(questing music)
- On the 15th of April 1918,
it rained fire here:
German Artillery fire.
I'm near the French
village of Rietz Du Vinage,
where a desperate action took place.
These were the darkest
hours of World War I.
(guns firing)
(explodes)
The Germans had just deployed
massive numbers of troops
to the Western Front during
the Spring Offensive,
and the English lines looked
like they were about to break.
(cannon fires)
But after launching a
barrage of artillery fire,
the British soldiers launched
a furious counterattack.
As the Germans returned fire,
a young 19-year-old Irish
2nd Lieutenant crept forward
with his company through the mud.
A shell exploded,
no one knows whether it
was German of British,
instantly killing his friends
and peppering the Irishman with shrapnel.
Certain that he would
die, and with shrapnel
in his chest, legs, and
arms, he crawled away
from the carnage until he was picked up
by a stretcher bearer.
He was weary, broken, burnt
out, and without hope.
Yet just over 20 years
later, we find that same man
on the radio in London during the terror
of the Nazi Blitz in World War II
and he's bringing hope to millions.
Hope to his nation.
What information, what
message would bring hope
to a nation in its darkest hour?
And what does it take to turn
a person so completely around
from having experienced
the worst of humanity
and being without hope to
becoming a hope bringer
and a beacon a light for millions?
Well, stay with us to
find out as we journey
in the footsteps of C.S.
Lewis: The Hope Bringer.
His story will inspire you and his message
just may bring you an extra
boost of hope and peace too.
(questing music)
C.S. Lewis was one of
the intellectual giants
of the 20th Century
and one of the most
influential writers of his day.
Although he was an important academic,
lecturing at both Oxford
and Cambridge Universities,
most people know him through
the more than 30 books
that he wrote including classics like
"The Chronicles of Narnia,"
which have sold over 100 million copies
and have been turned
into three major movies.
Clive Staples Lewis was born
here to a protestant family
in East Belfast, Ireland in 1898.
His books have brought hope
and joy to generations.
Most people know C.S. Lewis today
as the author of "The
Chronicles of Narnia,"
a series of books for children
that featured talking animals.
Now that's no coincidence.
C.S. Lewis's love for
animals showed itself early
in his life.
When Jack was seven, his
family moved into this house
called Little Lea in East Belfast.
Lewis's family just love books.
Lewis later wrote...
- [Man] "There were books in the study,
"books in the dining room,
"in the great bookcase on the landing,
"books in the bedroom,
"books piled as high as
my shoulder in the attic,
"books of all kinds."
- When his mother died
from cancer just months
before Lewis's 10th birthday,
he became even more withdrawn.
He was deeply hurt by her passing.
Lewis not only lost a
mother but his father
never fully recovered from her death.
Lewis and his brother
felt estranged from him
and their life at home
was never the same again.
Lewis's mother had given him a Bible
but her death convinced him
that the God of the Bible
was at best just a vague idea
or at worst was simply cruel.
At 15 years of age, Lewis
completely rejected Christianity
and became a staunch atheist.
His key interest became
the world of mythology.
All of his life Lewis
experienced an inner longing
for something which he later called "joy".
It was the idea that something existed
which was so much greater
and more wonderful
than anything we experienced
as part of our normal lives.
As a teenager, Lewis was
fascinated by the ancient songs
and legends of Scandinavia.
And these intensified this
longing deep within him.
In 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship
at University College Oxford.
It was a big culture shock for Lewis
coming from Ireland to England,
but it was an opportunity
that was too good to refuse.
However, within months of entering Oxford,
the British Army shipped him off to France
to fight on the Western
Front in World War I.
It was a terrible war.
The most brutal and destructive conflict
the world had ever seen.
On average, roughly 6,000 men
were killed every day for the war.
Before it was over,
nearly 10 million soldiers lay dead.
Millions more were seriously wounded.
About half the British
soldiers fighting in France
became a casualty of some sort.
C.S. Lewis was one of them.
That day, here among the
trenches of Northern France,
it was precisely on his 19th birthday
that Lewis was wounded
by an exploding shell.
Two of his close friends
were killed instantly.
He later wrote about his
experiences in the war
as someone trying to forget.
- [Man] "The horribly
smashed men still moving
"like half-crushed beetles,
"the sitting or standing corpses,
"the landscape of sheer earth
without a blade of grass,
"the boots worn day and night
till they seemed to grow
"to your feet, all this often
"seems to have happened to someone else."
