Exposing The Darkness Series

Therefore it says,

“Awake, O sleeper,

and arise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.”

We were, as Ephesians 2:1-2 explain, dead in the sins and trespasses in which we once walked. We were asleep. But God woke us up. As verse 5 of that chapter goes on to explain, God made us alive together with Christ. And so he brought us into the light of Christ.

Let me give an example from the experience of C. S. Lewis. Lewis summarizes his moment of conversion in matter of fact terms. “When we set out (on a trip to the zoo) I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” I assure you that if he were joining Tenth, the elders would have prodded him a bit more on his testimony! Lewis actually did write a book – Surprised by Joy – about his journey to conversion, and presents, as you would expect, the arguments that eventually led him to faith. But arguments did not form the whole picture. Rather it was observing the lives of certain Christians that began to awaken him, so to speak. He writes of the turning point for him in the chapter “Checkmate.”

His name was Nevill Coghill. I soon had the shock of discovering that he – clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class – was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist. There were other traits that I liked but found (for I was still very much a modern) oddly archaic; chivalry, honor, courtesy, “freedom,” and “gentilesse.” One could imagine him fighting a duel. He spoke much “ribaldry” but never “villeinye.” Barfield was beginning to overthrow my chronological snobbery; Coghill gave it another blow. had something really dropped out of our lives? Was the archaic simply the civilized, and the modern simply the barbaric? …

These disturbing factors in Coghill ranged themselves with a wider disturbance which was now threatening my whole earlier outlook. All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader.

Lewis then goes on to list his favorite authors, all of whom were either Christian or religious.

Can you trace what was happening to him? Lewis had been an avowed atheist, holding with conviction that whatever was the most modern in viewpoint was the right way in thinking. What began to shake him was to form friendships with others as bright as he, yet who thought and, more importantly, walked a different path. Using the terms of our Scripture, they walked as children of light. Their light exposed his darkness. He began to see the darkness of his way of thinking. But not only was he beginning to see the darkness of his life, he also began to see how the Spirit had been working in him (though he did not understand it at the time). Go back to the phrase, “I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen.” Not to have seen what? That he was already being drawn to the light by the books he had been reading. He will now revisit what those books have to say, but it only happens because of observing Christians being light. Eventually, Lewis would experience the description of verse 8: “at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”