matt-chandler-ambition

My wife and I were flying back from North Carolina yesterday. She leaned over and started reading off my screen. I was reading an essay by Tolkien on fairies. That might sound funny to you, but let me try to unpack it. So Tolkien was used by God in mighty ways to share the gospel and ultimately see converted a man named C.S. Lewis, who was a professor of medieval literature at Oxford. Tolkien was also a professor at Oxford, although a bit older than Lewis. He would engage Lewis around this conversation. In a secular day and age, we’re still drawn to certain stories and certain things. So we all, in our culture, spend millions if not billions of dollars on entertainment driven around some pretty consistent themes.

We want a love that’s unbreakable. So we’re going to buy books that teach on that, and we’re going to go watch movies on that. Tell me that all romantic comedies aren’t the same exact thing over and over again. There’s love, it’s fun, could this be it? there’s a secret, then they get outed, then there’s a break up where surely all is lost, it will never work and then the crescendo is that it works. Now you know that’s what’s going to happen, you know that’s how it’s going to work and you’re still spending $25 to go watch it.

But that’s not the only theme we like. We want good to triumph over evil. We want to see evil crushed. So we spend billions of dollars watching movies, reading books and playing video games that show good conquering evil.

And Tolkien’s point to Lewis is the reason we’re drawn into these stories is because it’s the story that we’re actually in. He took it to a whole other level of nerdom. He literally created the elvish language. It got weird quick. His argument to Lewis is this. The reason why we’re all drawn to this, the reason why we want so badly to be a part of something like this is because we were actually designed for it and in Christ we’re walking in it

 

~ Matt Chandler