Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

Contemplating the Goodness of God

02 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Glory, Stephen Charnock

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Stephen Chanticleer explains that we impoverish our lives because we do not meditate up the goodness of God. He explains that such knowledge would transform what we desire

A sense of the Divine goodness would mount us above the world. It would damp our appetites after meaner things; we should look upon the world not as a God, but a gift from God, and never think the present better than the Donor. We should never lie soaking in muddy puddles were We always filled with a sense of the richness and clearness of this Fountain, wherein we might bathe ourselves; little petty particles of good would give us no content, when we were sensible of such an unbounded ocean. Infinite goodness, rightly apprehended, would dull our desires after other things, and sharpen them with a keener edge after that which is best of all. How earnestly do we long for the presence of a friend, of whose good will towards us we have full experience.

CS Lewis in The Weight of Glory explains that we were created to desire and seek such goodness

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased

The Inklings

11 Monday May 2015

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Church History

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During the hectic middle decades of the 20th century, from the end of the Great Depression through the Second World War and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered weekly in and around the University of Oxford to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, the Inklings.

http://chronicle.com/article/Oxfords-Influential-Inklings/229967/

There is a fierceness

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in C.S. Lewis, Luke

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51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; 52 he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; 53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

Luke 1:51-53 (section of the Magnificat of Mary)

There fierceness even a touch of Deborah mixed with the sweetness of the
Magnificat to which most painted Madonnas do little justice.

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

The Madonna and Child and Musical Angels
(about) 1410
Starnina:

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Why Muller Opened an Orphanage

24 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in Faith, George Muller, Ministry, Praise, Prayer, Uncategorized

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Muller’s work with orphans is perhaps the reason he is best known. Christians take great hope from the story, because it demonstrates how powerfully God can and does work through a faithful servant of Christ. Thus, it is interesting to note why Muller set upon the work. One would think that the plight of homeless children would have stirred him — and, indeed it did. But, the good to the children was not the primary goal. Muller gave three reasons:

1. That God may be glorified in so furnishing the means as to show that it is not a vain thing to trust in Him;
2. That the spiritual welfare of fatherless and motherless children may be promoted;
3. That their temporal good may be secured.
He had frequent reminders in his pastoral labours that the faith of God’s children greatly needed strengthening; and he longed to have some visible proof to point to, that the heavenly Father is the same faithful Promiser and Provider as ever, and as willing to Prove Himself the Living God to all who put their trust in Him, and that even in their old age He does not forsake those who rely only upon Him. Remembering the great blessing that had come to himself through the work of faith of Francke, he judged that he was bound to serve the Church of Christ in being able to take God at His word and rely upon it.

Arthur Tappan Pierson. “George Müller of Bristol.” James Nisbet. iBooks. Muller’s rationale was explained by Lewis (who was not referencing Muller directly, but rather referencing the same principle: Aim at heaven, and you’ll get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

The Training of the Twelve: The Rewards of Self-Sacrifice.2

07 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by in A.B. Bruce, C.S. Lewis, Discipleship, Luke, Mark, Matthew

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Now, about these rewards: I remember a conversation as an example of the problem of rewards: If we are serving for rewards, does not that make us mercenary? Isn’t it beneath a Christian to serve Jesus to receive a reward?

C.S. Lewis can help here. In “The Pursuit of Happiness: C. S. Lewis’s Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethic”, David Horner writes of the matter raised by Lewis’ sermon “The Weight of Glory”:

