Some great stuff in this book.
Chapter 3: Creation as Communication
C.S. Lewis at the toolshed.
I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.
Chapter 9 on self-denial and sacrifice
After a call to reach cultures with little or no knowledge of Christ with the hope that one day they might produce God-honouring pieces of art and culture themselves:
And to those who would scoff at the notion that the greatest theologians, philosophers and culture makers in the history of the church might eventually hail from Somalia or China or Afghanistan, remember this one fact: a thousand years ago Vikings from Saxony, Norway and Denmark were raping and pillaging their way across Europe. They worshiped the one-eyed, bloodthirsty god Odin and fought under the banner of the Black Raven. Before battle, they ate hallucinogenic mushrooms, painted themselves blue, and ran naked into the fray.
Five hundred years later, one of their heirs nailed a piece of paper to a door and ignited the Reformation. Five hundred more years, and their descendants settled the Midwest, invented hot-dish, and gave us Minnesota Nice... From mushroom-crazed berserker to Christ-exalting worshipper. That's what the gospel does. That's what happens when the grace of God lands among rebels and turns them into friends of God.
