What makes a good story? CS Lewis said that the best stories give us a glimpse of the Great Story. His much-loved Chronicles of Narnia do that in a big way, showing us the true Lion.
Lion Truths from Narnia (pt.3)
Narnia, where it was always winter and never Christmas after the wicked White Witch cast her spell on the make believe land invented by C.S. Lewis. But the snow began to melt and the spell went away with the arrival in Narnia of the mighty lion Aslan. “Narnia” winter weather hit hard in parts of the Midwest this past weekend before heading onto New England and as far south as Florida, 10 days before winter officially opens in the Northern Hemisphere. Blizzard like conditions arrived as the latest chronicle of Narnia, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” opened and took the honors with the greatest box office for the weekend. Flights were cancelled. The Minnesota Vikings game with the New York Giants was played last night in Detroit after heavy snow and gusting winds collapsed the Metro Dome in Minneapolis forcing postponement of the Sunday NFL game. And for the first time ever the Salvation Army was forced to stop ringing bells until the great storm passed. Welcome to Haven Today. I’m Charles Morris at Christmastime. We share the great story that’s all about Jesus and part 3 of a program called, “Lion Truths from Narnia”. Melting snow is one way that C.S. Lewis describes the last stage of his own experience of winter turning to Christmas in describing his becoming a Christian written in detail in his book “Surprised by Joy: The shape of my early life”. If you missed our first two programs we had on the adopted son of C.S. Lewis, Douglas Gresham, the president and film maker at Walden Media Michael Flaherty, a pastor’s wife, Cathy Keller who was a pen pal of Lewis’ before he died and pastor Jim Bergen in Boulder, CO who became a Christ follower after hearing “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” told and realizing that he was just like the bratty child Eustis Clarence Scrub in “Dawn Treader”, well we have those 2 programs still posted on our website, haventoday.org. And if you’re wondering how to make a major difference in the life, this Christmas, of someone you love, check out the boxed collectors’ set of the “Chronicles of Narnia”, all 7 books, that we have for you this Christmas, haventoday.org and it’s for your Christmas gift to Haven Today. There’s still time to get it before Christmas if you act today. And you can call us at 1-800-654-2836. That’s 1-800-54-2836. Haven Today opens with the Christmas music of Peter Ide.
Song: What Child is This
Performed by: Peter Ide
Haven Today, at Christmastime with part 3 of “Lion Truths from Narnia”. I’m Charles Morris an that’s Peter Ide, “What Child is This”. Doug Gresham, the adopted son of C.S. Lewis will be back with us in just a moment so stay tuned. C.S. Lewis wrote the Narnia tales to try to cut through to the real story. He wrote them, he said, because as a child he had such negative associations with Christianity. It all seemed like a very heavy business to him. He wanted children to meet Jesus, disguised as Aslan so that they could see just how glorious and wonderful he really is and it works, not just for children but for grownups too. When the Pemency children first come to Narnia and hear the name Aslan they each have a different reaction. Peter, the eldest feels suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan has the sensation one gets from a delicious smell or a beautiful strain of music. Lucy, little Lucy feels that wonderful sense of freedom one gets when school is out for the year and the holidays have started. Only Edmund feels anything negative and that’s because he’s coming under the influence of the wicked White Witch. As believers we may not have these same reactions when we hear the name of Jesus but Lewis helps us see that we should. Jesus is the door to all the adventure and sweetness and joy and freedom in life even for grownups. He’s not a tame lion, as Mr. and Mrs. Beaver told the children in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, but he is good. He is the Lord and claims us absolutely. All we have is his by right but oh, he is good! He pours himself out for us. He loves us. He delights in us and he shares everything he has with us. If Christianity feels like a heavy business then a trip to Narnia may be just what the doctor ordered for you. C.S. Lewis wrote “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, the first book, hoping it would liberate the minds of children to see Jesus as he really is. By creating a parallel world they could meet him in disguise and learn to love him. Lewis received many letters from children who wrote to ask if Aslan was indeed intended to be like Jesus and he answered them all with a resounding “Yes!” One boy wrote and asked, “Is he meant to be the Lion of Judah?” And Lewis wrote back, “Yes he is! You’ve got it exactly.” In “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” that just opened last weekend, the third book in the chronicles, he tells his readers that the resemblance between Aslan and Jesus was no accident. He has Aslan appear to the children first as a lamb and then as a lion, towering above them and scattering light from his mane. Lucy asks him when they can come back to Narnia again and Aslan tells her, very gently, that she must return to her own world and never come back to Narnia. Lucy sobs, “It isn’t Narnia, you know. It’s you! We shan’t meet you there. How can we live never meeting you?” And Aslan tells her, “But you shall meet me, dear one. But there I have another name. you must learn to know me by that name. This was the reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” Lewis takes you into Narnia so you can know Jesus better in the real world. And that’s the effect it has on both children and adults. You pick it up a little bit in the movie but you really read it in the books. There’s