Praise the Lord for this new day. It has been very cold here for the last few days. They are predicting that " a heat wave is coming in our way for the second part of January. We rejoice in that. Jesus reigns. All is well.
"Its all Gods children singing
Glory, glory, hallelujah
He reigns, He reigns
And all the powers of darkness
Tremble at what they've just heard
Cause all the powers of darkness
Can't drown out a single word" Newsboys - He Reigns.
The Christmas spirit transformed the life of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". His heart and mind were frozen but the sprit of Christmas transformed them. He became a new man. Once stingy and tight fisted, he became a new man, generous, joyful, and giving. Christ of Christmas changes people around the corner and around the globe. The son of a Hamas leader in West Bank, Palestine, became a Christian and is now proclaiming the liberating power of Jesus Christ. There are many Christians around the world who are committed to praying for Moslems, that they will come to the saving and life giving knowledge power of of the New Born King of Bethlehem. My daughter Sunita tells me that many Moslems coming to faith in Christ. around the world. They see Jesus in dreams and visions. Let us take few moments today to pray for Moslems, that they will be delivered from the hatred, hostility, fear, and antagonism, and turn their eyes upon Jesus. The Christ of Christmas still changes and transforms people like us.
I do read from time about C. S. Lewis, a man who was transformed by Jesus Christ our Lord. C. S. Lewis was a hard nut to crack. He was for many years a staunch atheist. Lewis went to Oxford University, and while at Oxford, he never wavered. He stated, "Though I like clergymen as I like bears, I had as little wish to be in the church as in a zoo." The notion of an Ultimate Authority who might interfere in his life made him feel nauseated. He wrote how he had surrounded himself with a barbed-wire fence and guard with a notice, "No Admittance," to anything that remotely resembled God. Later he described in a letter a transforming change in his life, ". . . very gradual and intellectual . . . and not simple."
First, throughout his life, from the time he was a boy living in Belfast to his conversion in his early thirties, he periodically experienced a sense of intense longing for some place or person. He recalled that when he was eight years old, an intense desire "suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from the depth not of years but of centuries . . . It was a sensation, of course, of desire, but desire for what?" Then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. He described this longing as a yearning for "Joy." He described how he eventually came to realize that no human relationship could ever satisfy that longing. It was a "pointer to something other and outer."
While at Oxford, Lewis met some faculty whom he admired who were scholars and yet devout believers, one of them being Professor J. R. R. Tolkein. He reflected on some of the writers he most admired and realized that they embraced the "spiritual worldview." He read G. K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man, a book that profoundly impressed him with arguments he later used in his own writings. Chesterton was a prolific British author, journalist, poet and literary critic. At some point Lewis read Chesterton and dismissed him, noting that his pessimism, atheism and hatred of sentiment would have made Chesterton the least congenial of all authors. Lewis then added, "It would almost seem that Providence . . . quite overrules our previous tastes when it decides to bring two minds together."
C. S. Lewis warned that a young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. He realized that Chesterton had that same "kink" as some of the other authors that C. S. Lewis admired: "Chesterton was a believer."
About the same time, a second event happened that had "a shattering impact" upon Lewis. One of the most militant atheists among the Oxford faculty, T. D. Weldon, sat in Lewis' room one evening and remarked that the historical authenticity of the Gospels was surprisingly sound. This deeply disturbed Lewis. He immediately understood the implications that if this "hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew" thought the Gospels true, where did that leave him? He had considered the New Testament stories myth, not historical fact. If they were true, he realized that all other truth faded in significance. Did this mean his whole life was moving in the wrong direction?
Lewis remembered an incident that happened several years earlier — on the first day he arrived at Oxford as a teenager. He left the train station carrying his bags and began to walk in the direction of the college, anticipating his first glimpse of the "fabled cluster of spires and towers" he had heard and dreamed of for so many years. As he walked and headed into open country, he could see no sign of the great university. When he turned around, he noticed the majestic college spires and towers on the opposite side of the town and realized he was headed in the wrong direction.
Lewis wrote many years later in his autobiography, "I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life."
Lewis wrote that he began to feel his "Adversary" — the One he wanted desperately not to exist — closing in on him. He described going up Headington Hill on top of a bus. He felt that he was trying to shut something out of his life, "I could open the door or keep it shut . . . The choice appeared to be momentous but it was strangely unemotional . . . I chose to open . . . I feel as if I were of man of snow at long last beginning to melt . . . "
He described being back in his room at Magdalen College, night after night, feeling that which he had greatly feared had at last come upon him. "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 described this as the first phase in the transition. It "was only to Theism, pure and simple . . . I knew nothing yet about the Incarnation . . . The God to whom I surrendered was sheerly nonhuman." Although at first he felt he was posting letters to a non-existent address, once he accepted, with considerable resistance, the presence of an Intelligence beyond the universe, Lewis concluded that this Being demanded complete surrender and obedience. This was the beginning of his conversion, not yet to faith in Jesus Christ, to the conviction there was a God who was alive, personal, all powerful, who had been and was now seeking him out.
Praise the Lord, "The Hound of Heaven" was at work. He still at work today.
In Him Alone.
Brown
http://youtu.be/nlfxe8ujn7M
