Heart of a Friend

“ Everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.” “ If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years! A bit more makes no difference!” Christianity is about being a friend of God. It’s relational. It’s not about being “ faced with an argument which de...

Highlights: Ep. 34 | Mere Christianity | Part 13 | More Than What We've Become When we draw our circle bigger we’re enriched. When we don’t we’re impoverished and diminished. Streams of Living Water, (Richard Foster) If you’ve benefited from the writings of C.S. Lewis, it’s because a few key people a generation ago decided to draw their circle bigger. They took a dip in another stream. We owe...

Highlights: Ep. 33 | Mere Christianity | Part 12 | Failure - A Defining Moment “ The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail… God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits.” It’s a necessary and defining...

Ep. 32 | Mere Christianity | Part 11 | To Go The Distance  Highlights Faith as Lewis uses it here means “spiritual tenacity.” “ Faith is…a necessary virtue. Unless you teach your moods “where they get off,” you can never be a sound Christian…but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.” “There will come a moment when the...

Highlights: Ep. 31 | Mere Christianity | Part 10 | The Gift of Tomorrow What happens when we die? Only a fool ignores this question. “ Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth; waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We a...

Highlights: Ep. 30 | Mere Christianity | Part 9 | Just Do It Love is the litmus test for authentic Christian living. It’s the one signature quality above all others that defines us as Christ-followers. “ Love in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will…It would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manu...

Highlights - The Great Sin According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice. Pride, in all its forms is essentially “ self-conceit .” Vanity: People glory in the greenest lawn, the flattering cut...

Highlights: A Terrible Duty - Episode 28 I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe the one I have to talk of today is even more unpopular: the Christian rule, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Because in Christian morals “thy neighbor” includes “thy enemy,” and so we come up against this terrible du...

Highlights: How to Make Marriage Work: Two important keys to making marriage work. First - The determination that marriage is for life. “ Christianity teaches that marriage is for life…a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism…”one flesh.” They (various churches) all regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body…some think the operation so violent that it cannot be done at...

Mere Christianity  |  Part5  | Good Sex - Highlights “S ome muddle-headed Christians have talked as if …sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they are wrong . Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be giv...

About Politics: “ Christianity has not and does not profess to have, a detailed political program. We are given the golden rule, ‘Do as you would be done by.’ But how that should be applied… to a particular society at a particular time is not specified for us. “That is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity .” “ Most of us aren’t reall...

“ Enemy occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed…landed in disguise…But w hy is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joinin...

Highlights - Mere Christianity (Part 2) Episode 23 Lewis is more than a pipe-smoking, ivory tower, arm-chair academic. He had literally/personally agonized and bled in the “trenches” over this question: If there is a God, then why is there so much evil and suffering? He knew first-hand, in a way that few of us have ever experienced, that “something is seriously wrong with our world.” “ My argument...

Lewis appeared on the September 8, 1947 cover of Time Magazine . This slightly stooped, round-shouldered, balding professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University was an international “rock star.” One irony… originally Mere Christianity was a series of radio talks! They were never written to be a book! Lewis gave these talks on the BBC during World War 2. His purpose: “ Explai...

Highlights - Episode 21 - Teach Us…A Relationship to Be Pursued Nine prayer practices that have helped me continue to make progress in my own relationship with God. First: Think more relationally…less transactionally. It’s not what we say, it’s who we’re with. “ Prayer is not a button to be pushed; it’s a relationship to be pursued .” (Carey Nieuwhof) Second: Recognize the value of a prayer model...

Summary Notes - Teach Us…This Means War! (Episode 20) We’re all in the middle of a cosmic conflict between good and evil - a world war. Life is not a playground it’s a battleground. “ The whole of the cosmos is caught up in a fierce battle between two rival kingdoms .” (Gregory Boyd, God at War ) If you know this is a battle-field and you know the enemy and his strategies, you can reduce your risk...

Highlights - Teach Us to Pray: Here There Be Tigers (Episode 19) “ Lead us not into temptation …” A more accurate and helpful translation: “ Spare us from difficult circumstances. ” Two reasons - linguistic and theological . “I t’s a confession of our weakness. It’s us essentially saying, ‘Lord, I’m weak. I can’t handle the pressure. I’m vulnerable. Don’t put me to the test. ’” (Villodas) “ It’s a...

Episode 18 Notes Highlights: Set the Prisoner Free (Part 7 - Lord’s Prayer) If you are a Christ-follower, there can be only one response when other people wound us… forgiveness . The Lord’s Prayer expects it. On this issue we’re all called to be super-heroes. Anyone thinking seriously about the Lord’s Prayer has to ask, “Is our forgiveness by God conditional upon our forgiveness of others?” They a...

Highlights: Recovery Begins Here (Part 6 - Lord’s Prayer) “ The central defect of evil is not the sin, but the refusal to acknowledge it.” (Scott Peck, People of the Lie ) The practice of denial only allows the evil to grow worse . Recovery can only begin when we acknowledge the sin : “ Forgive us our sins . “Trespasses” and “Debts” are metaphors for the same thing - sin . (cf. Luke 11:4). Differe...

Highlights: Isn’t Kroger Enough? (Part 5) “ Give us this day our daily bread …” Do we really need this part of the Lord’s Prayer? We regard our food as less of a necessity and more like a hobby. Yes, we eat to live but more and more we live to eat. Isn’t this prayer an artifact from a by-gone era of scarcity? John Stott cites Martin Luther, “ Luther had the wisdom to see that “bread” was a symbol...

“ When we depend on man we get what man can do…when we depend on prayer we get what God can do. ” Prayer changes things. May your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In this prayer we’re asking for heaven to come to earth…we’re asking for what’s happening in God’s neighborhood to happen in our own…we’re asking for the mission launched by Jesus to continue in the present an...

Summary Notes: Teach Us to Pray - Episode 14 (Part 4A) No one is happy about the world the way it is. But turning back the clock is not the answer. The answer lies in looking ahead. And this is the focus of this part of the Lord’s Prayer: “May your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This part of the prayer expresses our longing for a better world. Is this one petition or...

Episode 13 Notes - Teach Us to Pray (Part 3) Top 5 prayers: family, guidance, health, forgiveness and thanksgiving The trellis of the Lord’s Prayer helps our prayer life to grow up and in the right direction…it trains our hearts to pray differently…it breaks us free from the “treadmill list” of our top five concerns…it helps us to develop new spiritual muscle memory…it trains us to feel what is mo...

Episode 12 - The Lord’s Prayer - We’re Not in Kansas Anymore If God is in heaven and God is everywhere then heaven must be everywhere. In other words, heaven has no zip code. Heaven is the world we don’t see. This invisible world is what the Bible means here by “heaven.” To paraphrase: “ Our Father, in the unseen but ever present reality that surrounds me. ” Three implications: First, “In heaven”...

Episode 11 Notes - Teach Us to Pray (Part 1) God values our prayers, more than we may think! Jesus’ disciples never asked him to teach them how to preach. But they did ask him, “Lord, teach us how to pray.” The Lord’s Prayer or The Disciples’ prayer is, in a sense, everybody’s chance to walk where Jesus walked - to put the feet of our souls where Jesus put the feet of his soul when he prayed. Each...