I hear this argument many times, and it does indeed become a puzzle to many Believers: if Christianity works, then how come there are so many people who call themselves Christians so rotten? Why aren't all Christians nicer than the non-Christians?
I recommend highly C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, particularlyone of the final chapters entitled "Nice People or New Men." In it, Lewis tells of how Christians are a continual work in progress as they grow closer to the Lord, and the overall picture is clearer when you remember that the entire creature is overcoming the effects of a sinful kosmos and is in transition towards total and complete Christlikeness. At the moment, some "works in progress" may seem to need a lot more renovation (boy, that really describes me!) For the casual observer to point and say, "well, that's the reason I don't become a Christian, because that Christian is not perfect in his manners," I direct you to Lewis' closing paragraphs of that same chapter:
"Niceness"-wholesome, integrated personality-is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in ourpower, to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up "nice";just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world - and might even be more difficult to save.
For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders - no one could tell by looking at them that theyare going to be wings - may even give it an awkward appearance. ..
If whatyou want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, "So there's your boasted new man! Give me the old kind." But if once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people's souls - of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call "nature" or "the real world" fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?
