#138 | Life, C.S. Lewis, and Stories of Sharing the Gospel, Pt. 2 | Jerry Root

God's at work and we're just his ambassadors. We're working for the King. And consequently you feel the prompt to share Jesus with somebody and it doesn't go well.

You don't know the end of that story.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our.

Deep conversations.

Does the word evangelism scare you? It scares a lot of people.

Even though we know that we ought to be doing it, there's something about it, or at least the way we think of it, that brings to mind used car salesmen. But it doesn't have to be that way. I will admit I'm not the best evangelist in the world. I'm not. I hear the word evangelism and I tense up.

I understand the meaning of it, and when I think of it being good news and making disciples, I'm fine.

But the word evangelism itself conjures up images of used car salesmen pressing me to sign on the dotted line before I have been given the opportunity to. To think it through. That's part of the reason why I wanted to talk with Jerry.

He's amazing at it, but it's not because he has the best sales pitch or he's the greatest salesman. It's because he loves Jesus and he genuinely cares about people. He really does have a knack for getting to the heart of people's concerns.

It's amazing. If you haven't listened to part one of this conversation, I'm going to recommend that you stop this and go back and listen to that one right now.

Because in part one, we talked about Jerry's story and how C.S. lewis opened up the world of faith to him in an incredible way. We started to talk also about evangelism.

And today we start by bringing Lewis and evangelism together. Some have even said that, you know, that's what Lewis really was, an evangelist. But it doesn't stop there.

We talk about prayer and how God loves specific people, about bread is good and bread mold is bad. But that very thing gives us penicillin and about how, just like humans can use bad to create medicine, God can and does do the same thing.

We get to sin and politics, being decent to one another.

It's really a wide ranging conversation that reinforces to me just how integrated our lives really are, how we need to be living as Christ in all of life, not just the Sunday part. And when we do, well, God has some pretty amazing things in store.

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You'll be glad to know that you've made a difference in the lives of others, enabling thirsty souls to have their spiritual thirst satisfied. Now let's get to Jerry Root. Happy listening. How did Lewis understand evangelism?

He says that God does things the course publicity of human endeavor and acts things about which we must talk about. He says this in the introduction to the Socratic Club at Oxford. The first meeting Socratic Club was set up where non Christians would read a paper.

One week a non Christian would read a paper and the Christians would respond. Next week a Christian would read a paper and the non Christians would respond.

It was just this ongoing debate and many people came and read papers there. Some of the leading academics in the English speaking world at that time would come. But Lewis said these are things we must talk about. God did this.

God did this in our world and it's something that we should not be quiet about. And Lewis himself in his own life engaged in these sorts of Things. I don't think he considered his gift as a gift of evangelism.

But I think that it doesn't make any difference what your gift is. We don't get a pass on evangelism any more than we get a pass on giving, even if we don't have the gift of making.

You know, all the areas of giftedness in the scriptures we're all called to function in. Some people have a special aptitude for a particular one.

But Lewis had had a serious relationship with Christ, and he wanted people to know about him. So how does he do it? He engages in the Socratic Club at Oxford University. His letter writing, he was clearly evangelistic.

In many of his letters, he's writing to non Christians. You had the BBC broadcast that became mere Christianity, where he's publicly doing these things.

World War II, he was out ministering to the RAF airmen who were dying by droves. But he felt an obligation to come and share the gospel with them before they died. He would talk with some of his students.

He would talk in ministries in various ways. He would preach at churches. He was out there doing these things and sometimes took flack for it among his academic community, too.

But he felt that these.

The need to share about the love of Christ transcended anything that was for him a career interest, whereby he would take his career interest and say, forget the gospel. I've got my career to run. That's pretty courageous, I think, on his part.

I think so, too.

And I think he learned in the process, too.

How many books did Lewis write?

Well, he wrote 73 books. He wrote 50, 56 of them in his lifetime. And the others he wrote after he died.

Walter Hooper, who had been his literary executor, took essays that had common themes and put them under common cover. A lot of these were put together after he died. Also, he was a. A tremendous letter writer. I used to own a letter where he said, I answer all my mail.

And he would even write to his regular correspondence, and he would say, please don't write me around Christmas. I get so many letters. He might get a thousand letters. He'd answer every one.

