[dramatic music]
>> It was 1943 when C.S.
Lewis wrote the lectures
that then later became
"The Abolition of Man."
If you haven't read "The Abolition of Man"
I highly recommend you do.
It's a very short book,
it's three short chapters
and it's not Lewis's most famous book
but it's fantastic and it's
very relevant to today.
It's a book about education.
And at the beginning of the book,
Lewis sets out this
understanding of the human person
that he gets from a
12th century theologian.
And I like medieval
philosophy and theology
so I love that he goes there.
He goes to a man named Alain of Lille
from the 12th century who said,
"The human person has three parts.
"There is the head, which is our reason.
"And the reason is
supposed to be in charge."
If you're a good human person,
you should have the reason in charge.
And then there's the belly
where we have appetites like hunger.
And those are good things,
God made us to be hungry.
It's not bad to have appetite
but you don't want your
appetites running your life.
Things get all messed up if
your appetites run your life.
So the reason is supposed to
be in charge of the appetites.
Reason can't actually pull this off.
If that's all you've
got, appetite and reason,
the appetites always win.
If I have some nice theory
about nutrition in my head
and I'm starving, I'm gonna
eat whatever's there, right?
Reason's not going to do it for me.
So, Alain of Lille says
we also need to have
the quality of the chest.
And that quality is sustained,
disciplined, ordered love of what's good.
It's a love for really
beautiful good things.
It's a desire to reach out and grab
what's good and beautiful.
And only if you have this sustained,
ordered, disciplined love and, so it's not
the kind of love that's an impulse.
That's the appetite, right?
That's the belly.
No, the appetite here,
or the love of the chest,
is something that's been
taught to you over years,
something you've cultivated, something
that's so disciplined, so habitual,
that it's now been internalized
and now it's at the core of who you are.
So, if you were to violate it,
you would violate your own nature.
Lewis says throughout history cultures
have always taught people certain
kinds of things like that.
Not just ideas, not just principles,
but things that they're supposed to love,
things they're supposed to value.
So lots of cultures
will hold up a, sort of,
ideal of what family life should be.
A picture of a beautiful family
in which children honor parents.
And that value of the
honoring of the parents
will be so beautiful and
so precious in that culture
and so internalized by people there
that the idea of being
disrespectful to your parents
will be unthinkable, even
when they're annoying.
Even when they do things you don't like,
you just can't even imagine that you
would say something disrespectful
to your mother or your father.
It would be like doing something
really distasteful or disgusting.
It's not who you are.
Now, Lewis is saying
this is very different
from just having an intellectual assent
to the idea that children
should honor their parents.
This is a love, this is a picture
of what life is supposed to be
that you embrace as good
and that you've taken to your heart.
I think that Jesus is a good example
of someone who loves the best things.
Jesus is, of course, the
preeminent example always
of what it means to be
a perfect human being.
So when Jesus loves good things,
he loves even better things
than just honoring parents.
He loves the ultimate good.
When we read about Jesus
in the New Testament
we see that everything Jesus does
is governed by one overriding love,
his love for the Father, his
desire to delight the Father.
And it is his delight, Jesus' delight,
to do the Father's will.
And because that's his delight,
everything else he does flows from that.
Now, the virtue of magnanimity
that everyone referred to,
is the virtue of having
a great soul, a big soul.
And you have a great soul if your chest
is oriented toward great goods.
You know, if you love really little goods,
if the goods that you
value and that you dream of
and that you aim for are
trivial, stupid things,
you are not a magnanimous person.
But if you are aiming at great things,
you're a magnanimous person.
And Jesus gives us the example
of aiming at the greatest thing,
which is to be a child of God,
to live as God's child.
Many of the things that
Jesus exemplifies for us
are not things that we can imitate.
You know, we're not all called
to go out and save the world.
But we are all given the opportunity
to be children of God, Jesus
gives us all that opportunity.
He says I give you access to my father
because now you're my
brothers and sisters.
And he gives us the
spirit who puts into us
the spirit of being children of God
so that we can call out to God
and call him Abba Father.
So this identity of being God's children
and delighting God with our behavior,
that's supposed to be right here
at the heart of our identity.
