Tag: C.S. Lewis

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More Alive Than Ever

C. S. Lewis had a profound influence on the life of Sheldon Vanauken. Vanauken became a Christian when he studied under Lewis at Oxford University. In his book A Severe Mercy he described their last meeting.

Over lunch at a pub in Oxford they had spent time pondering the nature of life after death. When they had finished eating, they stood outside for a few moments and just before parting ways, Lewis said to Vanauken, “I shan’t say goodbye. We’ll meet again.” Then the great scholar plunged into the traffic to cross the street while Vanauken watched his friend walk away.

When Lewis got to the other side of the street, he turned around, anticipating that his friend would still be standing there. With a grin on his face, Lewis shouted over the din of the passing cars, “Besides — Christians never say goodbye!”

During this season as we anticipate the celebration of our Lord’s resurrection, it is important to remember that the hope of eternal life is not based upon wishful thinking. Our assurance of life after death is based upon the promise of Christ.

When Jesus was accosted by some of his detractors who denied that there would be a resurrection, he told them they were in error, badly mistaken (Mark 12:24). His opponents were religious skeptics who believed that this life is all there is. They believed the soul perished with the body. There would be no rewards or punishments after death.

This materialistic philosophy exists today. Doubts about life after death are widespread, especially now as our nation moves further away from biblical values. People seem to be pursuing pleasure and prosperity for the here and now, with little thought for a life hereafter.

The Lord Jesus answered his critics in Mark 12:25-27 by directing their attention to God. He is alive. He is the giver of life. Eternal life resides in God. Jesus quoted the Bible where God said to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:5-6).

Then Jesus said something that is a key to our understanding of life after death. “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27). Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive! If they are alive with God, then my parents are alive with God. My brother’s baby who died is alive with God. My friend Stanley who was killed in Vietnam is alive with God. They will be resurrected when Jesus comes again.

That is why C.S. Lewis said what he did to Sheldon Vanauken, For a believer in Christ, to be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

The American evangelist Dwight L. Moody famously said, “Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody of East Northfield is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal — a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto his glorious body.”

“He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” This brief statement of Jesus is proof that faith in him includes the certainty of overcoming death. It is a promise of eternal life.

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

 

 

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The Arrogance of Jesus

Who does he think he is? He calls himself the Son of God. Really? Who talks like that? He says God gave him all authority in heaven and on earth, to raise the dead, to judge the world, to rule as King, to give eternal life to those who believe in him.

Readers of the four gospels in the New Testament are forced to come to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth made himself the center of his teaching. He brazenly claimed to be the only way for human beings to reach God.

Who does that? What kind of person would say as Jesus did, “No one can come to the Father except through me?” Religious propagandists and cultists maybe. Mentally unstable people with delusions of grandeur perhaps. But such egomaniacs are worthy only of our contempt, or pity.

Surely Jesus’ statements about himself seem to be supremely arrogant!

That is, unless they are true.

If Jesus’ statements about himself are true, that means he is more than a human teacher. If he is right, he is contradicting the idea that all faiths are valid pathways to God. If he is speaking truth, then he is not a dangerous religious shyster, or a pathetic, unbalanced narcissist.

If he is right, then the apostle Peter was correct when he preached, “There is salvation in no one else! There is no other name in all of heaven for people to call on to save them’ (Acts 4:12 NLT).  If he is right, then he really is the Son of God who gave his life on the cross to save us from our sins.

The renowned Christian intellectual C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. he would either be a lunatic — on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Read the New Testament and come to your own conclusion. Did Jesus speak with arrogance, or with divine authority?

Pastor Randy Faulkner

 

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Que Sera,Sera…So Why Pray?

The question is sometimes framed like this: “If God already knows what will happen, if he has a plan and he is in charge, then why pray at all? Whatever will be, will be.” This expresses the age-old tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Thinking about this for too long makes my brain tired.

Tired, or just plain lazy? Is my sinful self just looking for an excuse not to pray? In a startling confession, C.S. Lewis admitted, “Well, let’s now at least come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while reading a novel or solving a crossword puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us” (Letters to Malcomb: Chiefly on Prayer).

