1. Always Winter And Never Christmas” Series

“Discovering Nania – 1. Always Winter and Never Christmas”

Gladstone Baptist Church – 29/1/06 pm

On 26th of December, the classic book “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” was released into the cinema’s as a movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is worth a look.

C.S. Lewis was an amazing man. Some would call him one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. He published over forty books while he was alive and twenty more were published after his death.

He was a quiet professor at Oxford University, in England. During World War II, the British Broadcasting Company asked him to do a series of lectures on the radio about what Christianity was all about. These were a hit and he became the second most famous person in all of England, second only to Winston Churchill. The lectures were later published in a book that is titled, “Mere Christianity.”

Lewis was born in Northern Ireland. His mother died when he was seven years old. His father sent him to boarding school in England the next year. He served in the British Army during World War I, where he was wounded three times in battle. And then at the age of 19, he took the entrance exams for Oxford and there excelled.

Until he was 30 years old, Lewis was an avowed atheist. In a letter written to a friend in October 1916, he said, “I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention.” Interestingly, Lewis did not believe there was a God, but he said that he resented God for not existing.

But a change began to take place in Lewis while working as a professor at Oxford. Lewis became friends with two other professors, who happened to be real Christians. One was Hugh Dyson, the other was J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. As Lewis got to know these two, he became persuaded that their faith was real. And in the summer of 1929, he became convinced that Jesus really was an historic figure who really did die on the cross as a substitute for the sins of the world. So Lewis bowed his head and invited Christ into his life.

In one of his books, Lewis said he came into Christianity “kicking and screaming.” He said “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 228-229).

C.S. Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe out of his personal experience of what it meant to have someone die in his place. His encounter with Jesus Christ not only changed his life, it changed his eternity. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the story of C.S. Lewis. But more than that, what makes the story so good is the fact that it is your story and my story.

Over the next 4 weeks, I want to dig a little bit into this story to discover the real life story behind the fantasy of the screen. I hope that you will join us as we go on this voyage of discovery that could be as life changing for you as it was for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy and for C.S. Lewis.

Tonight, I want you to imagine what it would be like to live in the northern hemisphere where it snowed in winter. I want you to imagine that it is the middle of winter and there is snow everywhere.

I have a friend – Leah Grant - who some of you might know who is over in England and sent an email to me not so long ago explaining what living in this environment was like … She writes … “I would like to begin by sharing with you a cold winter’s morning expedition I had recently.

• first, get ready for work - put on huge knee length padded coat with fur lined hood, and gloves,

• pick up work bag and rubbish bag and head for the car.

• get outside, try to open wheelie bin but can’t, because it is frozen shut.

• take off gloves, find keys, get back inside, deposit rubbish inside