What We Can Learn from C. S. Lewis

Ask God to Forgive You, Not Excuse You: Five Lessons from C. S. Lewis

God exists everywhere and everywhen. He is eternal and omnipresent. And not only is he present everywhere, he is everywhere pursuing us. He is the hunter, the king, the husband, approaching us at an infinite speed. Central to C.S. Lewis’s vision of the Christian life is the basic fact that we are always in God’s presence and pursuit.

This basic fact about reality yields a basic choice. We can either embrace and welcome this reality, surrendering ourselves to this eternal, omnipresent, and pursuing God, or we can vainly try to hide from him, to resist his advances, to reject his offer. Thus, though it is true that we are always in God’s presence, it’s equally true that we are perpetually called to come into God’s presence, to unveil ourselves to him.

“All of us are worse than we think.”

A chief component of this unveiling is the confession of our sins. If we are to come into God’s presence, we must come honestly. We must come as we are. And what we are is a bundle of sins, fears, needs, wants, and anxieties, so our honesty and unveiling must include the confession of sins.

Lewis is aware that the confession of sin is difficult and fraught with danger. Thus, in a number of places, he offers counsel on the perils and pitfalls of confessing our sins. Read More

Share Your Faith Like C.S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis denied he was a theologian but he did declare “I am a rhetor.”[1]

Since all rhetoric is persuasive—whether it be a request for someone to pass the salt or a shouted warning to flee a burning building—it is safe to say that through the spoken word as well as the written word Lewis sought to persuade.

However, his methods were not manipulative. He was committed to objective value, seeking to follow the truth where ever it led. He was a truth seeker and attempted to be a truth teller. This was true of Lewis as a rhetor and no less true of him as an evangelist.

Lewis wanted to point people to God. Although he was not always comfortable in the role of an evangelist, he was true to this task and regarded it as a necessary one.

That is, he sought to persuade others to accept the message of the Christian gospel—or good news—that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). Read More

The image is one of Pauline Bayne's illustrations in The Magician's Nephew, the sixth book in C.S. Lewis' The Narnia Chronicles. It depicts Aslan on the day he sung Narnia into being. To those who have not read the Narnia Chronicles, I strongly recommend that they should be read in the order that they were originally written and published, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Magician's Nephew appears to assume that the reader has already read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The order in which the Narnia Chronicles was originally written and published also reflects Lewis' strategy for drawing the reader into the world of Narnia. A mental image of a fawn with an umbrella on a snowy day is what inspired Lewis to write the Narnia Chronicles in the first place. The fawn was Tumnus whom Lucy meet when she went through the wardrobe. Lewis stopped writing the Narnia Chronicles when the images ceased. While the Narnia Chronicles are now published with the Magician's Nephew as the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and Wardrobe is anticlimatic if one reads The Magician's Nephew first.