And consequently, as a result of that, people kept his letters because the content was so good. And his brother kept a file of all the people Lewis corresponded to with their name, their address and the date when he wrote him a letter.

And Warren Lewis gave that file to Clyde Kilby, who started the Wade center at Wheaton College, which is the largest collection of C.S. lewis material in the world. So Kilby had the file with the names and addresses and all the letters.

And he went and asked those people, would you be willing to give your letters to a research center on CS Lewis? Many of them did, some of them, he said, if not, would you let us copy them so that they would be preserved for humanity, for Literary Studies?

And many of them did. Some of them, he said, would you leave them after you die?

Many of them did, some of them, he'd say, well, would you allow me to find a businessman who would be willing to pay you for them so we could put them in the Wade Center? And many of them did. So there's eight volumes of letters that Lewis wrote. The Cadillac, of course, was the three, edited by Walter Hooper.

But you've got others as well. There's letters to Children, Letters to An American Lady. There's letters to Arthur Greaves.

Some of these are contained also in the Hooper Edited collection. But nevertheless, so 73 books. Every once in a while you'll see something else that's published, usually in the Journal 7.

If somebody's a real big Lewis fan, they should probably subscribe to that journal 7 out of Wheaton College. And then there's another one called Same Sook Comes out of Arizona. Bruce Johnson is the editor of that, and these are.

Sometimes they'll publish something new that just came out about Lewis, something that he wrote.

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He wrote across genres, but a lot of people don't know necessarily a lot about his prayer life. He did write about prayer, of course. I found some.

A book written some time ago, I don't remember how many years now at the top of my head, but that talked about his prayer life. What was his prayer life like?

Well, you've got Letters to Malcolm chiefly on prayer, right? And it's basically his sequel to Screwtape Letters.

So Screw Tape Letters is one half of a correspondence between one demon and another demon talking about how to tempt somebody.

When he wrote that book, he said in the preface to the second edition, his goal was to write a second book, one angel writing to another angel on how to elevate and encourage somebody, nudge them towards sanctification. Lewis said, who could ever write the second book? We're all closer to the diabolical than we are to the divine.

So in a less pretentious way, one of the last two books he wrote before he died is his Letters to Malcolm chiefly on prayer. And it's one side of a correspondence, fiction correspondence of a friend writing to another friend on how to encourage him in the Christian faith.

It's not angelic, it's human. So that's a significant book. And he writes a lot about prayer there. He writes about prayer, too, in Reflections on the Psalms, a book that he.

He does. It's the only thing close to commentary by C.S. lewis. But the Psalms, many of them are prayers. They're poems and they're prayers.

But he's got other essays, too. The Problem of Petitionary Prayer. He's got a bunch of essays on this as well. And there probably are books out about Lewis's prayer life.

There's certainly books about his devotional life, and there's one by Lyle Dorsett, Seeking God in the Secret Place. And it's about Lewis's prayer life as well, Miles, a very reliable C.S. lewis scholar. So those are different places where he could go.

But basically he maintained his private life. He read in the Scriptures every day. He would get up early in the morning and read in the Scriptures.

He would spend time in prayer, and then he would go on Addison's Walk, which was a walk behind Madeline College, and he would say his prayers while he was walking. Then he'd go to chapel, morning chapel at Modeling College, and then he'd go to breakfast, and then he'd start his work day.

But he was up every morning and he would read the King James Version, he read Moffat's translation, and then he would often read. He read in his Greek Bible every day as well, so the personal devotional life of Lewis was something very central to his life.

I mean, he had unique gifts. All of us can do the devotion thing and grow by virtue of it. I don't think all of us have a photographic memory like Lewis had and so on.

I mean, he marshaled his gifts for kingdom purposes. We could see a model in that. Whatever your gifts are, to marshal them also for kingdom purposes. But Lewis was pretty. Pretty diligent about that.

He also said, though, that he sometimes prayed visually. He didn't necessarily use words. He would pray for people by imagining their face. Maybe it was a waitress at a restaurant where he was at.

And he would imagine her face and be praying for her imaginatively. And I don't know exactly how he did it, but he writes about this, and it's interesting. He had his habits and was faithful. He had long lists, though.

He would pray for a person he met on a train. He would pray for a student. He would pray. He just. It was a big part of his life. But it was something that seemed to be ongoing throughout his day.