Although Lewis’s subject in this sermon concerns Christian discipleship more generally, he begins with a point about ethics.  With characteristic awareness, Lewis knows that the legitimacy of being motivated by the promise of Heaven’s rewards will at first appear to be morally out of bounds for the Christian.  The view in most “modern minds” of Christian ethics, and of Christian discipleship more generally, is that doing the right thing is most essentially a matter of self-denial, sacrifice, and “disinterested” fulfillment of obligation.  Any positive relation that morality has to our own happiness or well-being-any essential connection between “doing good” and “my good”-is ruled out.  Put differently, the “pursuit of happiness,” for us, is not a specifically moral pursuit.  At best it is nonmoral, a matter of prudential self-interest:  something in which we should perhaps be legally free to engage, in view of the Declaration of Independence, but only as long as our pursuit stays within the bounds of moral obligation.  All too often, the pursuit of happiness represents to us something actually immoral:  “because I want to be happy” is probably the most common reason we hear-or give-for justifying morally wrong behavior.  This way of thinking about ethics, especially Christian ethics, has attained an almost self-evident status among Christians and critics of Christianity (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand) alike.

But Lewis disagrees, as does the weight of ancient and medieval thought, both pagan and Christian, up until the late Middle Ages.  Classical thinkers viewed happiness as intrinsically connected to ethics; indeed, they considered happiness to be the starting point of all moral thought.  Moral action, in their view, is grounded rationally and normatively in the pursuit of happiness.  These thinkers were, in other words, “ethical eudaimonists”:  they understood moral action to be grounded in the pursuit of eudaimonia (Greek: well-being or flourishing – traditionally translated as “happiness”).

http://www.cslewis.org/journal/the-pursuit-of-happiness-c-s-lewis%E2%80%99s-eudaimonistic-understanding-of-ethics/#_ftn2, accessed September 6, 2012.

This gets to a point: We are so perverted by our thinking that we can believe that happiness is somehow separate from pursuit of God; that the right must somehow be painful and medicine to be good must be bitter.

It is true that the call of God can pinch our flesh. Peter’s comments discloses the pinch, “We have left all.” But Jesus responds with: You have completely misunderstood: You have left a lesser to gain a greater: You have left the temporal to gain the eternal. What does Lewis write:

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness.  But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love.  You see what has happened?  A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance.  The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.  I do not thik this is the Christian virtue of Love.  The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.  We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.  If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.[1]

Lewis goes onto explain that a reward which is naturally connected to the activity is no mean and base desire, but rather exults the action:

We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connexion with the things you do to earn it, and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. A general who fights well in order to get a peerage is mercenary; a general who  fights for victory is not, victory being the proper reward of battle as marriage is the proper reward of love. The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but the activity is itself in  consummation.

Jesus in offering reward does not offer some secondary matter, mere “filthy lucre”[2]. Rather, the promised reward does not take one away from God – rather, as shown in Revelation 21, the ultimate offer is of God himself:

1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” 5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son” Revelation 21:1–7 (ESV).

[1] A copy of the text is available here: http://www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf

[2]The oath to enter the Missouri Bar Association used to require one to abjure “filthy lucre” – that pledge is no longer required: http://www.courts.mo.gov/page.jsp?id=1778, accessed September 6, 2012.

No One Ever Told Me

12 Thursday Jul 2012

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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep swalloiong.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another not to me.

                C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Mistakes About Faith.2

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Discipleship, James, Puritan, Romans, William Guthrie

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(From Chapter 3 of The Christian’s Great Interest, by William Guthrie)

To unknot the paradox of saving faith, Guthrie continues by explaining that faith is not principally a matter of believing a series of historical facts to be true. Yes, a Christian must believe certain facts about the world, about oneself, and about God’s action in the world in Creation and in Christ. However, such intellectual assent is not sufficient:

19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! James 2:19 (ESV)

You need more than demon faith. True saving faith lies in the affections, it lies in desire: It is an act of the will, the act of the heart:

10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. Romans 10:10 (ESV)

Consider the images which Christ uses to paint this desire:

44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, 46 who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. Matthew 13:44–46 (ESV)

(Incidentally, you can hear Mark Dever read Richard Sibbes’ sermon on this passage here: http://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/audio/2010/07/sibbes-the-rich-pearl/ I highly recommend this).

True saving faith is a matter of the most profound desire – it is a desire which so overwhelms all competing desires that one would sell all that one has to gain that desire, that pearl, that treasure.

