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THIS TOO SHALL PASS
"Walking on Water" Sermonspice video about Bethany Hamilton (Soul Surfer), also quote from Pastor TL Lewis Bethel Baptist Missionary Church, Pratt City Alabama who quoted the following after his church was destroyed from Tornado:
"I can't tell you that I don't hurt over this, I hurt every day. But I got too much evidence to not have confidence to know that this too shall pass."
There is no fear of God before their eyes."
Romans 3:10-18 (NIV)
“Don’t you fear God?” is a great question. It’s a question that I don’t think we hear much anymore. And if we’re not careful, the next generation will miss entirely this all important characteristic of God.
That’s why I’m glad Disney and Walden Media is releasing C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, Witch and The Wardrobe” this December. If you don’t know anything about this, let me encourage you to pick up the book and make plans to see this movie. In this story, Lewis chose a Lion to represent Jesus. At times the children in the story felt comfortable to run their fingers through his mane, take rides on his back and enjoy being in his presence. But his roar was ferocious enough to introduce an element of fear. It prompted 1 of the children to ask, “Is Aslan safe?” The thoughtful answer was, “No, He’s not safe, but He is good.”
God is a God of love and justice; grace and wrath, and sometimes I think we need to hear Him roar to remind us of His holiness.
In the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye, a man devoted to tradition, finds his thinking challenged when his oldest daughter wants to marry for love, instead of having her marriage arranged by her parents. It had never occurred to him that one would marry for love, and one night he cannot help but ask his own wife the question (in song, of course!): “Do You Love Me?”
T: Golde, do you love me?
G: Do I what?
T: Do you love me?
G: You’re a fool!
T: I know! But do you love me?
G: Do I love him? For twenty five years I’ve cooked for him, cleaned for him, starved with him. Twenty five years my bed is his. If that’s not love - what is?
There are times when going through the motions just doesn’t cut it. There are even times when a commitment to “going through the motions” can cause us to miss what’s most important. For 25 years, Tevye and Golde had been going through the motions of a loving marriage, without ever thinking about whether they loved one another or not.
Shadowlands -- a Broadway play, later made into a motion picture -- tells the story of C. S. Lewis and his wife, Joy . . .of their intense love for one another . . .and of the shadow that was cast across their life. Shadowlands portrays their struggle with Joy’s cancer. After Joy’s death, Lewis wrote these words: It is incredible how much happiness, how much joy we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.”
The comfort that is at the heart of those words is also at the heart of Advent. The answers to the paradoxes of living by dying, finding peace o...
Alan Stokes
The movie Shadowlands is about C.S. Lewis’ relationship with his wife Joy. In the movie, Lewis’ colleague’s praise him and affirm that C.S. Lewis’ faithful prayers were getting God to help his wife. In response C.S. Lewis says that when he prays because he can’t help himself not to get any gain from God. He closes the dialogue by saying under his breath, "It doesn’t change God, it changes me."
C.S. Lewis is portrayed in the movie Shadowlands as a man struggling with doubts about God. Shadowlands is about his life and reveals the awful ordeal he had to go through with his wife dying of cancer: I discovered these thoughts on the internet about this movie:
1. Jack’s grief was intense. His "faith--so ardently championed in his books--was shaken to its very foundation." 7 Attenborough’s film visually captures this dark period of doubt and bitterness. The suspense builds as the viewer wonders if Lewis can continue to regard death as a simple river-crossing on a bridge built by the great Bridge Builder. Shortly after Joy’s death, Jack attends a social gathering. Everyone turns as Jack enters the room, quietly whispering, one by one, "so sorry, Jack," "so very sorry." Harry Harrington (Michael Denison) reminds him that "we see so little here." Faith, he points out, is all that sustains one. "Only God," he says, "knows why these things happen." Jack turns on him with a vengeance, angrily shouting: "We’re the creatures in the cosmic laboratory. I have no doubt the experience is for our own good, but it still makes God the villainous vivisectionist!" The film lays out the harsh reality of death.
a. Moments like this usually bring on the wave of doubt into our lives.
2. Lewis’s "Grief Observed," claims Ralph C. Wood, is "darker than anything in Kafka or Sartre." 10 Lewis accuses God of being a Cosmic Sadist, an evil tyrant. Lewis later described the book as one "which ends in faith but raises all the blackest doubts en route." 11 In the film, a drained Lewis, sitting behind his desk, voices his Grief Observed thesis. He turns to his brother and admits: "I’m so terribly afraid. Of never seeing her again. Of thinking that suffering is just suffering after all. No cause. No purpose. No pattern. No sense. Just pain, in a world of pain."
You see Lucy knows what she has seen and experienced is real. Her brothers and sisters couldn’t see it with their own eyes yet, and even though they knew Lucy had never been one to make up stories or lie, they could not on faith accept what she 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 it 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).
Even if you never saw the movie “A Few Good Men,” you’re probably familiar with one scene.
Tom Cruise plays a military lawyer and is interrogating tough-guy Jack Nicholson.
Cruise is getting nowhere and finally yells, “I WANT THE TRUTH!”
And Jack Nicholson shouts back. “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"
Truth is difficult stuff. Sometimes it’s hard to handle.
"The trut...
There’s a movie called “Shadowlands” about the life of C.S. Lewis. At one point, Lewis is told by a friend, "I know how hard you’ve been praying .... Now, God is answering your prayer."
"That’s not why I pray, Harry," Lewis says. "I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God; it changes me."
HARDLY SAFE: THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
If you have ever been through a tornado. ... One personal encounter with a power that before was only theoretical can make all the difference. You live differently after that. You respect the power. You live in awe of its presence and tremble to think of its potential. Above all, you live in profound humility because you recognize your inability to control it.
If all this for tornadoes, then what of the Almighty God? I am reminded of the quote from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Mr. Beaver describes the might and majesty of Aslan, the lion-God. When he finishes, Lucy asks, "Is--is he safe?" Replies Mr. Beaver: "Safe? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King I tell you." This is our God: hardly safe but thoroughly good. We cling to the King in fear, but much too afraid to let go.
(Don Ratzlaff in The Christian Leader (April 23,1991). Christianity Today, Vol. 35, no. 10)
