An introduction to C.S. Lewis.

Good morning, church family. Today we are embarking on a new journey together that I am incredibly excited about, and it’s a new kind of thing altogether really.

We are calling this series: A Summer with C.S. Lewis.

Now, some of you might wonder.

Why are we spending our summer focusing on a 20th-century British Oxford professor, a literary scholar, and a guy who smoked a pipe and wrote children's stories about talking lions?

And what on earth does it have to do with the Church!

We are doing it because Clive Staples Lewis, or "Jack," as his friends called him, possessed a rare. God-given gift.

He had the ability to take the most profound, complex truths of the Christian faith and put them on the bottom shelf where all of us can reach them.

the key being that we can understand them, the way that he puts them.

But more than that. Lewis didn't live his faith out in a completely sterile academic vacuum.

He lived it in the messy, painful, and very real world.

He knew deep grief.

He knew the horrors of war.

And for a long time, he knew what it was like to fiercely hate the idea of God.

Because. Before he was a defender of Christ, he was a dedicated, and aggressive atheist.

The Life and Timeline of C.S. Lewis

He was fulfilling a wartime promise made to a fallen friend, so Lewis took in the friend’s mother, Janie Moore, and her daughter.

Mrs. Moore could be incredibly demanding. She was erratic, and as it turns out, very difficult to live with.

As her health declined, Lewis acted as a primary caregiver, he was handling domestic chores, managing her chaotic household, as well as dealing with constant interruptions.

In his autobiography, he described his eventual conversion to Christianity in 1931 not as a joyful leap, but as a total surrender.

He wrote:

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

He didn't write about Christian charity from a distance, he practiced it daily by washing dishes and managing family arguments.

Lewis was also a wounded veteran of World War I.

He knew the literal stench of trench warfare, he had experienced the terror of artillery fire, and the grief of losing some of his closest friends.

But when World War II arrived, he didn't hide in academia - in the hallowed halls of Oxford University.

He opened his home, which was called “The Kilns”, to host groups of children evacuated from the London bombings.

He also traveled to Royal Air Force airbases across Britain to give talks to lonely, terrified soldiers and airmen, people facing imminent death, helping them make sense of pain and suffering.

But, perhaps the ultimate test of his faith came late in life when he married Joy Davidman.

Their deep and vivid romance was cut tragically short by her agonizing battle with cancer.

But again. Lewis didn't retreat into rigid and emotionless academic theory when she died.

He went through a very raw, devastating dark night of the soul, you may have experienced one of those.

which he very candidly wrote about in A Grief Observed - which Pastor Tim will get to in a couple of weeks.

But. He allowed his faith to be smashed to pieces by real sorrow.

so that it could be rebuilt into something completely authentic.

stripped of all of the easy, academic answers.

"I had been writing books about suffering,"

Lewis later admitted, as he reflected on his wife's death.

But he realized it was a completely different thing to experience the actual weight of it. The true heaviness of deep grief.

Ultimately. Lewis's Christian writing has endured in culture. NOT because it was written by a man who lived in an ivory tower, a place of privilege.

But because it was written by a man whose hands were calloused by the heavy, complicated, and beautiful realities of a deeply lived life.

And so I think, because of this, his writings are something that we can all connect with in some way, find some common ground to stand on.

So. This summer, we aren't studying Lewis to worship him in any way.

And we aren’t studying Lewis because he was clever. He was.

But that’s not the reason.

but we are studying him because he kept pointing past himself to the One through whom we see everything else.

and the longing, the reason, and the surrender that were earmarks in his life are supposed to be reflected in our lives, so the Lord can do the same for us.

We are studying his insights to see how the Holy Spirit transformed a very cynical. A very wounded intellectual into a picture of grace.

But let’s talk a little bit about his life, and the timing in his life before we launch into some lessons we can pull from his experiences.

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29 1898 in Belfast. Ireland (Northern Ireland today).

He had a brother. Warren, whose nickname was Warnie, so Clive and Warren were more casually known as Jack and Warnie.

And they spent their early years devouring books and creating imaginary worlds.