Well, I remember the book that I. And I can't remember the book off the top of my head, but it talked about his driver. He had a driver. And Clifford, he was.

Yeah.

And he'd made a comment, or Cliff was. Clifford was trying to get into a conversation with him. And he said, you know, not today. I need to pray while you drive.

Clifford Morris was the guy. He mentions him in Letters to Malcolm, chiefly on prayer.

He talks about the fact that he was reading the work of a Scottish divine named Alexander White. And he goes, morris let him. To me. And I heard an interview with Clifford Morris years after Lewis had died.

And he said, I'm the guy that Lewis mentioned there. I'm the one who ran in the Alexander White thing. And Morris talked about the fact that Lewis would sometimes say that they had good conversations.

Morris even said on their drive from Oxford to Cambridge, because Lewis continued to live in Oxford when he was teaching at Cambridge University. Morris would pick him up and take him.

And he said they would usually stop someplace along the way, you know, to go to the bathroom or have a cup of tea or something like that. And he said there was sometimes they would stop at this pub and the pubs. The pubs in England are interesting.

If it's a local pub, it's usually like the neighborhood living room. You'd meet your neighbors not in their home, but at the pub. And you'd have a beer and you'd talk or whatever. And in Oxford, when We lived there.

I noticed that a lot of the pubs took on a certain personality. So this pub might be all the taxi drivers. This pub might be all the Oxford Brooks students. This pub might be many of the Oxford students.

This pub might be where the Oxford dons and teachers would go. And then you'd get a little bit outskirts and it would be the local pub where the people who lived in that neighborhood would hang out and so on.

So Morris said that they would be driving to Cambridge and he said he knew this one, this one pub where the lorry drivers, the truck drivers would stop and Lewis would be in there and he'd order a beer and they'd be talking and Lewis would have them all in stitches. They'd be laughing or he's a very humorous guy. Then he'd go to the toilet and these guys would say to Morris, who is that guy? What a regular guy?

What a good guy. They knew he had a sort of posh accent. They say, you know, born with a plum in their mouth or something like that, or a silver spoon in their mouth.

Lewis was kind of upper class guy, but they saw he was just a regular guy. He could connect with even the working class. And that's again, Lewis being faithful to what he said or he wrote. There are no ordinary people.

You've never met a mere mortal. And Lewis says everybody is either moving to become one day an everlasting horror or an everlasting glory.

And the weight of glory is that we have a responsibility to each person we meet. I, you know, I read through the Bible every year. I've been doing it. I don't know, I'm at the 55th, read through it or something like that.

And I've read the New Testament 39 times besides that Greek Bible twice. I'm not a great Greek scholar, but I can read it if I have a lexicon near my elbow to look up the occasional word. I don't know.

But one of the things I've noticed when I was reading through the Bible one year years ago, I got to Chronicles, you know, chapters one through 12. And I'm saying, lord, you're omniscient. You know, you know everything.

And yet, though you're omniscient, you only gave us one thin little book compared to what you could have given us was 12 chapters of names in the first 12 chapters of Chronicles. Good economical use of the space. I've never heard an audible word from God, but I'll forget these prompts at that moment. The prompt was to you.

They're just names, but every one represented somebody I love deeply. If you could have only known Simeon.

Yeah, I know he wasn't very nice to his brother Joseph, but he felt like he was the unloved son of his father Jacob. He had vicissitudes going on in his heart and I knew every one of them.

If you could have only known, you know, Naomi when she had lost her husband and her two sons and she didn't want her daughters in law to go with her. But Ruth stayed with her. There were vicissitudes going on in her heart and life and struggles.

I knew him and I realized to me they were 12 chapters of names. But God doesn't just love people generically. He loves particular people, individual people.

Every time I read through Chronicles 1 through 12, I remind myself about how great and deep and broad and particular is God's love for people. And you have it in 1st John 4 it says God is love. Very explicit.

And the interesting thing to me is if God is love, that means he never stopped loving Satan either. Matter of fact, Satan's incorrigibility doesn't diminish God's character. God is love. The tragedy of Satan is not a deficiency in God's love.

The tragedy of Satan is that somebody like Satan would become so incorrigible that he would reject the hand that's always outstretched to him, to the place of moral blindness, Akrasia again, like we had talked about in the place of utter reprobation. And it should be a warning to us that any of us can move in that direction if we step away from the love of God. That's always reaching out to us.

