C.S. Lewis
It is a truly fatal mistake we are making, letting the world believe we are fools. Flippancy against Christ is reaching deadly levels, because we are allowing nonbelievers to assume that we throw our minds away in embracing the Gospel. God commands us to love him with all our minds. And it is because of our polite declination to do so that Jesus has been given the short end of the stick as the opiate of the masses. I held on to that prejudice for years.
I was not prepared for C.S. Lewis. I had heard his name through the grapevine, and bought Mere Christianity in some vague hope that some Irish guy from over sixty years ago might have some vague antidote for the lifetime of blind faith I had been raised on.
…….!!!
His writings were miraculous. They were earthshattering. With a humble wit and a relaxed, conversational writing style, Jack (as he liked to be called) fired a shotgun blast though the very heart of my unbelief. Twenty-one years of learned misconceptions about Jesus and his teachings were massacred, and the true Jesus, whose massive intellectual riches have barely begun to be mined in over two thousand years, was allowed to grin and wink at me as He had always desired to do.
My faith had been growing when I found Lewis. But it was his unparalleled understanding of God's Word, his delightful wit and solemn grasp of its desperate realities, that made me realize, unequivocally, 'I'm home.'
For a couple of years I almost deified Jack. I spent more time reading him than I did reading the Bible. And as Jack, in all his humility would have said, Come now. Stop reading my silly books and focus on the Gospel.
And of course, I did. And I began a solitary fourteen year thrill ride through the single most astonishing wonder in our world: The Bible.
No one ever said it like Jack. He is one of the most quoted (and misquoted) writers on Google. There is hardly an issue in the scope of spirituality which cannot be run through by one of the deadliest writers who ever held a pen.
He challenged me. I was a recovering hippie. He was not. I loved the world, and had expected a hell fire and brimstone tirade against it. Instead, he dismantled it almost casually, with a warm grin on his face as he pulled back the curtain of sin and lies and allowed Christ to look me in the face. And thanks to Jack, that Holy Gaze was only mildly terrifying.
Jack, as a young man, was a venomous atheist. He bragged in his twenties that in the blood and filth of the First World War, he never stooped so low as to pray. How did a man whose atheism could survive the perpetual near-death experience of trench warfare become the shining beacon of faithful inspiration to millions he was in his later years? By thinking. His conversion was the result of careful examination and reflection and research. Jack has been described as a man who thought his way to God. And through his beautiful writings, millions more have done the same.
I have continued to explore this intellectual giant. I have read roughly eighteen of his books, from his stunning spiritual fantasies in Narnia to the devastating death-statement of A Grief Observed. Not once have I failed to learn something, nor to marvel at his tragically unread odes to the intellectualism of the Bible.
If anyone has doubts about God's twisted sense of humour, let that person reflect on the fact that God took home arguably the greatest Christian voice of the twentieth century on November 22nd, 1963, the same day as President John F. Kennedy, when it could not have been more certain to be overshadowed completely in the newsreels. But Lewis' writings live on. Seek them out. Seek out books like Mere Christianity, Miracles and The Problem of Pain, and discover a man who will captivate and astonish you. And who will then defer you to the Man who captivated and astonished him.
It is a truly fatal mistake we are making, letting the world believe we are fools. Flippancy against Christ is reaching deadly levels, because we are allowing nonbelievers to assume that we throw our minds away in embracing the Gospel. God commands us to love him with all our minds. And it is because of our polite declination to do so that Jesus has been given the short end of the stick as the opiate of the masses. I held on to that prejudice for years.
I was not prepared for C.S. Lewis. I had heard his name through the grapevine, and bought Mere Christianity in some vague hope that some Irish guy from over sixty years ago might have some vague antidote for the lifetime of blind faith I had been raised on.
…….!!!
His writings were miraculous. They were earthshattering. With a humble wit and a relaxed, conversational writing style, Jack (as he liked to be called) fired a shotgun blast though the very heart of my unbelief. Twenty-one years of learned misconceptions about Jesus and his teachings were massacred, and the true Jesus, whose massive intellectual riches have barely begun to be mined in over two thousand years, was allowed to grin and wink at me as He had always desired to do.
My faith had been growing when I found Lewis. But it was his unparalleled understanding of God's Word, his delightful wit and solemn grasp of its desperate realities, that made me realize, unequivocally, 'I'm home.'
For a couple of years I almost deified Jack. I spent more time reading him than I did reading the Bible. And as Jack, in all his humility would have said, Come now. Stop reading my silly books and focus on the Gospel.
And of course, I did. And I began a solitary fourteen year thrill ride through the single most astonishing wonder in our world: The Bible.
No one ever said it like Jack. He is one of the most quoted (and misquoted) writers on Google. There is hardly an issue in the scope of spirituality which cannot be run through by one of the deadliest writers who ever held a pen.
He challenged me. I was a recovering hippie. He was not. I loved the world, and had expected a hell fire and brimstone tirade against it. Instead, he dismantled it almost casually, with a warm grin on his face as he pulled back the curtain of sin and lies and allowed Christ to look me in the face. And thanks to Jack, that Holy Gaze was only mildly terrifying.
Jack, as a young man, was a venomous atheist. He bragged in his twenties that in the blood and filth of the First World War, he never stooped so low as to pray. How did a man whose atheism could survive the perpetual near-death experience of trench warfare become the shining beacon of faithful inspiration to millions he was in his later years? By thinking. His conversion was the result of careful examination and reflection and research. Jack has been described as a man who thought his way to God. And through his beautiful writings, millions more have done the same.
I have continued to explore this intellectual giant. I have read roughly eighteen of his books, from his stunning spiritual fantasies in Narnia to the devastating death-statement of A Grief Observed. Not once have I failed to learn something, nor to marvel at his tragically unread odes to the intellectualism of the Bible.
If anyone has doubts about God's twisted sense of humour, let that person reflect on the fact that God took home arguably the greatest Christian voice of the twentieth century on November 22nd, 1963, the same day as President John F. Kennedy, when it could not have been more certain to be overshadowed completely in the newsreels. But Lewis' writings live on. Seek them out. Seek out books like Mere Christianity, Miracles and The Problem of Pain, and discover a man who will captivate and astonish you. And who will then defer you to the Man who captivated and astonished him.