After studying at Oxford University, he enlisted in the British army and served in the Somme Valley in France, where he was wounded in 1918, ironically he was wounded by friendly fire, a british shell fell short of it’s intended target and he was injured by shrapnel from the explosion. Three shards of shrapnel hit him, one in his left leg, one in his left wrist, and one that fractured his rib and punctured his left lung, so he was in rough shape.

Following the war, he returned to Oxford.

and ultimately he became a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, and he held that position from 1925 to 1954.

and later holding the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University from 1954 to 1963.

For sure. The life of a scholar.

From a spiritual perspective. Raised in the Church of Ireland, Lewis became an atheist in his teenage years. Through intellectual exploration and deep friendships, most notably with J.R.R. Tolkien, he returned to Christianity in 1931, and we will get into that more deeply today.

C. S. Lewis wrote over 30 books that covered multiple genres.

First of all Children's Fantasy, which he is best known for. The seven-book series The Chronicles of Narnia.

And honestly, before I became a Christian. That was pretty much the only thing I knew him for, didn’t realize he had written other books related to Christian Apologetics, books like Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Problem of Pain.

And he even wrote some Science Fiction. The Space Trilogy.

In 1956, he married Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer. Their profound love story and Joy's subsequent death from cancer in 1960 inspired Lewis's sorrowful memoir. A Grief Observed.

Lewis passed away on November 22, 1963, in Oxford, England, just one week shy of his 65th birthday, his health had been declining, but ultimately Kidney Failure was his listed cause of death.

Interestingly enough. November 22 1963 may sound familiar because it’s the same day that JFK was assassinated, and also the same day that Aldous Huxley died, he was well known for the book Brave New World.

The fact that these three men all died on the same day prompted the writing of the famous 1982 book Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Kreeft.

which imagines Kennedy, Lewis, and Huxley meeting in Purgatory to debate their wildly different worldviews.

But. As we look at his life today, we are going to take a preview of the landscape of what our summer journey will look like.

And we will hopefully in this process glean three meaningful lessons that relate to our own walk with God.

So let’s start with these three lessons that we can pick up from the life and faith of C. S. Lewis.

Lesson 1: Faith Uses Both Reason and Imagination

Our faith can bring together. Reason. AND. Imagination.

Lesson 2: Pain Is Not the Absence of God

The first lesson from Lewis’ life teaches us that God does not ask us to check our brains, or even our imagination, at the door of the church.

At one point in his life. Lewis felt like he had to choose.

For years, he felt trapped in a devastating civil war inside his own head.

He felt like he had to choose between two completely different worlds.

On one side was his imagination. He absolutely loved Norse mythology, ancient legends, fairy tales, and poetry.

They lifted his mood, and his heart, they gave him that deep, bittersweet longing for beauty.

But on the other side was his reason.

He looked at science, history, and cold, hard logic, and he concluded that the universe was just a bleak, accidental cosmic accident.

He famously said that he lived in a state where nearly all that he loved he believed to be imaginary, and nearly all that he believed to be real he found grim and meaningless.

He thought Christianity was just another fairy tale, creative, but ultimately a lie.

But God - as He often does - had other plans.

On a crisp September night in 1931. Lewis went for a walk along Addison’s Walk at Oxford University with his close friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

JRR Tolkien many of you will know from his writing of the Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit. And was actually a Catholic.

Hugo Dyson was also a writer and academic, and even though he and Tolkien were friends, he famously didn’t like the Lord of the Rings, and would almost heckle during Tolkien's readings of it, which he eventually gave up doing, because of Dyson!

But after this conversation. They stayed up talking until four in the morning, and Tolkien showed Lewis a flaw in his thinking.

Tolkien said.

"Jack, you love myths because they contain fragments of truth, even if they are made up.

Where Do You See Yourself in This Story

Why can't you see that the story of Christ is simply a myth told by God?

It is the True Myth. It’s the story that all the other fairy tales were pointing to, except this one actually happened in history.

This Lion actually entered history, died on a real wooden cross, and really rose from the dead."

That night, the wall in Lewis’s mind collapsed.

He realized that Jesus didn't come to destroy our intellect, he didn’t come to mute our imagination.

He came to fulfill both.

He satisfies both our coldest, most logical questions.

and our deepest, most passionate longings.