Very powerful stuff. I think I filled my hands, but my heart was longing for something more. And you called, called my name, said you knew me long before I was born.

You, you talk about history. And we had a bit of a conversation earlier about historians. So there was a 40 year class reunion.

Share that story for our listeners because I think it's one that will make people laugh but also kind of open our eyes a bit to see where we're at today.

Well, they had these three guys who all graduated from Wheat in the same year. And it was Nathan Hatch, who was a historian and became provost at Notre Dame and later became president at Wake Forest University.

You had Mark Noel, this imminent church historian, Martin Marty, who was a great church historian at University of Chicago, once said to me, mark Noll is not America's greatest church historian, he's America's greatest historian. And then you had John Piper, the Great preacher. If you. If you read Desiring God, I love his Desiring God and so on.

But he's a pastor, he's a preacher. And my. My understanding of historians is they're kind of like ants. If you've read Tolkien, the answer, the tree Shepherds.

And they have long, long life. And the life of man to them is like the life of a gnat to us as humans. And they look at everything with the long view.

They don't get too upset about what's happening in the moment because they're historians. So here are these three historians. It was so funny, the gathering, because it was a 40th anniversary of their graduation.

They're going to have this thing at Barrows Auditorium. It's one of the large. It's not the largest auditorium at Wheaton, but it's a large one. And they ended up starting 20 minutes late.

And Catherine Long, who was a church historian at Wheaton at the time, she said, you'll have to pardon us for starting so late. We historians aren't used to a lot of people coming to our gatherings. Video rooms throughout the building so that we have place for the overflow.

So these three guys were assigned to talk about what the church was like 40 years earlier and what the church was like today. And Mark, Noel and Hatch, they're historians.

And so they say, well, you know, there were things in the past that were good and there were things that were bad. A little bit like, you know, Charles Dickens and Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and there are things today that are bad, and there are things today that are good. You know, there's some things that are better. There were. Piper. No, man, he.

He's got the prophetic finger pointed out and about how the world's going to hell in a hand basket and how bad everything is and so on. And, I mean, he's pointing out legitimate things, but the thing is, he's saying it's just so crazy.

And he says, one of the worst things is that these kids are so out of touch. They're in there, they're in their social media. They're. They. They don't even have connection with each other.

They put their earbuds in, they're listening to their iPhones and all that other stuff. And Hatch interrupts him and he says, you know, John, I know what you're saying. The biggest group at Wake Forest is the evangelical group.

And I often go to their worship services myself. I get so much out of them. And you're right.

As soon as they're done, they put in their earbuds and they go on their way, listening to John Piper sermons.

What did he do? Did he say anything? John Piper, did he say anything?

But he laughed. And he's got good humor. He laughed. But the thing is, though a Christian view, we're not dualists.

As Christians, we believe good is primary, evil is a perversion of the good. And so consequently, we're not dualistic. It's not an equal and opposite evil. And that. So everything that's out there has a good use.

And consequently too, it can be perverted. You can't think of a bad banana without thinking of a good banana that goes bad. Evil compares to good.

Like bread mold compares to bread we as humans made in the image of God. We could do creative things with that bread mold. We can make penicillin out of it.

Will we not at least give God that level of creativity where he could take the worst event in human history, which was not suicide, it was not homicide, it was not regicide or. Or genocide. It was deicide. We killed God when God became a man, right?

And consequently God takes that, that horrible act and he turns it on itself and makes divine penicillin out of it. He makes the healing of all the nations in Christ. And I think it's pretty remarkable.

But I think we have to think about it too, as far as man's nature is concerned too. I talk with people all the time and I'll say Christians, good Christians, you know better.

I'll say, do you believe man's sinful by nature, or do you believe man's good by nature? And they also, almost 99, 98 of the time, they'll say, no, I believe he's sinful by nature. I say, how do you justify that with your theology?

Man is sinful in nature. You need to use the prepositions carefully. Sin is an encroachment. It's not something that is part of human nature. It's something.

Something that has shown how human nature has become corrupted. But you look at your theology and at least four areas your theology is affected by.

Your view of man, your theology proper, your doctrine of man, of God. If man is sinful by nature, God would have had to have created a sinful. But the Scriptures tell me there's no darkness in him.

