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

The Perils of Introspection and Assurance of Salvation

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, I saw that all my waitings and watchings for joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, hang my finger, lay my finger and say, this is it, had been futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.

It can't be done. For the moment we step outside ourselves to contemplate our enjoying, we are no longer enjoying. 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.

Therefore, 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 prayer, no sense that I'm preaching, none. I don't wanna know that I'm preaching. I don't wanna 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 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 gonna go here tonight, Sam, but I get to jump on you this time if you do. You gotta 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 gonna 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. David may be able to remember who sent it to him. 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. 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. He'd say, 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 Puritan 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.

Why?

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, 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.

Handful of children's books, handful of science fiction novels, handful of poems, 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 gonna 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 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, amen.