- But it wasn't his horrific
experiences at the Front
that turned his life around and
pointed him to Christianity,
instead they merely
hardened him in his atheism.
During the long period
of his convalescence
from his injuries,
Lewis suffered from
depression and home sickness.
Still he later wrote
that his ideal picture
of happiness was...
- [Man] "To be always convalescent
from some small illness
"and always seated in a window
that overlooked the sea,
"there to read these poems
eight hours of each happy day."
(graceful music)
- In December 1918, Lewis
was discharged from the army
and he quickly returned and
finished his studies at Oxford.
After graduating, he
became a university tutor
at University College at Oxford.
And in 1925, he was
elected a fellow and tutor
in English Literature
here at Magdalen College,
where he worked for 29 years.
The reality is that
C.S. Lewis loved Oxford
and the friends he had here and in a sense
he never really left Oxford again.
During all this time,
Lewis was a very committed
and, at time, aggressive atheist.
He rejected the idea of God.
He thought Christianity was shallow,
and for him God didn't
exist because if He did,
He must be cruel and heartless.
His road back to faith was
a slow one over many years.
It was filled with
roadblocks that Lewis thought
would be impossible for him to overcome.
He had to deal with deeply
hurtful emotional baggage
and also many intellectual obstacles.
However, it was precisely
because of his commitment
to rational, logical thought that Lewis
not only returned to
Christianity but became
one of its greatest defenders.
His road to fame was influenced
not only by his own reading
but also by his Christian friends.
And prominent among them was
his colleague J.R. Tolkien,
with whom he'd have
long walks and debates.
Of course Tolkien is
famous today for his works,
"The Hobbit" and "The Lord of The Rings."
Lewis really resisted
coming back to Christianity,
but in 1929 he accepted that
there was in fact a God.
But Lewis wasn't a Christian yet.
He didn't accept the
Christian God until after
a late night walk with Tolkien.
He wrote that he then
became the most reluctant
covert to Christianity in all of England.
Today we live in a largely unbelieving age
where people have turned away from God.
There were several key
factors in Lewis's conversion
that are important and relevant.
The first factor is the
importance of reason.
For C.S. Lewis, Christianity
had to make sense first of all.
It had to be logical and reasonable.
One of the most important issues for him
was the problem of pain and suffering.
He came to see that while
it's easy to blame God
for suffering, atheism has
no answer for it at all
and that Christianity actually did.
It made more sense, was more logical,
and certainly provided more hope.
Next, he became convinced
that the evidence for Jesus
in the bible, in the Gospels
is actually very strong.
In the end, he couldn't argue against it.
In the Gospel story of Jesus,
he saw the evidence of God's grace.
Here in the life and teachings of Jesus,
he found the only true comfort.
Finally Christianity filled
his deepest needs and desires.
For Lewis, this went beyond
just intellectual arguments.
Lewis came to experience
the joy of a faith
that satisfied and filled
the longings of his heart.
In Jesus, he found peace, hope, and joy.
Jesus filled the God-shaped
hole in his life.
Lewis was no coward when
it came to doing his duty
for his country, but his
greatest service to his nation
in those dark hours
wasn't done in uniform;
it was through the medium of radio.
After reading Lewis's book,
"The Problem of pain,"
one of the directors
of the BBC asked Lewis
to start giving talks on radio.
So from 1941 to 1943,
while London was under the
terror of the German bombs
of The Blitz, Lewis spoke hope to a nation
that desperately needed it.
(bombs exploding)
These broadcasts came from Lewis' deep
Christian convictions,
and they were appreciated
by civilians and those
in the Arm Forces alike.
As an example,
Air Chief Marshall Sir
Donald Hardman wrote...
- [Man] "The war, the whole of life,
"everything tended to seem pointless.
"We needed, many of us,
"a key to the meaning of the universe.
"Lewis provided just that."
- These wartime broadcasts by
Lewis were later written down
in his book, "Mere Christianity."
And to show you the
impact of this book down
to our day, Mere Christianity
was voted the best book
of the 20th century by
Christianity Today magazine.
In 1930, the year before he
converted to Christianity,
Lewis had moved into this
house in a village near Oxford.
It was called The Kilns,
because it had been built
on the side of a former brick works.
This was the house in
which Lewis was to live
for the rest of his life.
It was here that Lewis did his writing.
His books have reached a vast audience
and they continued to attract
new readers every year.
Lewis, as with Tolkien, wanted
to use his writing talents
to share his Christian faith
that was so important to him.