He wrote these words while contemplating human selfishness and spiritual weakness. He said, “The truth is, I haven’t any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life.” This brazen acknowledgment of his sinfulness seemed shocking until I came around to admitting my own sinful inadequacy in prayer.

The stark truth is that prayer is a battleground and the enemy doesn’t readily yield territory to us mortals. This gets me back to my opening question: why pray? One reason is, in the words of Timothy Keller, prayer is “rebellion against the world’s status quo. Indeed, it is listed as a weapon in spiritual warfare against the forces of darkness (Ephesians 6:12).” We live in a world that is organized against the will of God. Prayer, then, brings our orientation back where it belongs: to God himself.

We pray because of who God is. Prayer forces our minds, and yes, even the posture of our bodies, to come before our Creator in praise, humble confession, thanks and asking for what we need. E.P. Clowney put it this way, “The Bible does not present an art of prayer, it presents the God of prayer.” The more we see and know God for who he is, the more prayer will follow. Our understanding of God shapes our praying.

Then there is the way prayer changes us. Prayer positions us as persons who act as those who are known by and have value to God. Lewis wrote, “The passive changes to active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view. To thus put ourselves on a personal footing with God … we assume the high rank of persons before him.” And by the agency of the Holy Spirit, we are permitted to call God “Abba, Father,” in the most intimate way.

Such awareness, of God, of ourselves, of the world, of the powers of evil and of the nature of prayer itself, all prompt us to pray, and to pray boldly. Jesus illustrated this in a parable. He asked his hearers to imagine a man banging on the door of his neighbor at midnight. He has unexpected guests and no food to offer them.

The neighbor tells him to stop bothering him or he’ll wake up the whole household. He tells him to go away. Then Jesus asks, “Is that really how the neighbor is going to react?” His implied answer is no.

Because the man at the door is bold and persistent, he will indeed get up and give him the bread that he asked for, as much as he needs (Luke 11:5-10). Jesus says this illustrates how we should pray with “shameless audacity.” It is not that God is reluctant to hear and to help. It is that he values the kind of bold desperation described in the story. That is a lesson for me when my prayers are tentative and my faith is weak.

“Ask,” Jesus said. Asking implies a need and a recognition of God’s willingness to meet the need. Ask with audacious persistence. Ask, expecting an answer.

“Seek,” Jesus went on to say. Seek the Father’s will above all else, as Jesus taught us to pray. “Your will be done on earth” is a way of praying as the Lord Jesus prayed. Seeking also means pursuing the will of God in everything else we do.

“Knock,” implies persistence. It is not wrong to keep knocking on the door of heaven. In the language of the New Testament, the present tense of these three verbs implies continuous asking, seeking and knocking. The first verse of Luke 18 says, “Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.”

Why pray? If we pray for no other reason, the fact that Jesus said it is normal behavior for his followers, makes it a priority. We may not understand fully how our praying fits into the accomplishment of the sovereign will of God. But the fact that he commands us to pray says that it does. Reason enough.

    –  Pastor Randy Faulkner

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No Explanation is Adequate

No Explanation is Adequate

Our local newspaper was full of sympathetic coverage of the death of a sixteen-year-old football player. Peter Webb died after sustaining head trauma during a game with his Christian school team on September 13. At his funeral, he was eulogized as enthusiastic, confident, athletic, and devoted to Jesus Christ.

His father, Jim, and his four brothers showed uncommon courage as they each rose to speak in Peter’s honor before over two thousand guests in attendance.  Several high school football teams came and they heard Peter’s dad speak of the intense pain the family felt because of the loss of their son and brother.

No doubt the young men on those teams and Peter’s fellow students have been struggling with the same questions most people ask in similar situations. Couldn’t God have prevented Peter from dying? if so why didn’t he? If God is good, why does he allow evil to exist? If he is all-powerful, why doesn’t he bring an end to human suffering?