To make sure that you understand the nature of saving faith, consider the other descriptions given in Scripture for the same event:

It is receiving – which is believing:

12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, John 1:12 (ESV)

It is staying:

3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Isaiah 26:3 (ESV)

It is also called, “ a trusting in God, often mentioned in the Psalms, and the word is a leaning on Him. It is a believing on Christ: ‘This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He has sent’ (John 6: 29), and often so expressed in the New Testament. When God maketh men believe savingly, He is said to draw them unto Christ; and when the Lord inviteth them to believe, He calleth them to come to Him. ‘All that the Father giveth me, shall come to me; and him that comes to me, I will in no wise cast out. No man can come to me, except the Father which has sent me draw him.’ (John 6: 37, 44.)”

This is a matter of desire, a matter of hunger for God:

Shall that be judged a mysterious difficult thing which does consist much in desire? If men have but an appetite, they have it; for they are ‘blessed that hunger after righteousness.’ (Matt. 5: 6.) ‘If you will,’ you are welcome. (Rev. 22: 17.)

Indeed, saving faith consists not only in such desire; but sanctification, Godward change consists in stoking this desire. John Piper writes:

I had grown to love the works of C. S. Lewis in college. But not until later did I buy the sermon called “The Weight of Glory.” The first page of that sermon is one of the most influential pages of literature I have ever read. It goes like this:

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. [C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1965), 1–2.]

There it was in black and white, and to my mind it was totally compelling: It is not a bad thing to desire our own good. In fact, the great problem of human beings is that they are far too easily pleased. They don’t seek pleasure with nearly the resolve and passion that they should. And so they settle for mud pies of appetite instead of infinite delight.

I had never in my whole life heard any Christian, let alone a Christian of Lewis’s stature, say that all of us not only seek (as Pascal said), but also ought to seek, our own happiness. Our mistake lies not in the intensity of our desire for happiness, but in the weakness of it.

Desiring God, 19-20.

Many people go astray, because they believe true, saving faith to be a mysterious thing, a thing which cannot be known. Yes, it is a difficult thing, a thing above our natural ability – because it is a matter of desire. And yet, it is a matter of the greatest consequence and the plainest ease, because it is a matter of desire and love – which is no mystery at all.

Pornography and Sanctification

09 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, C.S. Lewis, Discipleship

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 From a Men’s Breakfast in 2010:

“Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things”

C.S. Lewis

 

The French philosopher and mathematicians Blaise Pascal wrote:

 

The greatness of man is so obvious that it can be deduced even from his misery.  What is natural in animals is seen to be wretchedness in man.  From this we can recognize that since his nature todays resemebles that of the animals, he has fallned from a better state which in former times was more appropriate to him.  Who does not feel more unhappy at not being a king except a king who has been deposed ….Who considers himself unhappy because he possesses only one mouth?  Yet who would not be unhappy if had only one eyes? No one, perhaps, has ever taken it into his mind to fret over not having three eyes.  But man is inconsolable if he has no eyesight (80/117-409).

 

We were meant to be great, but it constantly strikes us that we are not.  We were meant to be immortal – and yet we are not.  Thus, we are so ruined and sad over death, both our own and others.

            Something has gone terribly wrong.  It is everywhere apparent.  To be a human being is to suffer a permanent loss; it is a confusion that follows from a thought which has just escaped your attention and which now cannot be recovered. It is to know that what you see is not quite true, but to not know how to regain the focus. 

            To be a human being is to be isolated and alone behind your words and deeds and to know that somehow you are not what you appear and others are not what appear. 

            All of human civilization, all of human action is a vain attempt to somehow repair this breach in the grandeur of our soul.  We were made for something truly great – we were made for God himself!  We were made to exercise dominion over the creature as lords of the Great Lord himself.  We were made to live forever; to never grow old, to never die, to never suffer sickness or loneliness or death.

