Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: C.S. Lewis part 3

Number four, the perils of introspection. Lewis' experience of the pursuit of joy and the mistakes he made has had a huge effect on the way

I think about the assurance of salvation. How do you counsel people who come to you, as they do to me almost every week, with questions about the assurance?

How can I know I'm real? You preach in such a way that I almost feel like I'm not a

Christian every week. So, help me.

And I spend huge amounts of time, I wrote a whole book about that, When I Don't Desire God.

Trying to help people with that issue. Well, Lewis has helped me amazingly with this.

This is very profound, I hope you get it in the next four or five minutes. What he discovered is that the effort to know the experience of joy by looking at the experience of joy is self -defeating.

He wrote this, And there's nothing to see.

Not quite nothing, he says. A sediment, it remains.

And the sediment is a physical sensation. You see it and then doubt the reality of your joy.

And the assurance of salvation fails. As you try to get outside yourself, look inside to see if the thing you were doing before you stepped outside is real, it's not there anymore.

It will never work. People are doing this all the time. And feeling horribly discouraged.

Wondering, I can't ever find anything real inside of me.

You've been there. I've been there. Let me read it again, this is

Lewis. This is our dilemma. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about.

As tasting and touching and willing and loving and hating, we do not clearly understand.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off. The more deeply we enter into the reality, the less we can think.

You cannot study pleasure in the moment of nuptial embrace.

Nor repentance while repenting. Nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter.

But when else can we know these things? You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same time.

For in hope, we look to hope's object. And we interrupt this by, so to speak, turning around and looking in hope.

That is huge. What this has meant is, first, that I now see that the pursuit of joy must always be indirect.

Focusing not on the experience of joy, but on the object enjoyed.

In the moment that I turn around to examine my experience to see if it's spiritual or to see if it's real.

I cease to do what I'm trying to examine and therefore can't see it. And therefore doubt and assurance goes.

Now apply that to faith in Jesus. The most authentic faith in Jesus is suspended when we begin to analyze our faith in Jesus.

Our own. Which means that this analysis always ends in discouragement.

When we're trusting Christ most authentically, we're not thinking about trusting. We're thinking about Christ.

We're loving Christ, we're delighting in Christ, we're contemplating Christ. When we step out of the moment to examine our trusting of Christ, we cease.

And all we see is the sediment there of some psychological leftover and it looks highly suspicious.

So my counsel to strugglers week after week is relentlessly look to Jesus, look to Jesus, look to Jesus and pray for eyes to see.

When we're in our prayer room before preaching, before worship, weekend after weekend, you will hear prayers almost every time for self -forgetfulness.

It's what we mean by authenticity in worship, preaching. When I'm preaching, I don't want to have a sweet sense that I'm preaching well.

I want no sense that I'm preaching. None. I don't want to know that I'm preaching.

I don't want to think that I just did that. It's no good now all into myself.

Right now. This very moment. I've just goofed it up with an illustration.

You see what I'm saying? You don't. You just don't want any of that nice approval stuff.

I don't want anything about Piper. I want totally there in the text, in the reality there.

That's a gift. It rarely comes in a sustained way. But oh, when it comes later, you say, yes, it happened.

It happened for a few minutes. And that's what heaven will be.

Number five, the incompleteness of duty without delight.

I don't know if you're going to go here tonight, Sam. But I get to jump on you this time if you do. You got to understand how good it is for me to sit here and listen to Sam talk.

Because you obviously know we're saying the same thing, right? Because we both drunk at the same well, right? He drunk at Edwards.

I drunk at Edwards. He drunk at Lewis. I drunk at Lewis. We drunk from each other's books. This is just sweet. I've never been in anything like this before.

To have myself come back and be so beautiful. Lewis' analysis of joy impelled me deeper into the biblical reality of what it means to walk by the spirit.

Or to live worthy of the gospel. Until we are gripped with joyful impulses of the gospel.

Joyful, inner impulses of the gospel of grace from the inside. Until we're gripped by that, we're always thinking in terms of doing external duties with pressures from outside.

So here's the list of stuff to do. God will be pleased if we do it. And now we're going to work up the willpower to do it.