What's at all that God is good, so therefore he couldn't have created us bad. We are made in the image of God. The imago DEI is what our nature is. Then your doctrine Of Christ. Did Jesus become sinful when he became a man?

If sin's essential to human nature, Jesus would have had to become sinful. But he becomes a man without sin, tested in all points as we. Yet without sin that wasn't present in his human nature.

Then you have four categories of man in your biblical anthropology. Adam and Eve before the fall, no sin. Adam and Eve and all who follow. After the fall, sin. There's the encroachment. We're in that category ourselves.

I'm weary of it all, frankly. I long to have it flushed. Then you've got Christ and his humanity. No sin. And you got man in his glorified state. Eventually it will be flushed.

I can't wait. I long to have this stuff leeched out of me. Four categories of man in Scripture, sin's only present one.

It can't be the definitive characteristic of what it is to be human. Then you've got your soteriology, your doctrine of salvation.

If you see a pig wallowing in the mire, you don't kick the pig and tell him to get out of the mire. He's living according to his nature. He doesn't have sweat glands. He wallows to keep his body cool.

But if you see a man living in sin and degradation, do you tell him he shouldn't live like that? Why? If he's living according to his nature, let him go. But no, we tell him he needs Jesus because we want him to live above his fallen state.

And we want him to be set on the process of not only having his sins forgiven, but set on the process of sanctification so he can grow into glorification. And here again, as Louis, you've never met a mere mortal. Every person you meet is moving towards one end or the other.

And we're trying to help them to get back to the restoration of the image of Christ. Sinful in nature, not sinful by nature.

That's a very important distinction, and one, quite honestly, that I had not heard is Travis.

Because if I don't have it, I'll find it easy. To treat people who are living in sin is if they're just dirt bags. I should never treat anybody that way.

Even Hitler, I can't treat that way because he was a man made in the image of God. Hitler is a tragedy because of what he did to himself and what he did to so many other people. He's a tragedy.

But we should never treat anybody, no matter how bad they are. Who would have ever thought that the Apostle Paul, this Christian killer, would Become one of the greatest leaders of the early church.

You don't know if the person you're talking to now, no matter how despicable they are, that they might be somebody very important for God's purposes. There is no river that runs wide as your goodness. There is no mountain that stands tall as your faithfulness. All my days, your mercy.

Follow me when you do your gospel presentations. And I'm sure that there's a spectrum here, but do you find that it takes. Takes a lot more time?

I mean, it seems like you have taken that tact that this, this isn't just a one time conversation thing. Now, we do have those moments, of course, where that's all we have in that moment.

But it seems more often than not, just according to what I know about you, you seem to try to stay in one place over time and build a relationship over time to kind of chip away. Would I be wrong in that assessment?

There's all kinds of people you meet in all kinds of circumstances, and the gospel should be able to be communicable in all of those circumstances. So it's not uniform. I'll give you an example. I was reading a paper on C.S.

lewis at a theology conference down in San Antonio, Texas, and I got in the plane, I'm sitting by the window. This guy comes and sits in the middle seat and he says, rats, I've got a middle seat.

If I'd have been really spiritual, I'd have said, oh, if you want, you can have my window seat. But I didn't do that. A guy comes and sits on the aisle seat and he says, professor Root. And I go, you got the drop on me.

I'm sorry, I don't think I know you. He says, I was at the paper you read at the theology conference. So this guy and I start talking theology over the guy in the middle seat.

And I turned to him and I said to him, please forgive us. We are both at a theology conference. We were talking about theology. Please forgive us if we talk over you. Why don't you join our conversation?

What's your name? He said, sean. So we talked for a couple more minutes. And I turned to Sean. I say, shawn, are you a spiritual person? He says, I am, I am.

I said, tell me about that. He said, I went and studied with a shaman in Peru once. I said, that sounds interesting. Tell me about that. Now you could say, oh, horrible.

I wish you could see that. For those that are just on the audio part, he was digging his finger down his throat.

Is this new age let's avoid this, you know. You know, put up the cross, keep the. Right, right, right. Or you could say, does this exhibit spiritual hunger?

And I'm going to assume the best, because I don't think I'm sitting next to this guy. Not by design. I think there's a reason I'm sitting there and that this guy's sandwiched between two people that were just at a theology conference.