            But we have been thrown into exile.  We wander about.  Our hearts are restless and wandering things.  As Augustine prayed, You have formed us for yourself – God – and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.

            But we miss God, we fail to seek him where he can be found.  And so we fill up our restlessness  with accomplishments and power; or we try to drown it out with entertainment and drugs and sex.  These are things we are used to substitute for God, and as such they become little gods to us.  When anything replaces the true God it becomes a false god.  And false god demand terrible sacrifices, they will stop at nothing less than our complete destruction.

            This morning we are going to speak about sexual purity – which is just another way of saying that we will speak about not making sex a false god.

            To understand our current state and to understand how a good thing could become a false god, we first need to understand how we got here.  We’ll need a short history lesson.

 

 

1.         It was not supposed to be like this 1:26-30

            a.         We were made in the image of God

            b.         We were created with a profound relationship to and with God. 3:8

            c.         We were made male & female

            d.         We told to populate the earth and were given dominion

2.         We are isolated as a result of the Fall

            a.         We sought God’s position: 3:5

            b.         As a result we became isolated and ashamed 3:7

            c.         We were cursed in all our relations 3:16-17

            d.         We were thrown out of Eden 3:24 and we have been restless wanderers ever since.

 

3.         Everything is now disordered: because we are not home.

            a.         We are defiled.

4.         Note that the relationship with God and the relationship between a man & woman were both distorted in the same event.

            a.         The direct effect of the curse

            b.         This is underscored in Romans 1:18-28 

           

            b.         This is underscored in Romans 1:18-28 

 

Note this:  When our knowledge of God becomes distorted, our sexual relationships become distorted.  Getting God wrong results in our getting sexual relationships wrong.

 

The wrong here is the same whether it is same sex, opposite sex or both sex.  Hetrosexual immorality is not better than homosexual immorality.  Any sex outside of a monogamous marriage involving one man and one woman is wrong.  Period.

 

5.         In our distorted and isolated condition: we have been trying to reconstruct attachments  — that is, love, which is attachment to others: God and man.

            a.         Sexual desire is a mechanism which God has given us to impel us to intimate knowledge of and connection to another human being.  Adam is said to “know” his wife, not because the biblical writers would not talk about sex, because the text is emphasizing Knowledge.

            b.         The first command the order of the Bible is found in Genesis 1:28 is to be fruitful and multiply – which will take a sexual connection to a woman. The foundation of the existence of all human beings was tied to this fact of knowledge between a man and woman.

            c.         Adam’s first words to Eve were to express a profound covenant intimacy with her: They were to belong to one-another.  This intimacy was to be so profound that they were to become one-flesh.

            d.         Such intimacy is related held up in the Bible as a good.  In fact, when God wants to express his love and concern for his people, he often uses the image of marriage.  When he wishes to express the nature of sin, he often uses the image of adultery.

            e.         John Piper puts these ideas together very well:

Therefore, I say again: God created us in his image, male and female, with personhood and sexual passions so that when he comes to us in this world there would be these powerful words and images to describe the promises and the pleasures of our covenant relationship with him through Christ.

God made us powerfully sexual so that he would be more deeply knowable. We were given the power to know each other sexually so that we might have some hint of what it will be like to know Christ supremely.

Therefore, all misuses of our sexuality (adultery, fornication, illicit fantasies, masturbation, pornography, homosexual behavior, rape, sexual child abuse, bestiality, exhibitionism, and so on) distort the true knowledge of God. God means for human sexual life to be a pointer and foretaste of our relationship with him.

6.         To repeat:  Knowledge of God is tied up explicitly with sexuality.  A broken relationship with God shows up in our lives with distorted sexuality.  Unfortunately, we will never have a sufficient knowledge of God during this life to fully put off the ill of sexual immorality – at least as a temptation.