So he wrote a significant number of books
dealing with Christianity
such as "The Great Divorce,"
"The Screwtape Letters,"
and "Surprised by Joy."
Lewis believed that the definition of love
was what most sharply differentiated
the Christian world view
from the secular world view.
So he wrote a book
called "The Four Loves,"
which compared the
divine unconditional love
inherent in Christianity to the affection
for family and friends and sexual love.
Lewis said that the difference
was that divine love
enables a person to love without
any direct personal benefit
while most other forms
of love are at some level
motivated by self-interest.
This unique form of
love, unconditional love,
doesn't simply evolve
from human experience
but rather was implanted
in every human being by God
through what Lewis termed the moral law.
It was also here in the
tranquillity of The Kilns
that Lewis wrote the universally acclaimed
children's classic, "The
Chronicles of Narnia,"
which contained many
strong Christian messages,
ideas, and concepts that
Lewis wanted to make
easily accessible to young readers.
Lewis believed that stories
could best convey the wonder,
the joy, the grand
concepts of Christianity
to the minds of children and
capture their imaginations.
So the Narnia Chronicles uses
symbolism to tell the story
of a great war with all
the world looking on,
a battle between the forces
of light and darkness.
And he uses Aslan, the
Noble Lion of Narnia,
as the literary Christ figure
who plays a pivotal role
in the story of Narnia,
just as Jesus is central
to the Christian faith.
He uses the story of Aslan as a retelling
of the central events in Christ's life:
His birth, death, and resurrection.
The Narnia books have sold
over 100 million copies
and have been transformed into
three major motion pictures.
They have enduring appeal,
unforgettable characters,
places and prose that stir
the imagination and the heart.
Many people are also surprised to learn
that Lewis also wrote a
science fiction trilogy
to which he represents Christian ideas.
(graceful music)
But what most people don't know at all
is that C.S. Lewis was actually
a very important academic
in his chosen field, which
was Late Mediaeval Literature,
where the special focus
on the use allegory.
So it's no surprise that we
can see allegorical elements
throughout many of Lewis's books.
Lewis was a prolific writer
and he surrounded himself
with other writers.
In fact in 1929, he formed
an informal discussion group
among his fellow writers
which he called The Inklings.
They used to meet here at
the Eagle and Child Pub
every Tuesday morning, where
they discuss literature,
philosophy, and religion.
The reality is that C.S.
Lewis was your typical
absent-minded professor.
His trousers were usually
all creased and wrinkled.
His jackets were usually old and stained,
and his shoes were scuffed and worn.
In 1954, he described himself like this
to his young admirer.
- [Man] "I'm tall, fat, rather bald,
"red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired,
"have a deep voice, and
wear glasses for reading."
In this way, Lewis is the perfect example
of how God can use any
of us to bless others
no matter how flawed we may be.
Sadly, Lewis was never able
to find lasting fulfilment
in his relationship with women.
They seem to be cut short by tragedy.
Remember how his mother
had died of cancer?
Well, in 1957, Lewis married Joy Davidman.
After reading Lewis's books,
she had converted from
Judaism to Christianity.
They lived together for
three year in The Kilns
until Joy died of bone
cancer three years later.
They were the happiest
years of Lewis's life.
He continued to raise Joy's
two sons after her death.
Lewis was a very famous man when he died,
however, news of his
death was over shadowed
by the dramatic death of
another even more famous man:
US President John F. Kennedy,
who had actually been
assassinated on the same day
less than an hour earlier.
C.S. Lewis was buried here
at the Holy Trinity Church in Oxford.
Even today it's common
to find flowers left here
on top of his tombstone,
but the people of the United Kingdom
did more than this for Lewis.
On the 50th anniversary
of his death in 2013,
Lewis was commemorated
together with England's
greatest writers at poet's
corner in Westminster Abbey.
There's a full stone dedicated
to the memory of C.S. Lewis
at poet's corner.
It's inscribed with words from an address
that he once gave.
- [Man] "I believe in
Christianity as I believe
"the sun has risen, not
only because I see it
"but because by it I see everything else."
- Within Christian circles,
Lewis's books are loved
in a way that transcends
denominational boundaries.
Through his writings,
Lewis has helped countless
thousands of people to find faith in God
and to keep it in an age that hasn't been
at all friendly to Christianity.
Today secular readers
of Lewis's fiction works
are often unaware of the
Christian themes they're enjoying
but they are engrossed by
Lewis's vision of heroic battles
between good and evil, of
right choices being made
in the most difficult circumstances
and visions of another
world, a better world,
a heavenly world that breaks into our own.
