Merry Christmas Everyone

The Desire of All Nations Has Come

The “desire of all nations”.  Do you know what it means to desire some thing or someone with an intensity so fierce it unsettles you?  Can we desire the Lord that way and still be sober?  I mean sober in the sense of sober-minded.  Sometimes I do -  long for Him, I mean, with the same desire the heart of every desperate seeker longs with.  If we seek with with the same passion we seek our addictions with, perhaps we would be found by Him – seeking Him with everything we’ve got ‘till we can say with Eric Liddell, “I feel His pleasure.”  Oh God, we want to feel Your pleasure.  The desire of ages, the desire of all nations, Christ the Savior is born.   This is our true desire’s star – that “infinite, soul-staggering grandeur” that only He can fulfill.  Our souls were designed to be connected to something bigger, something higher – His “shocking, stunning, divine, absolute, staggering grandeur.”  The human heart was “made to be staggered by terrifyingly awesome, joyous dread and peace.” ^[1] The human heart was made to find its pleasure in God.

  “The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. . . . Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” ^[2]

 

Resources

1. Piper, John, God’s Design for History, gods-design-for-history-the-glory-of-his-mercy
2. Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, HarperSanFrancisco 2001

Piper on C.S. Lewis

The Man Who Taught Me to See

Indeed, I thank God for professors and writers who devoted tremendous creative energies to render credible the existence of trees and water and souls and love and God. C. S. Lewis, who died the same day as John F. Kennedy in 1963 and who taught English at Oxford, walked up over the horizon of my little brown path in 1964 with such blazing brightness that it is hard to overstate the impact he had on my life.

Someone introduced me to Lewis my freshman year with the book, Mere Christianity^[1]. For the next five or six years I was almost never without a Lewis book near at hand. I think that without his influence I would not have lived my life with as much joy or usefulness as I have. There are reasons for this.

He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the obvious.

He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost everybody today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor.

Lewis gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it^[2]). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror.

He exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to objective being and objective value for the naked folly that it was. The philosophical king of my generation had no clothes on, and the writer of children’s books from Oxford had the courage to say so.^[3]

You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.^[4]

Resources
1.  C. S. Lwis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
2.  C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 199.
3.  Piper, John, Don’t Waste Your Life (Illinois, Crossway Books), p 18.
4.  C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 91