C. S. Lewis, the brilliant English scholar and Christian writer died the same day President John Kennedy did. Even today his books on the Christian faith are being reprinted by the thousands. One of the reasons I think God so greatly blessed the ministry of C. S. Lewis, and still blesses it, is that Lewis never had an elitist, artsy love for fine literature or fine music or fine culture in any form, though he himself was a great artist. In his life everything is subordinate to the salvation of lost sinners.

I find what he says a tremendous inspiration to keep the perishing before our eyes as we do our work and pray how God would use us to wake them up. Listen to Lewis for the sake of your own ministry:

"It is hardly possible for [us] to think too often or too deeply about [the glory] of our neighbor. . . It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors." (The Weight of Glory, pp. 14f.)

So he says of his own scholarly discipline:

"The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan. . . The Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world." (Christian Reflections, p. 10)

This tips us off to what C. S. Lewis' life was really devoted to. In 1952 and American liberal theologian criticized Lewis for using simple analogies to try to shed some light on the Trinity. Lewis' response was passionate and shows where his heart really was in all his work:

"Most of my books are evangelistic, addressed to [those outside]. I was writing to the people not to the clergy. Dr. Pittinger would be a more helpful critic if he advised a cure as well as asserting many diseases. How does he himself do such work? What methods, and with what success, does he employ when he is trying to convert the great mass of storekeepers, lawyers, realtors, morticians, policeman and artisans who surround him in his own city?" (God in the Dock, pp. 181-3)