II.        Sexual Immorality as Temptation:

I probably don’t need to tell you, but sexual immorality is a common temptation and problem for men. Pornography has made sexual immorality extraordinarily easy. It’s cheap, easy to get and seemingly anonymous.  It is everywhere.  It has affected the entire corporate culture – even for those who do not directly participate.  Popular magazines depict things which were formally the province of pornography.  Pornographers are having to work hard to find new perversions which do not merely become mundane and mainstream items of commerce.

Pornography has two basic powers:

A.        First, it promises intimacy and connection to another human being.  It promises an isolated man that he can become profoundly connected with another.  There is a hole in the human being which can rightly be filled only with God.  Sexual immorality promises that it can fill it more easily and faster and better.  Pornography is not just an offer of sex, it is an offer of connection which promises to meet our most profound moments of being hurt or lonely.

B.        Second, it promises sexual fulfillment in such a way that hijacks our nervous system and uses our body against us.  I want to read you two quotations from William Struthers’ book Wired for Intimacy in which he discusses the effect pornography has on a male brain:

Pornographic images or inherently different from other signals. Images of nudity or sexual intercourse are distinct, different from what we experience as part of our everyday visual experience. They are analogous to the HD signal. The male brain is built like an ideal pornography receiver, wired to be on the alert for these images of nakedness. The male brain and are conscious visual experience is the internal monitor where we perceive them. The images of sexuality grab our attention, jumping out in hypnotizing a man like an HD television among a sea of standard televisions (83-84).

 

Because of the way that the male brain is wired, it is prone to pick up on sexually relevant cues. These cues trigger arousal in the series of neurological, hormonal and neurochemical events are set into motion. Memories about how to respond to these cues are set off and the psychological, emotional and behavioral responses began. As the pattern of arousal in response continues, it deepens the neurological pathway, making a trough.

 

This neural system trough, along with neurotransmitters and hormones, or the underlying physical realities of a man=s sexual experience. Each time that an unhealthy sexual pattern is repeated, and neurological, emotional and spiritual road version cars at a channel that will eventually develop into a canyon from which there is no escape. But if this corrupted pathway can be avoided, a new pathway can be formed. We can establish a healthy sexual pattern where the flow is redirected toward holiness rather than corrupt intimacy. By intentionally redirecting the neurochemical flow, the path toward right-thinking becomes the preferred path and is established as the mental habit. The path to recovery relies on the very rules that govern how the wounds were initially created. By deepening the holiness pathways, we are free from deciding to do what is right and good as they become part of our embodied nature. This is the process of sanctification (106-107).

 

            C.        In short, pornography promises answers to our spiritual and physical desires.  The long-term effect upon a man is devastating.  One of the seemingly odd effects of pornography is that ends up making a man not like an actual human being.  The effect of pornography – indeed any sexual immorality – is to diminish the pleasure of sex.  This was explained masterfully by C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters.  In this letter, a senior demon explains the process to a junior demon:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage to humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever-increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

The writer Namoi Wolf came to the same conclusion:

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.

“For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”

Sexual immorality robs a man of the joy of sexual pleasure.  Sexual pleasure was created to increase the depth of knowing a single human being in a covenant relationship.  When it is decoupled from its rightful place, it ends up decreasing our pleasure and joy.

In preparing for this talk, I read a portion of an interview with a rock star who essentially said that he likes pornography better than real women, and even when he is physically with a real woman his mind is in pornography.

Sexual immorality promises you a connection to another human. However, the end effect is to be further isolated; more alone and ashamed.  And no, the shame of sexual immorality is caused by repression and culture.  The shame comes from the fact that is sin and sin is shameful.  Sexual relational with your wife is not shameful – in fact, it is a sin to refuse to have a sexual relationship with your wife (and obviously we are not talking about situations which involve physical inabilities).

III.       The solution

A.        There are two parts to the solution: there is the spiritual and the practical.  Both of them are important.  However, the spiritual aspect is the most important.  Without the spiritual component, there can be no practical.