Now what does this have
to do with disagreeing?
Well, I think it has three
possible implications
for how we disagree with each other.
First of all, I think if we really live
this way as Christians, if we really had
at the heart of our being
this great, passionate desire
to please God in every
single thing we did,
to live as faithful children of God,
following in the footsteps
of our brother Jesus,
we would disagree a lot more
with the world around us.
There would be many, many, many
more lines of disagreement.
Now whether you think that's true or not
may depend a little bit
on where you're standing
in the great community of the church.
We don't all have the same
experience of the church.
My experience of the church
is a pretty assimilated place.
That there's not a whole
lot of disagreement
between most of the people in the pew
and the people outside.
We shop at the same stores,
we consume at the same levels,
we listen to the same kind of music,
we watch the same kind of television.
There's very little to set us apart
from the world around us.
Some of you, I know 'cuz I've heard that
from some people since I've been here,
think that maybe there's
too much that sets us apart.
We live in a Christian bubble,
we're not engaged enough with the world.
Well, that can be, that can be the case.
Sometimes we do isolate ourselves
just with other Christians.
But even when we're all
isolated with other Christians
we're still consuming and
we're still watching television
and we're still entertaining ourselves
in just the same way as people outside.
And the little things that separate us
tend to be fairly trivial.
Now, if really, really,
we let the love of God
come into us as the most
central defining feature
of our nature, don't you think that maybe
a few more things would be different?
Maybe our patterns of spending money
would be radically different
from the rest of the world.
Maybe the way we treat poor people
would be radically different
from the rest of the world.
Maybe the way we do politics
would be radically different
from the rest of the world.
Maybe we would stop thinking
that one or the other
of the existing political parties,
neither of which was founded by Jesus,
is, in fact, representing him.
[chuckles]
[crowd applauds]
And I think this falls on
both sides on that one.
If we really allow God to
take us over in this way,
there has to be serious,
systemic disagreement
with the world, on lots
and lots of things.
And one of the reasons
that we allow ourselves
to get all outraged about things
is because we are so assimilated
that we get surprised
when we run into something
in the world that's not just like us.
Now, I happen to be a Calvinist.
I know there aren't a
lot of us here at Biola
but Calvinist are known for
really believing in sin.
We believe there's a
lot of sin in the world.
There's a lot of sin in me,
there's a lot of sin in you.
I have no expectation of any virtue here.
And so I'm just not surprised
by the fact that the world is a mess.
I'm not surprised by the fact
that the world is not the
way Jesus wants me to live.
I'm not surprised that
what I'm called to be
is radically other than
the society around me.
So we should disagree a lot.
But, if I'm really living this life
where there's this strong, powerful love
in my core, at my heart, see,
one of the things that does,
this is the original point
of having that chest
full, is that the chest
gives the reason power
to control the appetites.
So that the appetites don't run the show.
Now, I know in my life, the
appetites often run the show.
Lots of different appetites run the show.
Not just appetite for food but for stuff
and for success and for affection
and for approval and all sorts of things
that I want, that I have
impulsive needs for.
But there's also an appetite
for anger, for resentment.
There's an appetite of fear,
that's an impulsive thing.
That need to be safe, to feel like there's
nothing threatening in the world.
And putting safety above everything else.
See, all of that is out of control in us
if our chests are empty.
And Lewis says that in the 20th century
most of us have empty chests
because we've started to think
we're not supposed to train people
to have a love at the
heart of their being.
We've started to think that love
is a subjective thing and
that we should let people
pick their own things to love.
We've started to believe
what Woody Allen said,
you know, when he ran off with
his girlfriend's daughter.
The heart wants what it wants.
We've started to think that we, we're not,
we're not entitled to say to children
you really ought to honor your parents.
And you oughta hold that
up as a beautiful value.
And well, you know, you
can teach them facts
but you can't teach them values
because everyone has to
find values for themselves.
If we believe that, if we
leave people with empty chests,
then the appetites take over.
And they take over in
our disagreements too.
But if we're people with love at our core,
then even in our disagreeing,
we don't disagree
from a place of fear, a
place of being threatened,
a place of being self-protective,
a place of hunger or animosity.
