I remember in my late twenties, I had moved several times, and I was going back to what had been home to me during my high school years. I was going to be staying with some old friends, you know the ones, the ones that know all your stories, that know the “real” you, the ones that know all those secrets that as kid you’d do anything to keep secret, and as an adult you wish would have just never happened at all.
They were the ones that were there when you snuck out of the house, the ones that knew exactly what happened to the neighbor’s cat all the time, or the ones that you crashed your first party with. These friends were part of some crashing, that over time, became a lot more damaging to me and to them. We shared some very dark times together, and sadly, these times and their darkness were of our own making. Satan had an open season on parts of our lives. In the end, they were friends that had seen my spiral downward begin, while their worlds were collapsing around them too.
The difference between us even then was that I knew God, intimately and personally. He was real to me. I had chosen to rebel against everything I knew in my heart to be true. But these friends of mine did not know God, not that I hadn’t, in better days tried to tell them about Him. I can at least remember invitng them to youth group a few times. But none of that mattered now. They watched as I proudly turned my back on Him, denouncing even His ability to help me as I continued to try and walk further and further away from Him.
But years had passed since those days. Things had changed. I was the CEO of my own company. And doing well financially. So I was going back home, and back to see them, and I figured we were all at least a little more grown up. So how bad could things be?
I had left the lifestyle that was destroying me, and I assumed that they had too; and of course we still shared one thing in common, and it was the reason for us getting back together in the first place. We were all Padres fans, diehard Padres fans. For those of you that don’t follow baseball take some pity on us. It means that we suffered a lot, following a losing team year after year, going to game after game in the cheap seats and loving your team no matter how bad they kept getting beat down. But, heck, that year the Padres were in a pennant race and even had a chance to make it all the way to the World Series.
The trip was especially exciting for me to look forward to, because I was going to get to see a double header (that’s two games in a row for you non baseball fans), and they were games that would possibly determine if the Padres were going to be the champs of their division. Now all I had to do when I got there was relax, have fun and be myself. By that I mean, I knew I had to tell them about the fact that my life was not the same anymore. That I had powerfully reconnected with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and that nothing in the world was more important to me. That I was a part time youth minister. And I know you’re thinking…hey you’re a preacher, that’s easy for you. It’s what you do. You know, telling people about Jesus and all that. That’s your job. Well, no friends, it’s not always easy. Not for any of us. Especially when it comes to the truth and telling it to those closest to you. To tell all of you the truth, I was terrified they wouldn’t believe me. That they would think I was crazy. And treat me weird. I was also afraid I might give in and just say nothing about Jesus at all. And all the time I was preparing to go on this trip I just kept praying that God would give me the right words to say.
On the flight from San Antonio to San Diego, I was rereading for the umpteenth time C.S. Lewis’ "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe." I don’t know why in particular. But as I was reading it, a simple soft truth came tumbling out. I love it when God does that. There is something about traveling and books, and time with God. Something that, in my life anyway, has made for some great moments of simple revealed truth. Maybe its just being somewhere different that does it.
I don’t know if you all are familiar with C.S. Lewis’ "The Chronicles of Narnia," or know the story of, "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe," or not. But if you don’t, let me encourage you now, right after service GO GET THE BOOKS, "The Chronicles of Narnia," and read them. If you’ve read them before, reread them. There is something special on every page. And friends, there is something powerful coming, as Hollywood gears up to bring these books to movie screens all over the globe. They offer a powerful opportunity for us to share the basics of our Christian faith. But for those who haven’t read them, let me set the first story up for you.
Four young kids, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, a family of two brothers and sisters, have been sent off, by their parents to live outside of London during WWII to avoid the air raids. They come to live in this fantastic and magical large mansion with many rooms inhabited by a mysterious old professor and a cranky old lady who is the professor’s housekeeper. As all smart children will do, on a rainy day they decide to explore the old mansion together. In one of the rooms, void of almost everything, Lucy, the youngest and purest of heart of the four children, discovers a beautiful old wardrobe. And as the other children move on, she is drawn to the wardrobe, opens it and wanders inside. Once inside, she discovers that the wardrobe seems to have no back to it, and that it goes on forever. She has found a portal to a magically new, different and astonishing world. It is the world of a land called Narnia. It is a world where an evil witch has kept things perpetually in winter with no Christmas, no hope, for hundreds of years. A world of talking animals and fawns, dwarfs and things beyond the imagination; whose beauty has been robbed and whose joy has been stolen by the perpetual winter of the evil witch.
When Lucy is greeted by Tumnus the fawn, she is asked if she is a “daughter of Eve," and is told of a promise that might break the witch’s evil spell; if two sons of Adam and two daughters Eve were to reign in Narnia in a mighty castle, the evil of the White Witch would end.
Eventually, Lucy makes her way back through the wardrobe, and into the mansion, back home in her world after her first journey. And magic being what it is, although she has been in Narnia many hours, she has only been gone a few moments from the professor’s mansion. Her brothers and sisters mock her and tease her cruelly about her story. They call her “batty” and “Poor old Lu;” their disbelief in Lucy is almost more than she can bear, and Lucy is crushed.
You see, Lucy knows what she has seen and experienced is real. Her brothers and sisters hadn’t seen it with their own eyes yet. Even though they knew that Lucy had never been one to make up stories or lie, they could not, on faith, accept what she had said. But she knew it was real. C.S. Lewis puts it this way:
“For the next few days she was miserable. She could have made up with the others at any moment if she could have brought herself to say that the whole thing was only a story made up for fun. But Lucy was a very truthful girl and she knew she was really in the right; and she could not bring herself to say this. The others who thought she was telling a lie, and a silly lie too, made her very unhappy… What made it worse was that these days ought to have been delightful”(LWW –CH: 3).