And he said, I went and studied at a shaman with a shaman in Peru. I said, tell me about that.

Well, I saw I could study with a shaman, and I saved up my money on my vacation, and I went down to Peru and I studied with this guy for three weeks. I said, well, how did that go for you, Sean? He said, it was the worst money I ever spent in my life. And then he says, what's in it for you, Jerry?

And I share the gospel with him. Very, very short and clear, and so on. Loved by God, forgiven by God.

One of the things I like to spell out when I get to sin, I say to people, I think all of us have high ideals and we live beneath our own ideals. I believe in the high value love of other people. And yet I find I live beneath my value.

Because sometimes I have sharp words with people I say I love most in the world. Or I mumble under my breath if I'm stuck in traffic about the people around me. These people do anything to me.

But I see how even though I say I love God and I think I should love people, I live beneath that value. Everybody lives beneath their own values, let alone them. The divine, transcendent values.

And consequently, when you say it like that, people lean into it and they say, yeah, yeah, I struggle with that, too. If they're honest. Most people are honest when you talk with them. And now all of a sudden, we've established the sin thing.

I could go into more detail on it.

I could talk about the nature of sin and so on, But I talk about what I need to talk about so that I could get to the next point in the gospel message, which is always going to be centered in Christ. So, Sean, I share the gospel with him briefly, and he says to me, that's the most comforting thing I've ever heard in my life.

I said, sean, is there any reason why you wouldn't want to trust Christ right now? He said, none. And he prays with me out loud on that flight. Fifteen minutes into a flight, the guy sitting on the aisle, he's. He's just freaking out.

That would have been me I would have been doing the same thing.

He was doing his doctorate at Trinity Seminary and apologetics. He's used to building scaffolding for the gospel. He's not used to obstetrics seeing somebody.

Spiritual obstetrics.

This guy on the aisle is freaked out, and he turns to Sean and loves on him and begins already to begin to speak about growing in Christ, about getting in the word, about prayer, about getting into a fellowship someplace and so on. And it was so glorious to watch this guy on the aisle nurturing him. So we get Sean's address he lived in.

The guy on the aisle and I were both flying to Chicago, and Sean was going to go on to Toronto. But we get his address, we send him some stuff.

We find out some churches in the area that we could get him connected with that were good churches and so on. You try to follow up wherever you can. You can't always follow up completely. But that was an encounter on a plane one time, meeting with the guy.

There are many encounters where you have ongoing relationship with people. So there was a guy who was a mailman in my house. His name was Steve. I always offer the toilet to whoever my mailman is.

I don't know what those guys do when they're on their route, you know. But Jesus said, the cup of cold water can sometimes be valuable. I think sometimes any common human act of kindness is good.

And so I got to know Steve over time. And as I got to know him one day, I shared the gospel with him and he trusted Christ.

So I invited him to church on Sunday, and he said, well, you know, Jerry, I'm divorced and I have my kids on the weekend. I. I don't think it would be so good, you know. And I said, well, our church has great stuff for kids. I'll bet your kids would love it.

Why don't you come to church? And afterwards, why don't you and your kids come over for dinner? And he came over the house and his kids trusted Christ that day over lunch.

You know, these rippling effects that go out doesn't always go well, but you don't know if you're sharing Christ at all. You have to believe these things are being engineered from a higher source, from someplace on high.

And you have to believe that maybe this person's going to have 15 people talk to him before they come to Christ. And you're number eight in the process.

And there ever times when we hear about this and see what the rippling effects are or how the person came to faith later. So I've got a couple of examples. I was working in college, I had to put myself through college.

But this one summer I was asked by the YMCA to run their day camp in the summer and run the week long residential camp up in the mountains. And I said to the Y people, okay, I'd be happy to do this, but in the story time, I want to use Bible stories.

And in the day camp, the last week of day camp, Friday, they would have an overnight at the park. We'd have a hot dog feed, we'd have a campfire, story time, skits and stuff.

And in the morning we had a pancake breakfast and the kids would go on their way. And in the residential camp every night we had a campfire. And the last night I wanted to be able to share the gospel.

And I asked the YMCA guys can I do this? And they say, well, nobody could say they couldn't see it coming because it's Young Men's Christian Association.

