis leads a lengthy discussion on human instinct and how it relates to and differs from Moral Law. The actions of every single person on earth all boil down to instinct. Think about it: people either act out of a sense of bravery or fear, duty or selfishness, right or wrong, love or corruption, and so on. Every action, thought, and desire is driven by a form of instinct.
For a moment, let’s take a look at Moral Law. According to Lewis, many people believe it to simply be an extension of instinct. But that is not correct. Suppose that you go on a restful vacation to a peaceful mountain lake. The sun is bright, the wind stirs the trees, the water laps gently at your toes. An eagle calls somewhere in the distance. All of a sudden, your vacation is disturbed by a desperate cry from the treacherously deep part of the lake: “Help! I can’t swim!” What is your first instinct? Probably something along the lines of “where can I find a boat?”, all the while knowing there’s no time to spare. Your instinct to save the drowning man is your herd instinct, and the search for a boat in which to guard yourself from harm is your instinct for self-preservation.
Now buckle up: here comes the distinction between instinct and Moral Law. You have two instincts: save the man or save yourself. But in order to make a split-second decision between the two, there must be a third thing telling you which impulse to obey. This is your sense of Moral Law, instilled somewhere deep inside you by God and helping to guide you through life. Often, Moral Law actually prompts us to obey the weaker impulse instead of the stronger one. In the words of Lewis: “You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.”
Our instilled sense of Moral Law is a gift, not a burden. Too often today, people disregard this gift in favor of personal pleasure or gain. To become a true servant leader in an age riddled with inwardly focused people, we must embrace the gift God has given us: our sense of duty and purpose; the gift of Moral Law. If we lean on God, use the gifts he has given us, and remain humble, we will shine as bright lights in a dark world. Implement the gift of the Moral Law and be a reflection of God’s light today.