something about a fresh context that makes things come alive. You read the truths about Jesus that Lewis wrote into his stories and they become wonderfully clear to you. Like the truth that there is only one stream that you have to come to Jesus if you want to drink. It is a hard truth, especially in our many roads to truth culture that we live in today. If you listen between the lines in our public conversations you hear this assumption: tolerance means accepting that there are many ways to quench your spiritual thirst. We must afford the same respect to all by treating them as if they are all valid. But then Jesus says, “No. There is only one stream, only one way to quench your thirst and that is to come to me.” It may sound intolerant in our pluralistically conditioned ears. It creates a crisis, just like it did when Jesus explained it to the woman at the well. He told her, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who I am you would ask me and I would give you Living Water. Anyone who drinks this well water soon becomes thirsty again but the water I will give you will take your thirst away. It will become a perpetual spring within you bubbling up to eternal life.” The message: there’s only one real thirst quencher, the Living Water that only Jesus can give. The choices: be thirsty or have Jesus. At the Feast of the Tabernacles Jesus stood up and announced this to the crowds of Jews who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate a feast. He cried out to them in a loud voice and said, “If you are thirsty come to me and drink.” Only Jesus has this kind of water. There is only one stream where your real thirst can be satisfied. You have to come to Jesus to find that water. The crisis of that truth comes alive in the “Chronicles of Narnia”.
Haven Today and “Lion Truths from Narnia”. On our first two programs in this series we had Douglas Gresham on, we had the president of Walden Media, we had a pastor’s wife, we had a pastor who became a Christian after hearing the story of Eustis Clarence Scrub. a few years ago we had Doug Gresham in studio and at the time I asked him to give us a little bit of background about C.S. Lewis writing the “Chronicles of Narnia” including this new movie which is from the book, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”.
DG: There was a book that Jack wrote at a time that he and Tolkien were talking – he and J.R.R. Tolkien who wrote “The Lord of the Rings”,
CM: Yes.
DG: and they had both decided that Christian literature was not being written the way that they would have wanted to have read it when they were children. Children’s literature was being written in ways they didn’t want to read. They thought that books that dealt with issues and things like that weren’t suitable for children in the first place. They really felt that no one was writing the kinds of children’s books that needed to be written. So they said, well if no one else is going to do it, we better do it ourselves. And of course Tolkien went off and wrote “The Hobbit” and Jack went off and wrote “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”.
CM: right, yes.
DG: And, so that was the beginning of it all. Jack -
CM: And it’s amazing that they were close friends. Of course it’s a small world in England.
DG: Well, in literature I mean it’s a fairly small world, at the top end of literature. I mean there are always huge numbers of peripheral hangers on and smaller writers, if you like lesser writers. But the very top end of literary minds are a small number of people, even today.
CM: And the lives of Tolkien and Lewis were intertwined. I can remember my one trip to The Kilns being told that Tolkien helped Lewis to clear the back around the little pond out back where he’d go skinny dipping every morning and I think Keats used to write poetry there.
DG: And Shelley as well, yes.
CM: It sounds pretty idyllic doesn’t it?
DG: Well there’s a huge amount of literary history to that place.
CM: Yes.
DG: But yeah, Tolkien was Jack’s best friend. And Tolkien, together with Hugo Dyson and others, were among those who were instrumental in Jack becoming a Christian.
CM: Well you might as well explain, because I know, I read the whole Chronicles of Narnia to my 3 children and my wife read it to them once. And while in fact he did not write this children’s series as a Christian series, in looking back on it later he realized his Christianity was coming through in the series, right?
DG: You know Charles I think that’s completely inevitable. If you really do believe in something and thinking about it and talking about it fills your every waking hour, and you are a writer, what you believe in will inform your writing, there’s no way of avoiding it. If you’re a sea captain and all you think about is ships and the sea, when you write something, the essence of the ships and the sea will creep into your writing, you can’t help it. And I think that’s exactly what happened with Jack. He asked himself a question. Thinking to himself what really might it have been like if there were a world in which the animals could speak with the people and they lived with the great mythological creatures of Greece and Ancient Rome and so forth. And they were all in harmony and then somehow if evil had somehow gotten into that world and taken it over, how could God have saved that world? How might he have gone about saving that world like he saved this one? And his answer to that question was “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”.
CM: And supposition with the lion figure coming in.
DG: And it’s a suppositional, yeah, it’s a suppositional representation. It’s not a Christian book. But then Jack himself said, “We don’t need more writers writing Christian books. We need more Christians writing good books.”
CM: “Writing good books” yes. Great quote. That’s a great quote.
DG: And I mean, we don’t need more people making Christian movies either.
CM: Well –
DG: We need more Christian’s making good movies.