That's just the religion. That's religion. That's morality. Christian hedonism,

J .S. Lewis at this point, is massively penetrating and insightful.

Listen to these two quotes. One of them I had never seen before. Somebody mailed it to me.

I should give them credit. They may be able to remember who sent it to me. I think it might be Tony Reineke. Okay. Thank you

Tony, wherever you are, for sending me this oh hell quote. This is not it.

I'll tell you when I get there. A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty.

He'd always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love of God or of other people.

Like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times.

But of course, it's idiotic to use the crutch when our legs, our own loves and tastes and habits, can do the journey on their own.

A perfect man would never act from duty. Wow. Now.

The pursuit of holiness, therefore, is transformed. My teaching on sanctification.

Some of you brothers, I was talking to one of you about this, come from traditions in which this, what

I'm saying right now, is just totally, totally, utterly unknown.

Unknown. Everything is lists. Conformity to external pressures in the church.

Dress a certain way, talk a certain way, do stuff. And he's saying, no good man acts that way.

We built a whole church around that. Now, here's the really profound thing.

This next quote, this is the one from the Oxford History of English Literature. And it's about the

Reformation, it's about Puritans, and it's about William Tyndale in particular. What was William Tyndale about?

What were the Protestant Reformers about? Listen to this. This is good. In reality,

Tyndale is trying to express an obstinate fact which meets us long before we venture into the realm of theology.

The fact that morality or duty, what he calls the law, never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

It is shocking, but it is undeniable. We do not wish either to be or to live among people who are clean or honest or kind as a matter of duty.

We want to be and associate with people who like being clean and honest and kind.

The mere suspicion that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty, subtly poisons it.

In philosophical language, the ethical category is self -destructive. Morality is healthy only when it is trying to abolish itself.

Christ is the end of the law. I added that.

Back to Lewis. In theological language, no man can be saved by works.

The whole purpose of the gospel for Tyndale is to deliver us from morality.

Thus, paradoxically, the purity of modern imagination, the cold, gloomy heart doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it, is precisely the enemy which historical

Protestantism arose and smote. That's powerful.

That's powerful. And I just want to keep smiting. That's what Christian hedonism is.

It's the smite on morality. It's the smite on religion. It's the smite on externality and performance and stuffed laws and lists that don't come from in here, that have never tasted the joy, that have never embraced the absolute, rock -solid, heart -enlivening truth.

We're at war. That's what Christianity is in my judgment. Number six.

I'm skipping number six. You can read it. Two pages worth. Story.

I'd like two more, then we'd be done. Story is great, but not everything.

Lewis has been helpful in celebrating the power of story, which is very fashionable today.

And yet, Lewis did not overstate the value of story or its exclusive claims upon us to the exclusion of exposition and argument and doctrine.

Alan Jacobs wrote, Philosophy had gotten Lewis to Mount Pisgah, from which, like Moses, he could look out across the

Promised Land, but it would be literature, it would be story, that would take him into the land, so that he could taste the milk and honey.

That's true. And Lewis never drew the implication from that, that the tools of philosophy, of thought, of reason, of exposition, of excursus thinking, of doctrine, should be neglected.

He wrote three science fiction novels. He published many poems.

He wrote seven world -class imaginary tales for children.

And there were razor -sharp, logical defenses of the Christian faith, like Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Abolition of Man, Christian Reflections, and dozens of essays.

I love this. Owen Barfield. You know, he was surrounded by this group called the Inklings.

Most of them thought he was crazy, in doing what he did. In writing defenses of the

Christian faith, at the popular level, from a philosophical standpoint. They just thought, you're wasting your time. Write more stories.

Write more novels. It's story. It's story that counts. Barfield said, you've got an expository demon, and it needs to be exercised.

I thank God, that Lewis never permitted his expository demon to be exercised.

I think he got it just about right. A handful of children's books, a handful of science fiction novels, a handful of poems, a handful of razor -sharp, logical defenses of Jesus.

That's pretty good. You take the expository demon out of C .S.

Lewis, everything fails. He could not have written what he wrote, without this demon.