B.        Turn to Colossians 3:5

Colossians 3:5 (ESV)

5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

This would be the practical: stop engaging in sexual immorality.  Here is a practical warning:  When you read a command in the middle of a book you will almost certainly get it wrong.  Paul did not start with this command. He provided an extensive theological background to this command.  If you miss the theological context, you will almost certainly get the practical command wrong.

I don’t want a show of hands, but I want you to ask yourself, have you ever attempted to implement this command – or the command to stop any other sin – solely on the basis of will power and the Law?  Have you ever said, “I’ll never do that again!”  The answer is yes.  Next question?  Did it ever work?  The answer is no.  You can stop a behavior for a short period of time on the basis of will power, but you can never put it to death.  Killing sin is the work of believers who are assisted by the Holy Spirit.  If you try to put sin to death without God’s help using God’s means, you will fail.

Christ is the best, the most necessary, the most valuable.  In Colossae, some people were saying Jesus is good and all, but there is something more you can do in addition to Jesus.  There are actions and rituals and beliefs and what not that you can add to Jesus to get even more power.  These people evidently had plans for how to put sin to death.  They spoke of controlling the body.  Look with me at Colossians 2:20-23:

Colossians 2:20–23 (ESV)

20 If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

Note the commands to obtain purity.  We humans know that we are defiled in our exile.  We know that God demands perfect purity. These people were trying to obtain purity without Chirst.

Harsh treatment of the body, controlling your body’s actions sound like good advice to kill sin.  But Paul says that such things are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.  You cannot kill sexual immorality by locking yourself in a box.  People were sexually immoral before the Internet.  Pornography certainly puts a nasty spin on an old sin, but it is an old sin.

At this point, you may be dismayed to find that you are told to put sin to death and that you can’t sin to death by physically preventing a behavior. So what are you supposed to do?  The answer is in the supremacy of Christ.  Jesus is better than everything.  Jesus is sufficient for all needful things.  Jesus is sufficient to save us from the guilt of sin – and from the power of sin.

Let me explain this plainly: Ever since Adam, we have wandered very far from home.  We are strangers to God.  We are enemies of God.  The Bible uses remarkably painful images to describe our condition:  We are heirs of wrath:  we are destined to inherit the anger of God.  We are excluded from the true blessing of God.  We are slaves to Satan, with a chain of sin around our necks.  We could do nothing to remedy this situation.

But God who is rich in mercy determined that he would personally bear the penalty for our sin and suffer the wrath which we deserved by rebelling against Him.  –That isolation and loss we feel in this world is the symptom of our rebellion against God.  That fear of death which men know, is the reminded that we are fast-tracked to judgment.  Thus, we know that we are in rebellion against him.

So God became a man, the son of God became a man – while not ceasing to be God.  Jesus perfectly obeyed the just demands of God.  He then suffered the penalty which belongs to me.  Thus, God ransoms me from his own wrath to save and make me a true adopted son of God.

When I am restored to God, I am heir to those things which I most deeply desire:  What could be greater than to be a son of true eternal God!  What could be more wonderful than inherit creation with Jesus Christ, to rule and reign with Jesus!

If this is true of me, than it must be most cherished thought!  To be reconciled to God is to be my dearest joy.  And it is precisely that cherishing, that treasuring, that delighting God which God uses to cure me of my sin!  Purity before God comes as a direct result of delighting in God.  Purity never comes out from harshly treating my body, but rather by renewing my mind after the image of the one who created me.  Purity is the natural outflow of a mind set upon God.

Look down again at Colossians, we’ll read verse 1-5 of chapter 3:

Colossians 3:1–5 (ESV)

3 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Following verse 5, Paul gives several other commands about what to do and not do.  We’ll pick up in verse 15 of chapter 3:

Colossians 3:15–17 (ESV)

15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Let’s unpack this briefly:  Paul says have a mind set fully upon Christ.  Expect and desire to be with him.  Think about Jesus.  Then he says stop sinning and starting loving. Then he says, let the word of Christ dwell in you – which is similar to saying set your mind on the things above.  Then he says fill your heart with prayers and songs and joy and love.