Over the next few weeks of this series, we are going to see how Lewis beautifully used both sides of this transformed mind to defend the gospel.

First, we will look at how Lewis engaged the intellect inside him.

because so often people feel like once we engage the intellect inside then we begin to drift from faith, not true.

We will dive into Mere Christianity, a book that was born out of the dark days of World War II, where Lewis builds a brilliant, step-by-step case for God.

And he doesn't start with a heavy lesson in theology. he simply starts with a simple human experience - something we have all experienced at some point, two people arguing.

He shows us that our universal human sense of objective right and wrong.

this "Moral Law" in our own minds, points straight to a heavenly Lawgiver.

We will also look at The Abolition of Man - actually next week we will look at this, which is perhaps his most prophetic work, and his most hard-hitting philosophical work.

In that, he issues a chilling warning about what happens to a society when we abandon absolute truth.

He warns that when we try to "debunk" traditional values and rely entirely on raw, subjective emotion.

we end up creating "men without chests", as he calls them, brilliant intellects with no moral hearts to guide them.

So that’s The Abolition of Man next week.

But Lewis knew that arguments can only take a person so far.

Sometimes, you have to sneak past these guards of the intellect.

And that’s where his imagination came in.

In this series, we will step through the wardrobe into The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis realized that if you just tell people "you must love Jesus," their religious defenses go up.

But if you show them Aslan, a lion who is terrifyingly fierce on the one side, but breathtakingly good on the other.

a King who lays down his life on a stone table, suddenly, our defenses are bypassed.

At this point. We don't just understand God's goodness; we FEEL it.

We will also explore The Screwtape Letters, a masterpiece of satirical imagination.

By writing a series of fictional letters from a senior demon to a junior tempter, and in this process Lewis holds up a mirror to the human heart.

He uses creative fiction to expose the subtle, quiet, psychological traps of temptation that enemy forces use to derail our daily walk with Christ.

And so in this part the Lesson for Us, as the Church. God wants ALL of us, the complete us.

He wants our sharpest intellect. AND He wants our creative imagination.

Romans 12:2 tells us to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Notice it doesn't say the removal of your mind, but the renewing of it.

True discipleship isn’t blind emotion that refuses to think, and is certainly not a cold, dry intellectualism that refuses to feel.

No, what it means is a mind fully alive to the beauty, the logic, and the majesty of God.

If God gave us a sharp analytical mind, then we should use it for His glory.

If He gave us a vivid, creative imagination, paint and write and dream for His kingdom.

Because He is the author of both.

The second lesson we can pull from his life. And his writing, is that pain is not the absence of God.

Because the second major pillar of Lewis’s life was his brutal, life-long wrestling match with human suffering.

If any of us came to church today believing the lie that following Jesus means a life of smooth sailing, of financial prosperity, and of untroubled peace.

Lewis’s biography should completely shatter that illusion.

Lewis was no stranger to life’s agony.

When he was just a little nine-year-old boy, his world was ripped apart when his mother died of cancer.

He prayed desperately for her healing, but the heavens seemed silent.

As a young man, he was thrust into the muddy, bloody fields of the Western Front in World War I.

He spent his winters shivering in trenches filled with water, rats, and disease.

He watched his closest friends get blown to pieces by artillery fire right in front of him, and he himself was eventually wounded by shrapnel, carrying the physical and psychological scars of war for the rest of his days.

And yet, his greatest crucible that would test him came much later in life.

As a lifelong bachelor in his late fifties, he finally found the love of his life, a brilliant American woman named Joy Davidman.

It was a beautiful, late-blooming romance.

But just a few years into their marriage, Joy was diagnosed with advanced bone cancer. Lewis watched her suffer excruciating pain as the disease ravaged her body, before she finally passed away in 1960.

Lewis lived in the furnace of affliction.

Because of this, he wrote two incredibly distinct books on suffering, which we will study this summer.

They show the difference between talking about the furnace and actually burning in it.

One the ones we will look at is The Problem of Pain which was written in 1940.

At this point in his life, Lewis was a healthy, rising academic star.

He approached suffering with a brilliant, logical, and theological mind.

He tackled the classic philosophical dilemma:

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does evil exist?

