Do you know that some of the greatest theologians I know are shorter than 5 ft tall? I’m talking about children of course. The same lot that loves fairy tales and have endless supplies of hope seem to see the world better than most “big people”. C. S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and winsomely humbled his readers in this way, “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
When was the last time you read a good fairy tale? You know, the bit about castles, dragons, knights, princess, goblins, witches and Lions that spoke. When did you last find your mind in a land far, far away? Too often, we don’t have time for that sort of thing. We are too proper. We are too complicated. We are too busy being focused about matters that usually have no eternal significance. Why is this the case? Our worlds are too small. We dwell in our phones and are chained to an endless reel of reels.
Perhaps the first question that needs to be asked to break these chains is to ask the obvious: Is this what we were made for? When was the last time you allowed your mind to think about such things? We are too busy thinking about the repairs to our home or worrying about whether or not snow will come. We are too busy trying to make a few bucks more at the job. Perhaps we are even too busy complaining about someone or something. But is that what life is all about?
Lewis’ wisdom always fascinates me because too often I find myself focused on the muck of my ordinary life forgetting that, for all of its attraction, my heart and your heart were made for more than what we see around us. This may be misunderstood for selfishness. But I would argue that perhaps the great distraction to all of our lives is that we have not been selfish enough.
We are not seeking out what the ancients call the “summum bonum” or “the greatest good”. What are we seeking out then? Sub-goods. We are laying the weightiest matters of our hearts upon weak tables with loose legs. What do I mean? We are living for luxury as if luxury was our chief end. We are living for comfort as if it was our chief end. And we do the same with vacations, with weekends, with our Amazon wish lists, and even our retirement (if such a thing is possible for you). We forget that life was gifted to us to be enjoyed in the present and not endlessly to be gazing upon a day that might not come. In fact, for some of us, if God granted these desires to come to pass (a little more money, a little more prestige), we find that we would not become heroes in our stories but turn villainous in ways we never expected.
What are we to do? Remember the words of Christ Jesus the Lord, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4 ESV) You are not alive to simply enjoy endless sandwiches, goods, and vacations. You are not living for pleasures’ sake. You are living to display to the world around you the power and victory of God. You are living to display the wisdom, power, justice, and mercy of God. You are living to display how God can transform our miserable sinful self-destructive lives to testimonies of His power. To what end? The Apostle Paul tells us that it is “to the glory and praise of God.” (Philippians 1:11 ESV)
How does this all relate? We forget too often that we are not the main character of this story we’ve found ourselves in today. We are not hero who saves the day. The world in which we dwell has not been established for us to carry its weight. Perhaps this is why so many of us are discouraged or even frustrated with life. It isn’t working out the way we expected. Perhaps the great need of our hearts then is to return to those fairy tales of old. Maybe we need to remember that our seasons of darkness are the precise setting God has designed for us, so that we might in defiance sing. We might even recognize as J.R.R. Tolkien hinted at in his work, The Return of the King, that regardless of how dark the world may appear, it is the stars that remind us that darkness is but a momentary fog ready to be squelched. Every good story has a dragon, because every good story needs a hero to conquer something.
Perhaps today the dragon is not found outside of us, but within. We are the one’s with scaly hearts. We are the one’s whose words emerge like a spray of fire. We need to be conquered but not destroyed. We need to be renovated from the inside out. What we need is Christ to rip the poisonous heart that beats within our chests and exchange it for His own. For His heart is loving, gentle, tender, soft, and true. This is the promise of the new covenant Christ’s death and resurrection brought to pass. As we read in Ezekiel 36:26, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” (ESV)
How does He do this? Not by believing in a fable, but in believing that Jesus is precisely who He says He is in Scripture. John 14:6 records his message, “Jesus said… ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” (ESV)