Ep. 24 | Mere Christianity | Part 3 | Time to Come Home

“Enemy occupied territory - that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed…landed in disguise…But why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.” We live in an Age of Invitation. God didn’t send a sword, he sent a Savior. The Star of Bethlehem was not a Death Star…it was a light in the window inviting us to come home. Now is the opportunity for all of us to freely make our own decision - to “choose sides.”
Three Factors Influential in Lewis’ Conversion:
Good Dreams - “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Tugs of Sympathy - Lewis was surrounded by close friends who were believers in Christ. His conversion was as much
A True Myth - “The story of Christ is simply a true myth; a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he’s a poached egg - or else he’d be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let’s not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He’s not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

"And now what was the purpose of it all? What did He come to do? Well, to teach, of course; but as soon as you look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing you will find they are constantly talking about something different - about his death and his coming to life again. It is obvious that Christians think the chief point of the story lies here. They think the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed…The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.”

"In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us…even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam - he is only nourishing or protecting life he could never have acquired by his own efforts…the Christ-life is inside him…actually operating through him. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution - a biological or super-biological fact.”

“One day we are destined to be creatures so radiant with God’s glory, love, wisdom, joy and power, that if we were to see ourselves now as we will be then, we would be tempted to worship.” “A Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.” God loves us just the way we are, but He loves us too much to leave us the way we a