We disagree from a place of love,
from a core of love, a core
of being a child of God.
Think about how Jesus disagrees
with people in the Gospels.
I mean, just read through
one of the gospels, any one,
and see how often Jesus is at odds
with everyone else around him.
It's most of the time.
He is disagreeing all of the
time with everyone he sees.
But is he frightened?
Is he threatened, is he nasty or cruel?
Is he belittling people?
No, none of that.
Jesus is always disagreeing from a place
of absolute confidence
in his father's love.
So he's disagreeing from a
place where he can be generous,
where he can be loving
but always truthful.
When he talks to the rich young ruler,
he doesn't pull his punches, he says
you have to sell everything
and give it to the poor.
He doesn't allow his
own fear of disapproval
to make him say something more palatable,
but he says that with love.
And sometimes people walk away from Jesus,
but more often they're drawn to him.
So the way we disagree will be different
if our appetites, those
impulses, are under control
and love is the dominant
power in our lives.
Third thing, if we can actually start
to talk and think more
from here, from the chest,
then maybe our disagreements
can be chest to chest
more often instead of head to head.
So often when we disagree
with other people,
we turn it into some kind
of intellectual debate.
Oh, you're an atheist,
well let me tell you
five reasons why you ought
to believe in god, right?
And there are people
for whom that's helpful.
But not very many.
What if instead of
immediately jumping here
when we meet someone we disagree with,
what if instead we could
offer to that person
our picture of this beautiful
good thing that we love?
That has so captured our attention,
so captured our hearts,
that is has drawn us to it?
And now it is something we cannot give up,
something we cannot live without.
That's a very different
kind of conversation.
When I was a young pastor
many, many years ago,
there was a man who came to my church
who was trying to figure
out who Jesus was.
He had never been raised in the church,
he didn't know anything about the church.
But he had just met a few Christians
in the year or so before
he showed up with us.
And he was kind of intrigued.
There was something interesting about them
and he wasn't quite sure what it was.
And he showed up in our church
and started asking
questions and he asked me
to explain some things to him about Jesus.
Who is Jesus?
How is it that he's God,
I don't get that, he said.
So, like many, many pastors before me
I handed him "Mere Christianity"
and said read this and
come back and talk to me.
So he went out the door and after he left
I thought, "Oh no what have I done?"
"Mere Christianity" is great
at the beginning on Jesus
but it has a chapter later on sex.
I had not planned to talk to this guy
about sex for quite a long time
because he was a very promiscuous man.
He had children with several women,
he had no sense of sex being
something he had to control.
And I was not yet ready to break it to him
that if he became a Christian,
he was gonna have to change
this big part of his life.
I thought this might be a barrier.
And I didn't want to
lead with it, you know?
I wanted to save that for later.
So he came back and I said,
"Did you read the book?"
"Yeah, I read the whole thing."
"Did you like that part about Jesus?"
"That was nice.
Liked that chapter about
sex though, that was great."
"Why?" I said.
"I never knew it could
be so clean," he said.
See, Lewis, in this chapter on sexuality
that I had never thought
of as all that beautiful,
had somehow captured
this man's imagination.
He had held this up to him
as a different way of living.
He had said, "Look, this is
beautiful and good and true
"and you could be transformed
in this different way."
He'd spoken to his heart,
he'd spoken to the chest.
And this man said, "Wow,
I could have a clean life.
"I could have a different kind of life."
It's not like what he was
doing was working for him.
It's not like what he was doing
was leading him to happiness.
And giving him an alternative picture,
something beautiful, was very compelling.
It was a chest to chest conversation.
Since then, I've been less afraid
to talk to people about the
moral challenges of the gospel,
the moral change that might
come to you through the gospel.
Because actually that's what people want,
that's what people need, that's
what people are longing for.
To be made clean, to have something
to fill this gaping void in their chests.
To have something that they can love,
that they can bring into their heart
that will give their life
structure and meaning.
Something that's big
enough and worthy enough
to be worthy of a human person.
Something that can make a
human person fully human.
And Jesus can do that for us.
[dramatic music]