You can, but you can't follow them up. Well, at that time in my life I wouldn't have known how to follow somebody up. We saw about 540 decisions for Christ that summer.

But what happened to them? We did this residential camp up in the mountains at this camp called Little Green Valley YMCA camp. And I, I would pray for them.

I would agonize for those kids over the years. I'd say, lord, watch out for them. I was trying to be faithful in that environment. Please, please Lord, watch out over your sheep.

Well, fast forward many years later as a youth pastor in the suburbs, not in the inner city where that YMCA was, this kid comes to youth group. I haven't seen him before. And I said, what's your name? He said, mike. I said, mike, you look new here. He says, I am new.

My family just moved into the area and I met some Christians at my high school and they said they came to this youth group. So I came to the youth group. I said, well, Mike, are you a Christian? He says, yeah. I said, what's your story?

He said, well, you know, when I was a kid, I was up at a YMCA camp in the mountain and he said our family was going to leave on family vacation the next day and we wanted to leave before the buses got back with all the kids. So my dad drove up the night before and then we left at oh, dark 30 Saturday morning.

And he said that night the director of the camp, I don't even know who he was, he got up and he shared the gospel. And my dad and I both trusted Christ. We went on family vacation. When we came back, we started going to church.

And it wasn't long after that my mom and my two sisters came to Faith. I said, mike, what was the name of that camp? He said, little Green Valley YMCA Camp. I said, what was the YMCA you went up with?

He said, it was the Southeast YMCA in Huntington Park, California. I said, mike, I was the director of that camp. And I said, lord, thank you for letting me see that you did not abandon those kids.

And we both worship God. But we discovered I have many stories like that, by the way, frequency with which I share Christ. You begin to hear some of these things later.

God's at work and we're just his ambassadors. We're working for the King. And consequently you feel the prompt to share Jesus with somebody and it doesn't go well.

You don't know the end of that story.

And it may be that the end of the story is that will be held against the person because they won't be able to say a glory when they rejected Jesus, that they never had a chance to hear Scripture.

There'll be those gathered before the throne from every tribe, tongue, people and nation says God has not left himself without witness, but one of the ways he works is through us. And consequently we need to be faithful to the call and we need to be faithful to the Holy Spirit's prompts in our life.

There is a palm in Gilead.

Comes.

Like wisdom, speaks like children, Sight to.

The blind and a strength to my weakness. Something for soul, body, mind.

You've worked with a lot of students, you've seen a lot of shifts of the culture and you have, as I said at the onset, quote unquote, retired. But what are your, your words to the younger generation that's coming up?

What is your encouragement to them as they're embarking on this, on this Christian life that seems to be captured by political rhetoric in the culture, cancel culture and deconstruction going on all around them. What, what is your encouragement to them?

Well, it's interesting. I'll say something that I think is central to it and maybe make a few applications.

About three weeks before Lewis died, he got a letter from an 11 year old girl in America. She wrote to him through his publisher. He gets us basically on his deathbed. It's one of the last things he writes before he dies.

This great Christian on the threshold of heaven writing to this little girl on the threshold of her earthly life. And he says to her, if you continue to love Jesus, nothing much will go wrong with you. And I Pray, you may always do so.

I would say that to anybody, but especially young people today. You hear a lot of times about how people turned away from God because of some Christian or some church that performed poorly.

That's not a person that loved Jesus. That's a person that was expecting too much from a human agency that would fail everybody in the scriptures. Except for maybe Daniel and Joseph.

Everybody in the scriptures could have introduced themselves in some sort of a recovery group. Hi, my name's Noah and I'm a drunk. Hi, my name's Abraham. I'm a liar and a coward.

I would tell a lie that would put my life at risk rather than risk anything myself. I were Isaac and Rebecca, and we're dysfunctional parents. Hi, my name is Miriam. I'm jealous of my little brother Moses, and I'm a racist.

I'm upset about his interracial merit.

Hi, my name is Aaron.

I'm a religious leader, but I caved to peer pressure. Hi, my name's Moses. I'm a hothead and a murderer. Struggles with his temper.

Called the most humble man in the world, but struggles with his temporal degree. Doesn't get in the promised land because of it. My name is Rahab and I'm a Harib. My name's Samson. I struggle with lust. My name's Naomi and I'm bitter.