These profound questions cannot be answered with glib cliches. The emotional suffering of the Webb family cannot be healed by philosophical band-aids or sentimental pieties. As a sorrowing C.S. Lewis put it in A Grief Observed, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

Where is God?

“Where was your God when my son was killed?” a grieving father asked John Claypool. “He was where he was when his own boy was being killed,” came the answer. What the wise pastor was saying is that God entered, and enters, human suffering in the incarnation of Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Consolation in such a time is not to be found in platitudes, but in presence, the presence of a compassionate God who said he would be “near” (Philippians 4:5) and in the supportive presence of friends who quietly care and serve in his name.

But this does not answer the question “why?” Rational explanations are cold comfort to those in sorrow. But for those who are attempting to understand the mysterious ways of God it may be useful to recall that God is good and evil did not originate with him. He made the world good and part of that good was to allow for the possibility of human choices.

All choices involve risks and consequences, including the risk of brain trauma from a football injury. Was Peter Webb’s death untimely? terrible? tragic? Certainly. All sports, including American football, pale in comparison to the value of such a precious human life.  Yet young men are drawn to challenge, risk and conquest. “The glory of young men is their strength” (Proverbs 20:29).

A good purpose

Was his death purposeful? The Christian answer is an unequivocal “yes!” God was not defeated when that beautiful young man died. Somehow in the sovereign wisdom of the Creator, a good purpose is being fulfilled. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28).

Examples are found throughout scripture to illustrate how God uses human suffering to accomplish his purposes. The story of Joseph’s sufferings is such a lesson. “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good,” he told his brothers in Genesis 50:20.  The sufferings of Joseph were purposeful. The Babylonian captivity of the Jews was purposeful (Jeremiah 20-29). The death of Jesus Christ on the cross was purposeful (Acts 2:23). Nothing is outside of God’s purpose.

Likewise, the New Testament teaches us that God sometimes uses human suffering to humble his people (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). Sometimes it is to correct and purify his people (Hebrews 12:6, 11). Sometimes no explanation is given. Sometimes our only response is to lament, as Jeremiah does, as Job does, as Habakkuk does, as Asaph does in Psalm 73.

These facts alone do not lift the emotional burden of overwhelming pain and loss borne by a grieving family. The fact is, we are not always given emotionally satisfying answers to why there is undeserved suffering in this world.

God will win

The Christian message promises God’s ultimate victory over evil. In the meantime, we live in a world where danger, evil and suffering remain for the present. But this imperfect world is preparing us for the next. I paraphrase Winfried Corduan who reminds us that God is able to use evil to facilitate the coming of that better world. He writes, there can be no pity without suffering. There can be no redemption without sin. There can be no courage without danger. There can be no resurrection without death.

    –  Pastor Randy Faulkner Randy 2019-spring

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Enjoying God

Enjoying God

“Man’s chief end (purpose) is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” That is the famous answer to the question posed by the catechism, “What is the chief end of man?” Here’s a question for you today: what does it mean to “enjoy” God?

“Delight yourself in the Lord,” is the way King David put it in Psalm 37:4. It means to be delighted in God. That requires a re-thinking of our relationship to him. David is telling us that praise flows out of a sense of pleasure in who God is and pleasure in knowing him.

C.S. Lewis illustrated this in Reflections on the Psalms. “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling each other how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed. It is frustrating to discover a new author and not be able to tell anybody how good he is; to come suddenly to a turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and there have to keep silent because the people with you care no more for it than for a tin can in a ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.”

He points out that people praise spontaneously what they value, and urge other people to join them in praising it. “The worthier the object, the more intense the delight would be.”

Both the psalmist and the professor are pointing us to an underlying truth, that to enjoy God, and thus to praise him, we must know him. The better we know him as he really is, the more our pleasure in him will grow.

Our delight in God can grow as we learn to enjoy his gifts as coming from him: a good meal, a golden sunrise, the pleasure of physical exercise, marital love, meaningful work, the laughter of friends, joining God in acts of creation through the arts, and of course the communion of prayer and worship.

