Prayer for Our Nation

By Rev. Lonnie C. Crowe

As we move on toward the midterm elections and in light of the chaos in our nation and in the world, several major prayer ministries our calling for us to intercede, to stand in the gap for our nation. Remembering that righteousness exalts a nation (Proverbs 14:34), please join together as we declare the word of the Lord over those in authority over us.

We declare that our governmental leaders will love God and obey His directives for a good life because happy is the one who keeps the law of the Lord. (Proverbs 29:18)

Then our land will be blessed because our leaders will noble and not given to partying and drunkenness. (Ecclesiastes 10:17)

Our authorities will judge with truth. (Proverbs 29:14)

Our leaders will make right decisions because true authority is established in righteousness . (Proverbs 16:12b)

Our politicians will walk in the truth because “the king establishes the land by justice, But he who receives bribes overthrows it.” (Proverbs 29:4 (NKJV).

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice. (Proverbs 29:2 (NKJV) .

Intercede, pray, declare and then vote for truth and righteousness.

Heaven and Hell

Notes on Hillsdale Online Course on C. S. Lewis part 6

Lecturer Michael Ward

By Rev. Lonnie C. Crowe

Dualism is the belief that there are 2 equal and independent powers in conflict.  One is good and one is bad.

Good is choosing what is good in spite of personal references.

To say that one side is good brings in the standard.

Therefore, good is the one closest to the standard.

Good and evil are not equal and opposite.  Neither are heaven and hell.

The devil is not the opposite of God because the devil is a created being.

Michael is the opposite of Satan.

To be in hell is to be banished from humaness.

"We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life; but hell was not made for men." It is for ex-men.

"If the happiness of a creature lies in self- surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself and he may refuse.  I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully 'All will be saved." But my reason retorts 'Without their will, or with it?'...How can the act of self-surrender be involuntary?"

"The doors of hell are locked on the inside." Those in heaven become more like themselves, yet more united in love and worship.

"If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.  Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different; a society, because each has something to tell all the others."

Union with God is a continual self-abandonment, a continual surrender of self.

Hell, in "The Screwtape Letters", is a government department.  Screwtape is a demon, a serious minded, pompous bureaucrat. 

In "The Great Divorce", hell is a sprawling gray suburb, with shabby shops and greasy, little streets. 

There must be a complete divorce from all evil.

"Our life as Christians begins by being baptized unto death."

"Our most joyous festivals begin with, and center upon, the broken body and the shed blood.  There is thus a tragic depth in our worship which Judaism lacked.  Our joy has to be the sort of joy which can coexist with that."  

"There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself...as if the Good Lord had nothing to do but exist!  "There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ."

Getting to heaven is both harrowing and hallowing.  The process involves both sacrifice and rebirth.

 Pain and Suffering

Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course on C. S. Lewis part 5

Lecturer Michael Ward

By Rev. Lonnie C. Crowe

How can pain exist in a world created by a supposedly good and all-powerful God?

Pain is a tool in God's hand.  Pain insists on being attended to.  God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.  It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

We need this because we are under the illusion that all is well.  That we are the captains of our own souls. 

God loves us so much that He is willing to challenge us and our halfhearted understanding of what love is in a relationship with Him.  God loves man, not in some disinterested, indifferent, concern for our welfare, but in the truth that we are the objects of His love.  You asked for a loving God; you have one, the consuming fire Himself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work, as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.

The process of our realization is often a painful one.

George McDonald:  "The son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His."

3 Lessons:

Pain shows bad men where they are wrong.

Pain reveals our need for God.

Pain demonstrates when people choose the good for its own sake.

We must understand the agony of the Cross; the agony of being forsaken, before we can fully embrace joy of the Resurrection.  The miracle of the Resurrection is that is shows that God's forsakenness can be redeemable, can be reinterpreted.

Fortitude and patience come in when reason and argument exhaust themselves.

We cannot carry the burdens and pain of another.  Jesus can and did. When we realize this, we can share in the Cross and then the Resurrection.  We must go down to go up.

 Prayer and the Bible

Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course about C.S. Lewis part 4

Rev. Lonnie C. Crowe

Lecturer Michael Ward

In "Letters to Malcom"

Lewis wrote that the mistake he made  in praying was that he contemplated rather than enjoyed his time in prayer.  This burden later led him to abandon Christianity.

In "Spirits of Bondage", written during the time Lewis doubted the existence of God, he felt that if  God did exist, He was outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.

When Lewis became a theist, he saw God as a universal spirit--not the Christian God.

In a poem written after he became a Christian, he wrote, "This year, this year, as all the flowers foretell, We shall  escape the circle and undo the spell."

Lewis expressed that "A Christian is an articulation of God's word."

"We must, no doubt, distinguish this ontological continuity between Creator and creature which is, so to speak, 'given' by the relation between them, from the union of wills which, under Grace, is reached by a life of sanctity."

Some of Lewis' thoughts about the Bible: 

(Lewis was not a Biblical theologian).  

1.  The divine writers refer to Jesus as the Word of God. 

"It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God.  The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.

2.  Distinguish the different genres of the Bible.

Knowing the type of literature we are reading is necessary in their interpretation.

Reading the Bible centered on Jesus as the key is a must. "We are committed to it in principle by Our Lord himself. To the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus explained the O.T. scriptures pertaining to Himself."

 Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course part 3

C.S. Lewis on Christianity  

By Reverend Lonnie C. Crowe

I have recently finished an online study from Hillsdale College entitled “C.C. Lewis on Christianity.  The lecturer was Michael Ward, a fellow at Oxford in England as well as Hillsdale.  The course stretched both my mind and my soul and, therefore, my spirit.  I am delighted to share some of my notes from the course. Remember these are my notes.  They are what captured my thoughts.  They are not an outline of the course. 

 

 Notes on Hillsdale College Online Course 

C.S. Lewis on Christianity 

Lecturer Michael Ward 

"Enjoyment vs. contemplation"

"Surprised by Joy"--Lewis' spiritual journey to becoming a Christian--presents

an indispensable tool of thought:

Instead of a twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a threefold division:  the unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.

 The experience of being a Christian is to be enjoyed more than contemplated.

In the Christian life you are not usually looking at Him.  He is aways acting through you.  If you think of the Father as out there, in front of you, and the Son as someone standing at your side, then you have to think of the Holy Spirit as something inside you. God is love and that love works through men.  

But the spirit of love is a love going on between the Father and the Son.

The Holy Spirit is the life of the Christian's consciousness. knowing the Holy Spirit is more important than knowing about either the Holy Spirit or about ourselves.

Joy, when we experience it, we want to experience it again.  It is an unsatisfied desire, which is the greatest joy. 

In our walk with the Lord, we can often be surprised by joy in Him.