Jesus knew that faith was not going to be easy for any of us. Not easy to understand, not easy to hold onto and not easy to keep. But that it was the key to the Christian life. In the book of Hebrews, we are told to hold, “unswervingly to the hope we profess for He who promises is faithful”(Heb 10:23). Lucy held on tight for the ride, even though at first it brought no joy to her because of the torment of her brothers and sisters. She held on with white knuckles, without swerving, because she knew what was true. When her brothers and sisters first explored the wardrobe and found it “normal” before their eyes, they chastised Lucy. But Lucy’s faith was not diminished.
In Hebrew’s we are also reminded that, “ Through faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was never created out of things that are visible” (Heb 11:3). Lucy, without ever saying it, seems to know this profound truth. I think every child that first hears of the truth of creation, of how God spoke light into existence, and how He made us with His very own hands and breathed life into us, understands it much better than we adults do, as we grow older. For obvious reasons; what seems so simple to us at first grows dim, it becomes irrational, and eventually, some things just seems as though they cannot possibly be true at all after we have become so much smarter. This glitch in thinking is not something that hinders a child’s mind.
Jesus admonished His own disciples, after they were unable to heal a man, by telling them, “You have so little faith. If you were having faith even the size of tiny mustard seed, you would say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it would move!” (Matt 16:20).
But our faith is so easily abandoned. Why is that? For those of you that know the hope of eternal life, you that know when the sun arose this morning, God gave you this day, and everything in it. And He has already overcome it for you. Why do you struggle with faith? Why do we quit on it and rely on things we are sure are more “practical” – things of our own making, but that always turn out to be the very things continually fail us? Why is this?
The good news is Jesus knew we would have this problem and he offered us a simple solution in a powerful illustration. We need to remember to be like Lucy, to have the heart of a child. A heart that is tender, and truthful and trusting. We need a heart that is constantly saying yes to the will of God, and no to our own. Jesus knew this and when He overheard the disciples grumbling about who among them was going to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, He told them, to quiet down. “He called a child to Himself, and set this child before them and He said, ’This is the truth, unless you turn to God and away from your sins, and become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whichever one of you is as humble as this little child is the greatest in heaven" (Matt 18:2-4).
When I got to San Diego, I gathered my courage and I told my friends about Jesus. At first it was dreadful. I knew how Lucy felt. They laughed it off and tried to ignore it. They had some beers, I didn’t. We went to the ballgame anyway, and we had a good time. The Padres won both games and clinched their division as champions (they even went on to the World Series that year – only to lose as they had the only time they went before). But that night, as my friends and I were getting ready to fall asleep one of them asked me, “Come on Chuck, I know you, you don’t really believe in a living, true, like for real God do you?” I said, calmly, “Yes, yes I do. I have no other conclusions for what has happened in my life and no other explanations for all of the greatness of creation. I have no other explanation for the depth of our friendship either. And I hope, in fact, I pray that some day you’ll believe too. If you ever want to know more about why I believe what I believe just ask me.” My friend never did ask me any more questions. But somewhere a seed was planted, and he wrote me not long ago and told me he was happily married, and regularly attending church and knows Jesus Christ as His personal savior. His story has a fairly happy ending. And with the hope of Christ, it is guaranteed an even happier one. Lucy’s story turns out pretty well in the Chronicles of Narnia also. She is the one that Aslan, the mighty Lion, the character of God and Christ in stories, uses and calls upon most tenderly, and most fondly as a reward for her faithfulness.
But friends, the good news is we don’t need a magic wardrobe to enter into the world afresh and anew. We don’t have to pass through a special door to have our lives utterly changed by the mighty Lion as Lucy did. That Lion, as He is referred to in Scripture as well(Rev 5:5), is also a tender Lamb. He willingly took upon Himself everything this world had ever done (and will ever do)wrong; every sin that you and I will ever commit. He took these upon Himself willingly, and He died a horrible death upon the cross to pay for those sins.
But really, the reason you’re here today is no coincidence. God doesn’t work by accident. You’re here because Christ wants you to know that changing your life forever IS AS SIMPLE AS OPENING A DOOR. He is standing at the door of your heart right now and knocking, asking you to let Him in. The Mighty Lion, as gentle as a Lamb, the one who made you, the one who looked down from heaven and knew that He would rather come down to earth and die and rise again than live in heaven alone without you, is right here, right now calling on you.
If you haven’t let Him in, if you’ve been like Lucy’s brothers and sisters, and tried to see with your own eyes what only God can show you, then I encourage you; stop trying to do things by yourself, close your eyes, be still and listen,… it is Him you hear knocking at your heart’s door, even now. Open the door to your heart and let Jesus come in. If you’ve never prayed to do this, now is the time. Why wait any longer? Have the faith of child, open the door, and pray with me right now: "Jesus, I’ve needed you, and you alone, all my life. I have tried, and I have failed, I have fallen and stumbled, and hurt myself, and others and You by my actions. I am tired of trying to do things on my own. I am opening the door to my heart right now to You Jesus, come and fill me up. Be my Lord, lead me and guide me. Make me Your child again until I rest in your arms in heaven. Amen."