You understand how I'm using the word demon. Just the opposite. I am deeply thankful, that he would not be pressed, into what many today, are experiencing as a lopsided, unbiblical view of story.

Story is precious, and powerful. And the

Bible has plenty of it. But explanation, exposition, doctrine, are crucial, to life, life, life, poetry, marriage, children.

You try, to strip away, logic, reason, thinking, exposition, linear argument, from your life, and replace it only with story, this will be one great cloud of unknowing.

Both of them in Lewis, are deepened and enriched, by the other. And I thank

God for it. Finally, number seven, Lewis conception of our final eternal joy, in the presence of God, and what an unspeakable wonder that will be, final joy, and what a wonder that will be, enables him to stand, in God exalting awe, of what it means to be human.

He has helped me rise above my petty complaints, about people, and see people, at least from time to time, that's a confession, at least from time to time, as the staggering wonder, that they are, in the image of God.

I love this quote, this is way up near the top of my favorites. It is a serious thing, to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person, you talk to today, may one day be a creature, which if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror, and a corruption, such as you now meet if at all, only in your nightmares.

All day long, we are in some degree, helping each other on, to one of these destinations.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours, as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals, with whom we joke, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

Immortal horrors, or everlasting splendors. The effect that sort of seeing, and thinking, and speaking has had on me, is to make me take life, really seriously.

Really seriously. Every human being, really, really, really seriously.

Immortal horrors, or everlasting wonders, standing in front of me, in the city, at church, in the store.

Don't get it wrong, to take life seriously, doesn't mean to become morose.

I hope not. Quote, we must play, but our merriment, must be of that kind, and it is in fact, the merriest kind, which exists, between people, who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously.

No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. So in conclusion, life is serious, even when we play.

And the pursuit of joy, is a serious matter. All of it is serious, and happy, because God is real.

Neither he, nor my experience of him, as joy, is a mere event, in my own mind.

There is God. There is objective truth. There is the gospel.

And there is joy. And that God glorifying joy, is the great end of life.

In it, God's glory, and human joy, meet, without conflict.

So perhaps, it won't be surprising to you, when

Lewis, who was awed, by Christ, as the incarnate

God, dying for sinners, and rising again, the true myth, perhaps it won't be surprising, to you, if I close with two quotes, that go like this.

The salvation of a single soul, is more important, than the production, or preservation, of all the epics, and all the tragedies, in the world.

The glory of God, and as our only means, of glorifying him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business, of life.

I sent David last night, one last long footnote, and it was a response, of Lewis to Norman, Pittenger, in the 1950s, a liberal theologian in America, who wrote in the book,

I mean in the magazine, Christian Century, a critique, of Lewis's, oversimplified treatment, of the

Trinity, in a popular work, and just to give you a flavor, of this man's heart,

I'm going to read you, read you that footnote, and then I'll pray. When I began, no let me start one sentence earlier, most of my books are evangelistic, addressed to those outside, when

I began, Christianity came, before the great mass, of my unbelieving fellow countrymen, either in the highly emotional form, offered by revivalists, or in the unintelligible language, of highly cultured clergymen, most men were reached by neither, my task was therefore, simply that of a translator, one turning

Christian doctrine, or what I hope to be such, into vernacular, into language, that unscholarly people, would attend to, and could understand,

Dr. Pittenger, would be more helpful critic, if he advised a cure, as well as asserting many diseases, how does he himself do such work, what methods, and with what success, does he employ, when he's trying to convert, the great mass of storekeepers, lawyers, realtors, morticians, policemen, and artisans, who surround him in his own city, let's pray, so father

Lewis, saw himself mainly, in his popular writing, as an evangelist, there was much more to him, but not less, and he considered to be this, this to be the real business, of his life, we are pastors, how much more so, we want all these good effects, of Lewis, we want none of the bad effects, that he could have, and so I'm asking, that these brothers, would have discernment, and whether it's

Lewis, or another writer, or their wives, or somebody in their church, or a dad, or a mom, or a friend, would you bring into their lives, someone who would be used, by the

Holy Spirit, to stab them, brought awake, to the truth, with a joy unspeakable, and full of glory, in Jesus name we pray,