Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Learning in War-Time

This article of CS Lewis was a sermon preached in 1939 at the University of Oxford. It was a sermon about the learning and studying during wartime. The point of our learning in this life is to glorify God in all our actions that we perform. One of these actions, and one of the more important, is learning more about God and His creation.

This sermon took place at the beginning of World War II, one of the most deadly wars in the history of the world, which would make for a bad learning environment. But Lewis even in these kinds of situations is telling us that we should learn just as if there was no war going on. He gives a quote that states “would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.” This is saying that so much in this life we are concerned with what we feel would be best for us at the time rather than thinking about what would benefit us and what would bring glory to the name of God.

One other quote that I like is that “happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment as to the Lord.” This quote is saying that sometimes we just need to calm down and not constantly be thinking about what our future has in store for us but rather take life as one step at a time. Sometimes in life things can get out of hand and make it so that we feel a little too involved in our homework, so Lewis is saying that we are to enjoy life and take it in small steps so as to not get overwhelmed.

This sermon of CS Lewis had many things that we can take and put into our everyday lives. I think that learning is very important to the everyday life of a Christian and should not be a calling that is taken lightly. We must strive to learn more about God and His creation. In the book of Proverbs we are commanded to constantly be striving to get more wisdom, so we must take this call seriously, and always look for new ways to learn more about the creation.

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