Hi, my name is David. I'm an adulterer and a murderer. Hi, my name's Solomon. I'm supposed to be wise, but I'm very intemperate.

Hi, my name's Elijah and I struggle with depression. Hi, my name's Thomas and I struggle with doubts. Hi, my name's Peter. I let down my best friend at a time he needed me most.

Hi, my name's Paul and I'm a Christian killer. And I'm really hard to work with. We're all messed up. We can always find somebody that we could blame for our willingness to step away from Jesus.

But the question is, who is Jesus to you? If you love Jesus, you can pray for the people who hurt you. You can pray for the people who fall short.

You don't have to be surprised that some pastor of some big church goes off the rails. Matter of fact, even think, have you ever gone off the rails? Have there ever been times when you have not done well? Peter denies Jesus.

Was there never a time in your life where you lived a little bit short of your own conviction? You're looking in the wrong place if you're letting those things distract you.

That's why Lewis could Say, I pray that you will continue to love Jesus, and if you do, nothing much will go wrong with you. And I think that's where people need to be. And if I begin to think that politics are the solution, I have my political views, I have my concerns.

I'm going to vote based on certain convictions that I have. But I do not make a God out of politics. Politics aren't going to save my soul and give me the hope of eternal life.

Jesus will, and so consequently be politically engaged. I think you should. Some people say, well, you know, I hate politics. I say, be careful there, because now you're not being Christian in that judgment.

Because again, Christianity believes that things are good and that in this good world there are things that are fallen. Evil is a perversion of the good. But I say to them, have you ever felt lonely before? Oh, yeah, of course I have. Have you ever felt lonely in a crowd?

Because if you felt lonely and even felt lonely in a crowd, you're probably a sociological being. You're made for community. The fact that you can communicate tells you you're made for community. Are communities better if they're chaotic?

Are they better if they're organized and run well? If you're a communal person, you're also a political person by nature. Don't castigate politics. Politics aren't bad. Bad politics are bad.

If you want good politics, you probably need Jesus in the center of them. CS Lewis said the greatest political activity a Christian can engage in is to lead their neighbor to Christ.

Because if Christ reigns in that person's heart, they'll probably do better. Pascal said something similar in the Pals. He said Christians have two laws better than all the laws of statecraft. Love God and love your neighbor.

If I love God and love my neighbor, I'm going to want to do well by my neighbor. I don't want to hurt him. But if love grows cold, the Scriptures say lawlessness increases.

And if love grows cold, instead of those two laws, love God and love your neighbor, we end up having penal codes that begin to thicken and law libraries begin to proliferate because we have to keep writing laws to keep people to do coercively and extrinsically, but what they would do naturally if they love God and love their neighbor. So if a person's heart changes for Christ, I lead them to Christ.

There's a great political activity because it brings love in the place of lawlessness. I think that's very significant. So I would tell people that, don't lose track of Jesus.

Keep your Heart and eyes focused on Jesus and go out and serve him wherever you are. You'll never be with loss of opportunity if you keep your eyes on him.

And that is a good word. Thank you, Jerry, for your time. Thank you for your insights and CS Lewis and evangelism and I. And really thank you for coming on the show.

Well, you say I'm retired, but I want you to know I'm on an airplane every week.

That's why I put in air quotes.

So, you know, I don't. I don't know. I. I love serving him and I know that the more I age, the closer I am towards heaven.

I can't wait to get there and I can't wait to have all the brokenness in me finally fixed. But in the meantime, as long as he gives me breath in my lungs, I want to serve him. And thank you for giving me this opportunity.

I told you, wide ranging. But I hope you can see why I really enjoy talking to Jerry. I always take something profound away from our conversations.

I love that Jerry is both a down to earth guy and a scholar at the same time. How he has the strong conviction and he oozes love. He's the kind of guy I want to be like.

Jerry said that we are called to Christ and sent into the world. That's the heart of the missioholistic approach to the Christian faith. Called and sent, not just in one aspect, but in every aspect of life.

Jerry is a living, breathing example of what it looks like. No, we're not all scholars. And as Jerry said, he still thinks of himself as the kid from South Central LA who played football.

Not as a scholar, but we can all learn to love God and our neighbor like him. What would happen to our churches, to our neighborhoods, in our own lives and in our own country if we loved people like that?

As Jerry said, God's at work. We are his ambassadors.

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