CM: Amen, amen.
DG: There aren’t very many of us in the business quite frankly.
CM: That’s true, that’s true.
DG: I think there was not time in which I believe Jack sat down and sort of thought, “How can I make something that’s Christian.”
Cm: Christian, yes.
DG: He just wouldn’t have done it. It wouldn’t be in character with him, for children. He did quite deliberately set out with, Perelandra for example, to write some educational materials, spiritually educational material. And –
CM: Now that’s in the science fiction trilogy –
DG: That’s in the science fiction trilogy, yeah
CM: The science fiction trilogy that he wrote as well.
DG: “Perelandra” and “That Hideous Strength” are two of my favorite books in the world actually, “That Hideous Strength” particularly because it’s such fun.
CM: Let’s talk about your faith for just a minute. You told –
DG: Well, may I cut you off for just a minute, Charles?
CM: Yes, sure.
DG: First thing I’d like to tell you, or to say about this is that I think we use the words faith and faithful very, very loosely in modern society. When we talk about a faithful husband we’re not talking about someone who believes in his wife’s existence.
CM: Right.
DG: There’s usually pretty good evidence for that every time he wakes up in the morning. What we talk about when we’re talking about a faithful husband is a man who lives out his duty to his wife every minute of every day of every week of every year for the rest of his life, or her life, whichever happens to comes first.
CM: Right.
DG: When we talk about a faithful Christian or a man of faith, I think that’s what we should keep in mind. A man of faith is a man who lives out, or tries to live out his duty to Christ every minute of every day for the rest of his life. It’s as if, I suppose, we commit our lives to Christ and go up and he says, “Right. You’ve committed your life to Christ, fine. Now I sentence you to the rest of your life doing Christianity. In fact, don’t just talk about it get out there and ‘get ‘er done’!”
CM: Right or the other side, you’ve got the ticket to Heaven and so don’t worry about today, you’ve got tomorrow taken care of.
DG: Well, yes that’s, I worry about that. I worry about that.
CM: It’s the other 180 degrees.
DG: Yeah
CM: Well, let me ask you a question Doug that I ask for a lot of people who are on this program, what does Jesus mean to you?
DG: Well, without writing a book that’s a rather difficult question to answer.
CM: I’ll give you 60 seconds.
DG: 60 seconds?
CM: No, no go ahead.
DG: Well, Jesus is the person to whom I’ve handed my life because for many years of my life I tried to run it myself. Didn’t want to submit my life to the authority of anyone but myself, and of course, when you do that, you are in fact worshipping yourself and anyone that worships himself has a fool for a god. Eventually I realized I’m not qualified to run a human life so I handed it over to the one person in existence who is and that is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the one who died to pay the penalty for all the things I have done and I’m doing that I shouldn’t in my life and he’s therefore earned the right to run my life as far as I’m concerned. What is Jesus to me? Jesus is everything. Without him there is no life. Without him there is no point.
Song: The Lion and the Lamb
Performed by: Crystal Lewis
Crystal Lewis here at Christmastime here on Haven Today, “Lion Truths from Narnia” and a song called, “The Lion and the Lamb”. God is offering us right now, even today, living water. But we have to come to Jesus. It’s where the lion and the lamb lie down together. When we bow to drink we also bow to worship. We can’t take the water and avoid the lion. Those are his terms but the water is free to anyone. The Lord makes it clear in Isaiah that there is nothing you have to pay, no qualifications you have to meet. Listen to Isaiah 55:1 and 2, “Come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters and you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and no cost. Why spend money on what is not bread and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen to me. And eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.” Why don’t we come? Is it because we think he’s going to eat us for lunch? After all, he isn’t a tame lion we’re told in the “Chronicles of Narnia”. Are we just too stubborn? Oh, but we are thirsty. What to do? We just need to come and drink like the Pemency kids did in the Narnia tales. Come and drink. Jesus is the great thirst quencher. You never realize what a parched, joyless world you live in until you come to the waters and drink. When we finally come to this Living Water we wonder why we waited so long.
Well, “Lion Truths from Narnia” the new movie is opened and we have something special for you. And if you go to the internet and if you call us in a minute we can still get you, before Christmas, the “Chronicles of Narnia”. A special, full color collector’s edition with the original illustrations by Pauline Baines released in the 1950s with the very first United Kingdom edition written by C. S. Lewis. All 7 books in the “Chronicles of Narnia” are available in this boxed set. You can see a picture, you can find out more information if you’ll just go to haventoday.org. We ask for your gift to this ministry, your Christmas gift and we’ll send it out to you right away, haventoday.org. But you need to act today. Or call us on our toll free number and let us know how you’re listening when you call 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. I’m Charles Morris and thank you for joining me. Would you come back again next time when again we’ll be sharing together the great story at Christmastime? It’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.