In this way, C.S. Lewis's
vision reaches out
and still continues to
bring hope to millions
just as he did during the
London Blitz in World War II.
Today many people in
our society have chosen
atheism and rejected belief in God.
C.S. Lewis knew what it
was like to be an atheist.
Not just that, he was a highly intelligent
and militant atheist but
he was a man who found
no hope in life as an atheist.
And if you don't have hope,
then you haven't got anything.
The reality is that many people today
don't even bother to
think about things like
whether God is real or not, but Lewis did.
And he realised that it
was difficult for him
to remain committed to rational thought
and to not believe in God.
He found the evidence for
God to be overwhelming,
undeniable, but there was something else.
Throughout much of his life,
nothing he experienced could
ultimately satisfy him.
And together with that Lewis
experienced a deep longing
for a better world and
an indescribable joy
that every now and then would break
into his mundane reality,
but where did it come from?
Well, C.S. Lewis came to
recognise that that joy
had to come only from God.
He came to realise that he could only find
ultimate satisfaction in Him.
God is the answer to our heart's longings
and our deepest needs.
Only He can fill the
God-shaped hole in our lives.
Now this realisation is nothing new.
Thousands of years ago, the
Psalmist David wrote this
in Psalm 145 in verse 16,
"You open your hand
and satisfy the desires
"of every living thing."
And then in Philippians 3 in verse 8,
the Apostle Paul wrote this,
"Everything else is
worthless when compared
"with the infinite value of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."
What he meant is that
ultimate satisfaction
only comes from knowing Jesus Christ.
And that's what C.S. Lewis discovered.
And when he discovered that,
he also discovered an
endless source of hope.
And he went on to share
that hope, true hope,
lasting hope with millions.
We've only experienced moments
of great joy in our lives.
Now, what if those
moments were just glimpses
of a better world, an eternal world
where that joy was constant
and reigned supreme?
What about you?
Have you ever felt like
you're missing out?
Like there's more, much more to life?
Have you ever wished that
those moments of greatest joy
could last forever?
Well, what if they can?
There is a better world coming.
If you'd like to experience
more hope and joy in your life,
then I'd like to invite
you to join with me
and ask for it as we pray.
Dear Heavenly Father,
we thank You because You
are the one who satisfies
all our desires.
Thank You because You have
prepared a better world for us.
Thank You for those
glimpses of the greater joy
that waits for us up ahead.
And we thank You for the hope
that this gives us in You
and in Your promises to us.
Strengthen our faith in
You as we walk through
this world and bring us
finally to our heavenly home.
The place of complete joy and peace.
In Jesus' name we pray,
Amen.
One of the issues that Lewis
struggled with all his life
was the problem of pain.
It started with the death
of his mother from cancer
when he was nine years old
and continued throughout his life.
His was the age old question,
why did God allow that to happen?
If we're honest, we all have
to admit that we experience
pain and suffering. At first for Lewis,
it became a reason to reject
God and turn away from Him.
But later he discovered
that there was a way
to deal with suffering and pain
when it's apparently unbearable.
Lewis discovered that
not only did Christianity
have a better answer
to the problem of pain
but that the problem
of pain became a reason
to draw closer to God.
Because this is an issue for all of us,
I'd like to offer you
the free gift we have
for all our viewers today.
It's a booklet called Finding
Strength In The Midst of Pain.
This book is our gift to
you and is absolutely free.
There are no costs or
obligations whatsoever.
This book brings hope and strength
in the midst of trouble and pain.
So don't miss this wonderful opportunity
to receive the gift we have for you today.
Here's the information you need.
Phone or text us at 0436
333 555 in Australia
or 020 422 2042 in New Zealand.
Or visit our website, www.tij.tv,
to request today's free offer
and we'll send it to you
totally free of charge
and with no obligation.
Write to us at PO Box 5101,
Dora Creek New South Wales, 2264 Australia
or PO Box 76673, Manukau,
Auckland 2241, New Zealand.
Don't delay.
Call or text us now.
If you've enjoyed today's journey
through the experiences of C.S. Lewis
and how he turned from
atheism to being a bringer
of true hope to millions, be
sure to join us again next week
when we will share another
of life's journeys together.
Until then, remember
the ultimate destination
of life's journey.
Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth
and God will wipe away
every tear from their eyes.
There shall be no more
death, no sorrow, no crying.
There shall be no more
pain for the former things
have passed away.
(calm music)
(questing music)
