Jack

November 5, 11:33 AMNorfolk Christian ExaminerFred Michaux

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Our church is reading Max Lucado’s recent book entitled Fearless. You must read this book, exceptional. We have six small groups that are meeting each week, and the weekly sermons follow the book as well. If your church is looking for a great six week study, you just found one! Here’s an excerpt…

Jack summarized the first half of his life with an incident that happened in his teenage years. He arrived at Oxford University in Oxford, England, anticipating his first glimpse of the “fabled cluster of spires and towers.” Yet as he walked, he saw no sign of the great campuses. Only when he turned around did he realize he was actually walking away from the schools, headed in the wrong direction. More than thirty years later he wrote, “I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.

He was a militant nonbeliever, devout in his resolve that God did not exist, for no God could stand for such a disaster as we call human existence, He summed up his worldview with a verse from Lucretius: Had God designed the world, it would not be A world so frail and faulty as we see.

Dismissing God, he turned his attention to academics, excelling in each field he studied. In short order the dons of Oxford took him in as a respected peer, and he began to teach and write. Yet not far beneath the surface, his doubts were taking their toll. He described his mental state with words like abject terrorism, misery, and hopelessness. He was angry and pessimistic, caught in a whirlwind of contradictions. “I maintained God did not exist, I was also angry with God for not existing.”

A few of his close friends, also Oxford dons, rejected their materialistic view and became God-followers and Jesus-seekers. He first thought their conversion was nonsense and felt no fear of being “taken in.” Then he met other faculty whom he admired, highly regarded teachers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and H. V. V. Dyson. Both men were devout believers and urged Jack to do something he’d, surprisingly, never done. Read the Bible. So he did.

As he read the New Testament, he was struck by its chief figure: Jesus Christ. Jack had dismissed Jesus as a Hebrew philosopher, a great moral teacher. But as he read, Jack began to wrestle with the claims this person made: calling himself God and offering to forgive people of their sins. Jesus was, Jack concluded, either deluded, deceptive, or the very one he claimed to be, the Son of God.

On the evening of September 19, 1931, Jack and his two colleagues, Tolkien and Dyson, enjoyed a long walk through the beech trees and pathways of the Oxford campus -- an Emmaus walk, sorts. For, as they strolled, they rehashed the claims of Christ and the meaning of life. They talked late into the night. Jack, C. S. “Jack” Lewis, would later recall a rush of wind that caused the first leaves to fall – a sudden breeze, which possibly came to symbolize for him the Holy Spirit. Soon after that night Lewis became a believer. He “began to know what life really is and what would have been lost by missing it.” The change revolutionized his world and, consequently, the worlds of millions of readers.

What caused C. S. Lewis, gifted, brilliant, hard-core atheist, to follow Christ? Simple. He came in touch with Christ’s body, his followers, and in tune with his story, the Scriptures.

Max Lucado

Remarkable isn’t it? I hope you pick up a copy of this book and share it with as many people as you know…so I leave you with this one question, are you in touch, with Him, His followers, with His story?

Fearless,

Pastor Fred