In this book, Lewis gave us one of his most famous insights, one that many of us may have quoted in our own small groups. He wrote:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

This is a profound truth.

Pain breaks through our complacency.

It forces us to realize that this world cannot satisfy us.

But as brilliant as The Problem of Pain is, it was written by a man observing suffering from a safe distance.

Twenty years later, the theory became terrifyingly real. Sitting in the quiet house after Joy’s funeral, looking at her empty chair, the "megaphone of pain" wasn’t a tidy theological concept anymore, it became a weapon that had broken his heart.

Lewis wrote a raw, unfiltered journal that would become the book A Grief Observed.

This wasn't a tidy theology book with three points and a poem.

It was the desperate cry of a man whose faith was being tested by fire.

He wrote about the shocking physical toll of grief, about how it felt like suspense, or being afraid. And he wrote honestly about feeling abandoned by God:

"Where is God? Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence."

When we read these two books together, we realize something incredible.

Lewis didn't retract what he wrote in his youth.

But he realized that when you are actually drowning in grief, you don't need a philosophical lecture on the purpose of water, you need a Lifeguard.

And we have the greatest life saver to stop us from drowning in grief.

The lesson for us in this?

Lewis teaches us that a mature, and a resilient faith must have room for both honest theology AND honest crying.

Some of you are here today, and you are going through a season of deep pain.

Maybe it’s a medical diagnosis, a broken marriage, or the shattering loss of a loved one.

And on top of the pain, you feel guilty because you’re angry, or because you feel like God is far away.

But hear me on this. God is big enough to handle your toughest, darkest questions.

Faith does not mean putting on a fake plastic smile and pretending it doesn't hurt.

Jesus Himself wept at the grave of Lazarus, even though He knew He was about to raise him from the dead!

A mature faith means holding onto God even when the megaphone of pain is deafening, and even when the door feels locked.

True discipleship is being able to stand in the dark, tears streaming down your face, saying, "Lord, I don't understand this, but I am not letting go of You."

And that leads us to the third lesson in all of this today.

Lesson 3: We Were Made for Another World.

Finally, Lewis’s entire life, from his childhood in Ireland to his final days in Oxford, was defined by a very specific, but almost beautiful kind of homesickness.

He called it by the German word, Sehnsucht. [Sen - Sucht].

There is no perfect English translation for this word. It means an intense, an inconsolable longing, a kind of bittersweet ache of the soul.

So let me ask you. Have you ever experienced this?

Have you ever looked at a breathtaking sunset over the mountains, or listened to a piece of music so beautiful it made your chest tighten?

Or maybe you have stood in a quiet, sunlit forest, the beams of light filtering through the tree branches, or even looked back at a warm and fuzzy memory from your childhood.

and felt a sudden, sharp pang of nostalgia.

not just for the past.

but a longing for something you can’t quite put your finger on?

It’s that feeling that.

just on the other side of the ridge.

or just behind the music.

there is a joy we can almost touch, but not quite.

For the first half of his life, Lewis tried to chase that feeling down.

He thought if he could just read enough books, buy enough things, achieve enough academic success, or find the right relationship, that ache would finally go away.

But every time he grabbed hold of an earthly pleasure, the joy evaporated like mist.

The success was hollow. The objects grew old.

He realized a profound truth that changes how we view everything in this life:

No earthly pleasure.

not career success, not romance, not financial security, not comfort.

can ever truly satisfy that ache.

Those things are not the joy itself.

they are only the scent of a flower we haven't found.

the echo of a tune we haven't heard.

news from a country we have never yet visited.

And at the end of our summer series, we are going to look at his breathtaking sermon. The Weight of Glory, this was preached right in the middle of the blitz of World War II. during the bombings of London.

In that sermon, Lewis delivers what is potentially the most famous, razor-sharp realization of his entire life's work:

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

The reality is that earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy us.

They were only meant to ignite the desire, they are meant to point our eyes toward Heaven and say.

"Look! This is just a shadow of what is coming."

Like smelling the freshly baked bread before even walking in and trying the warm loaf.

And the lesson for all of us in this?

All of us, we are immortal beings. We were made for eternity.

And because we were all made for another world, it means the people around us were, too.

In that same sermon. Lewis drops a bomb on our casual, everyday interactions.

