SPIRITUALLY CONFUSED?
Who wouldn’t be? Life on earth gets confusing really quick. As soon as children entered public school, this world throws tons of stuff our way … how to fight off pandemic germs, how to handle electronic bullies, and those bigger issues: Drills not just for possible fires, but drills how to react to school shootings!
Then we get a bit older and we get more stuff to think about like how to keep yourself safe from germs, hackers, body issues, and gender confusion.
By the time we are adults we are stressed and angry with harsh world realities. We may feel we are the only generation to ever go through so much change but in reality, throughout history, everyone born, no matter when has had things to deal with and little schooling on how to deal with those problems. They had to muddle through just like us. This is what C.S. Lewis calls the “hopeless attempt” of human history and along with it “money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of many trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
Some say, this is why God was created, pretending that He is a myth; a farce of gigantic proportions. Others say, no! We were preprogrammed by Him before birth to search Him out. I fall into this latter group. And God created all that is, including Jesus, to show us how to live in the here and now. Why would people take up any religion or go to the trouble of denying religion all together if we weren’t preprogrammed to think about it?
I love what C.S. Lewis had to say about Jesus, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [Jesus]. They say, ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’
Lewis continues to write, “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.”
There are two more C.S. Lewis quotes I think are illuminating. In the first one, he said, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong …. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.” The second quote is, “When you argue against Him [God] you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”
What this all amounts to is, fence sitting does you no good! You live in a world created by God for you. Don’t you think it would be easier on you if you learned more about your creator? How He can help you navigate through all the uncertainties in life? Give you answers to some of your most pressing dilemmas? Relieve you of some of these stresses? It just makes sense, doesn’t it? Visit our website to learn more!
PS: C.S. Lewis was an atheist who became a Christian and a great theologian.
All quotes by C.S. Lewis are from his book, Mere Christianity, 1952.
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