Our delight in God grows as we appreciate more and more the riches of his grace in Jesus Christ.

    –  Pastor Randy Faulkner Randy 2019-spring

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A Strategy of Subversion

A Strategy of Subversion

The sermon on the mount was subversive. Our Lord Jesus subverted and re-framed time-honored religious precedents: alms-giving, fasting, public rituals, interpersonal relations, and prayer. The climax of the sermon is the Lord’s Prayer. It is an expression of the desire that God’s kingdom will up-end and replace all earthly authorities, powers, and customs. “Your will be done on earth” (Matthew 6:10).

This is the main idea of Albert Mohler’s book, The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down: The Lord’s Prayer as a Manifesto (Thomas Nelson, 2018, 175 pp). I read the book on a recent trip. It refreshed and renewed my understanding of the Prayer, in its simplicity and power.

In the introduction, he writes: “Looking across the landscape, it becomes clear that very few revolutions produce what they promise. Arguably most revolutions lead to a worse set of conditions than they replaced. 

“And yet, we still yearn for radical change, for things to be made right. We rightly long to see righteousness and truth and justice prevail. We are actually desperate for what no earthly revolution can produce. We long for the kingdom of God and for Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords. We are looking for a kingdom that will never end and for a King whose rule is perfect.

“This is why Christians pray the Lord’s prayer.”

Mohler writes with the conviction that this short prayer is a call to spiritual revolution. The kingdoms of this world will indeed pass and give way to the kingdom of Christ, in which God’s will will indeed be done on earth. The Lord’s prayer asks that the rule of God be made visible. That is the kind of authority in praying that seems to be lacking in many sectors of Christendom. That is why this book is valuable and deserves a wide readership.

The author confesses his own human weakness in a story he told about going about the business of prayer as one robotically performing a familiar task. He gives other examples of the tendency to pray badly, for which the Lord’s prayer is a corrective.

Analyzing various religious traditions, he asks us to consider what we really believe about God and about prayer. The fact that human beings are created in God’s image means that we are given the privilege of communication with our communicating creator who wants us to think of him as “our Father.”

Faithful to the gospel, Dr. Mohler sets forth the necessity of redemption through faith in Jesus Christ. The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for disciples of Jesus to pray. We can only relate to God as Father if we have become his sons and daughters through faith in Christ.

The fact that we are social creatures means that we are not to live or to worship in isolation, and the Prayer challenges our individualism. “Jesus is reminding us that when we enter into a relationship with God, we enter into a relationship with his people.” Mohler rightly emphasizes the fact that there is no first personal pronoun in the entire prayer. The plural pronouns mean we pray this in solidarity with other believers.

Point by important point the author applies the wisdom and beauty of the Lord’s Prayer in helpful lessons for all Christians. Dr. Mohler is a theologian who writes with the clarity of a journalist and with the empathy of a pastor. This is the kind of book I intend to give as gifts to people I care about and recommend to people who read this blog.

Romans 8:26 says “We do not know what we ought to pray for.” That has often been true in my experience. I am thankful for the promise that the Holy Spirit “helps us in our weakness.” One of the ways the Spirit helps me is the example of the prayers of the apostle Paul. Another is to pray the psalms, which are a guide to praise and worship. Another is the Lord’s Prayer. It is a model, or template, for praying in accordance with the will of God.

C.S. Lewis, in his Letters to Malcomb, Chiefly on Prayer, wrote about how he added to the Lord’s Prayer is own private overtones, or “festoons,” which were his way of using the Prayer as architecture for his personal praying. The categories and structure of the Lord’s Prayer, he said, allowed for freedom of personal application and expression of his worship, intercessions, and confessions.

Dr. Mohler would agree, I think. Reading his book has strengthened my praying. It has reminded me that Jesus has this world situation well in hand, and somehow our praying this way is a part of achieving his victory over the powers of darkness. Think about that when you are praying the Lord’s Prayer this coming Sunday in church.

    –  Pastor Randy Faulkner

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