He reminds us that there are no ordinary people. He writes:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations."

Think about that tomorrow morning.

The person you sit next to at the DMV.

or maybe your frustrating coworker, your quiet neighbor, the cashier at the grocery store.

They are going to live forever somewhere.

They are also immortal souls.

And. Lewis reminds us that this earthly life, with all its trials, joys, tears, and triumphs, is just the cover and the title page of the real story.

We have to stop trying to find ultimate satisfaction in a temporary world. We have to stop trying to make a home out of a hotel room.

We are just passing through.

Our citizenship is in heaven, and this summer, as we walk with Lewis, we are going to learn how to live with our feet firmly planted on earthly ground, but our hearts entirely set on the world we were actually made for.

So. As I will bring this introductory message to a close and stand at the threshold of this summer journey, I want to ask you a question:

Where do you find yourself today in the story of C.S. Lewis?

What part of his life resonates loudly within you right now.

Perhaps you are here today and you identify with the Mind of Reason.

You’ve been trying to think your way to God, or maybe you've been using your intellect as a shield to keep Him at arm's length. Trust me, I have heard the argument.

“Well intelligent people don’t need God, they figure out He can’t be a reality!”

Well C.S. Lewis was an intellect, and he figured his way into a faith in God.

But of course we all have questions, doubts, and intellectual hurdles at stages in our lives and in our walk of faith.

OR. Perhaps you are sitting here today in the Furnace of Pain.

You look at your life, your losses, your broken dreams, and you feel like the door has been slammed and bolted from the inside.

You are wondering if God even hears your cries in the dark.

OR, maybe you are simply feeling that deep, quiet Homesickness of the Soul.

You’ve chased the American Dream, you’ve bought the house, you’ve achieved the status, you’ve sought the relationships.

and yet, in the quiet moments of the night, that bittersweet ache is still there.

You are realizing that this world is leaving you empty, and there is something inside that needs something else, something you haven’t tried yet.

If any of that describes you, hear this incredibly comforting truth.

God is already pursuing you.

And this is the same God that chased down a cynical, and very reluctant Oxford professor night after night in a lonely college room.

This is the exact same God who is knocking on the door of your heart this morning.

He is not a distant theory to be studied. He is the Living Lord who wants to be known by you.

Our faith is not a call to blind, brainless conformity.

It is a relationship with the Creator of both the world, along with everything in it, and the creator of the human heart.

Jesus Christ came into our history, the "True Myth" made flesh.

He stepped into our cold, broken world.

He endured the ultimate trenches of our suffering, as he hung on a Roman cross, and took the maximum weight of our sin and pain upon Himself.

And when He rose from the dead three days later.

He broke the power of death and threw open the gates to the "other world" we were truly made for.

The one we feel instinctively is there for us.

And that brings us to the ultimate, unavoidable choice.

C.S. Lewis famously argued that when it comes to Jesus Christ, you cannot just call Him a "good moral teacher."

That option is not open to us.

Because of what Jesus claimed about Himself.

Lewis wrote that He is either a Liar, a Lunatic, or He is exactly who He said He is, the Lord.

And if He is Lord, He demands a response. We can't ignore that fact.

You see. Lewis's conversion wasn't just a change of intellectual opinion.

It was a total surrender. It was a moment where an arrogant man got down on his knees, admitted that God was God, and submitted his life to King Jesus.

And that was almost 100 years ago. But today, the invitation is extended to you to do the exact same thing, time never changes this.

If you have never surrendered your life to Christ.

If you have been running, trying to satisfy your eternal hunger with temporary things, stop running today.

Stop trying to make a home out of a world that is passing away.

Christ is calling you home this morning.

You can step out of the dark and into His marvelous light today by turning from your sin and placing your total trust in Him.

If you are a believer who is wrestling in the dark.

Don’t worry.

Your doubts don’t scare Him.

Your grief does not push Him away. Bring your brokenness to the cross today and let the Savior hold you when you cannot hold yourself.

This summer, as we step through the wardrobe together into the brilliant landscape of Christian truth.

let’s not leave here unchanged.

Let’s surrender our minds, our imaginations, our sorrows, and our longings to the true King of Glory.