40 Inspirational Classics for Lent

I watched this introduction to Lewis’s classic explanation of the Christian faith just a few days ago, and I think it’s quite good. The speaker is Professor Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University:

C.S. Lewis really is the finest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, and Mere Christianity should be required reading for anyone who is considering the truth claims of Christianity.

I could quote from Mere Christianity all day and not even begin to exhaust the wonderful aphorisms, images and exposition that Professor Lewis brings to bear on the questions of whether Christianity is true and what is its essential teaching. Lewis is not necessarily the “Protestant saint” that some make him out to be, but as a writer and interpreter of basic Christian theology, he excels.

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…”

“Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”

“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.”

“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.”

“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 the level with the 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.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.”
This truth is a partial answer to the whole Rob Bell controversy over whether there is or isn’t a hell as a place of eternal torment. Wouldn’t it be eternal torment to be an eternal being who chose in this life to live apart from, as a rebel to, the living, loving God of the Universe, the one who loves me so much that He gave his only begotten Son to die in my place, as an atonement for my sin. To know that now and fall down in gratitude and love toward Him is is a humbling experience; to learn that God was so merciful and so patient in the face of my repeated rejection and sin and that He had finally honored my rebellion with His divine wrath would be torment beyond any physical pain.
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 2 Corinthians 5:10
for He says, “AT THE ACCEPTABLE TIME I LISTENED TO YOU,
AND ON THE DAY OF SALVATION I HELPED YOU.”
Behold, now is “THE ACCEPTABLE TIME,” behold, now is “THE DAY OF SALVATION.”— 2 Corinthians 6:2