That is enormously practical advice.  I want you to imagine for a moment that you have been busy reading the word, meditating on it, so much so that it springs out of you in songs and prayers.  When you meet believers, you find yourself being exhorted and exhorting, encouraging, correcting, provoking one another to love and good deeds.  Imagine that you by faith can hold the new heavens and the new earth here – now.

Imagine that in part you begin to partake of the fellowship with God for which you were created – that fellowship with God which was lost in the Fall and the Curse.  Would that practically effect the temptation toward sin?

Imagine a man who is starving – you could get him to eat some pretty disgusting food.  But take a full man, who has plenty of food – he would never eat out of a dumpster.  A man who has been filled with the Spirit will not be tempted to slurp down the nasty run of the sewer.  A glass of toilet water will not tempt a man who drinks from living water.

In short, a passion for Christ will protect you from a passion for immorality.  There is much more that could be said, but we don’t have time.

The Materialist Magician

28 Tuesday Feb 2012

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In the Screwtape Letters, Letter 7, Screwtape writes to the younger demon Wormwood,

When humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, only believe in us, we cannot make the materialists and ethics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotional lies and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to believe in the Enemy. The “Life Force,” the worship of sex, and other aspects of psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce are perfect work — the materialist magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshiping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits” — the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey orders.

CS Lewis published his book Screwtape Letters in 1942. Since that time, Screwtape’s dream of a “Materialist Magican” has come to be.  In January 12, 2012, article, Dr. Peter Jones wrote:

When I was studying the Death of God theology, I never thought that years later I would read an academic book entitled Postsecularism (Cambridge: 2009). Its British author, Dr. Mike King, describes how secular humanists are becoming spiritual, open to questions of the spirit while retaining, of course, the secular habit of critical thought. However, not all “spirits” can apply.

The “in” spirituality includes

Quantum Physics, which shows “the human being as joyously co-extensive with and co-creator of that cosmos”;

Transpersonal Psychology, since it is both scientific and spiritual (it is actually occult shamanism);

Nature worship, which gives us both morals and spirituality;

Goddess worship, practiced by cutting-edge modern feminism.

This intellectual openness allows only one spirituality—pagan spirituality, or One-ism. Two-ism is unthinkable. Postsecularists seek to be liberated from two opposing “extremist” forces: traditional religion and atheistic secularism. Post-secularism delivers us from both these dead ends. While atheism is no longer valid, neither is traditional theism. For the postmodern the way forward is pantheism.

http://truthxchange.com/articles/2012/01/27/io-86-your-spiritual-but-not-religious-neighbor/

Christianity at heart is not merely an option among many. It is a historical religion which makes truth claims which will not devolve into a generic spirituality. Aldous Huxley’s “perenial philosophy” sound s true and good in a world were “true” and “good” merely subjective evaluations and we all just want to get along.  However, such a philosophy runs square into the claims of Jesus:

5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” John 14:5–7 (ESV)

Now, Jesus’ claim to be the sole way does not prove his point. However, it does prove that he is not willing to share “truth” others. Pilate may ask, “What is truth?”  Still Jesus will answer, “I am.”

In a gracious, though uncompromising way, Eric Metaxas made this point at the national prayer breakfast:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2012/02/03/eric-metaxas-at-the-national-prayer-breakfast/

And thus, the non-Christian positions which seek to reduce Christianity to merely a subjectively mediated recognition of the one universal truth, are not tolerant of other positions. Rather, they are totalitarian of a single position to which all forms of thinking must devolve. On the matter of tolerance and intolerance, see D.A. Caron’s recent book on tolerance:

http://andynaselli.com/tolerance

Adolphe Monod wrote in Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness, “The Battle”, “Today you are placed in teh presence of unbelieving and profane world that tolerates everything except what is holy and true.”