So, tonight's Wednesday night Bible study is different from probably anything that I've ever done and most of what I've ever heard in that I'm going to read from C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I'm going to read the first three chapters to us and see what we can get out of it. This is sort of what you get when I get told last minute that I'm going to be doing the Bible study. And I was thinking, okay God, what has been on my heart, where have I been reading, and all this different stuff, but what really stood out to me was that I've been reading Mere Christianity, and I've seen how it aligns with the Bible. And so I've pulled some texts from the Bible that we will read, but I'm going to go ahead and read this book, Mere Christianity, mere as in basic, as in you know, what does it boil down to and where do we get it from? How does a guy like C.S. Lewis, who starts out as an agnostic, end up writing something like the Chronicles of Narnia and, you know, the Great Divorce and the Problem of Pain and Mere Christianity and those kinds of things? I'm interested in that and I really, really like Mere Christianity because it is a great representation of what apologetics should be. It is simple in some ways, yet profound, and it's very applicable. I think people can understand it and they get it. It's actually something that C.S. Lewis was asked by England to give a series of radio talks during World War II. you're a Christian, inspire some people, give us some faith. Why are you a Christian?" And so he designed a series of talks and then he put them into a book, kind of formed them into the format of a book, and thus we have Mere Christianity. And I love how his first couple of chapters about Christianity doesn't cram Jesus down somebody's throat, doesn't come at it from a perspective like well you should already know these things and so here we go but it starts building a foundation and we'll see that here and I think that it's really good for us to know as Christians that what we believe in isn't illogical but it makes sense with everything that God's Word says and everything that we know to be true in our own lives so without further ado Book 1 is called Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe. So I will start with Chapter 1. Let me pray first. Dear Lord, please bless this time, even though it's a little bit weird. I feel that the Holy Spirit just wants us to hear from what you gave C.S. Lewis and also from your Word, and I just pray that it would be a special time tonight. In Jesus' name, Amen. So, Chapter 1, The Law of Human Nature. Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny, and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant. But, however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this. How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you? That's my seat. I was there first. Leave him alone. He isn't doing you any harm. Why should you shove him in the first? give me a bit of your orange I gave you a bit of mine come on you promised people say things like that every day educated people as well as uneducated and children as well as grown-ups now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him, he is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies, to hell with your standard. Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does, there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of law or rule of fair play, or decent behavior, or morality, or whatever you'd like to call it. about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what right and wrong are. just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football. Now, this law or rule about right and wrong used to be called the law of nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the laws of nature, we usually mean things like gravitation or heredity or the laws of chemistry. But when the old thinkers called the law of right and wrong the law of nature, they really meant the law of human nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law. With this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the law of human nature or to disobey it. We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law, but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it. If you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things. But the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses. The law was called the law of nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colorblind or have no ear for a tune. But, taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to everyone. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than the color of their hair. I know that some people say the idea of a law of nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teachings of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, What will really strike him will be how very alike they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man, but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two make five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to, whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everybody. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one life or four, but they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you like. But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real right and wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining, it's not fair, before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter, but then, the next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty that they might want to break was an unfair one. But, if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as right and wrong, in other words, if there is no law of nature, what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Had they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the law of nature just like anyone else. It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real right and wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong. But they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now, if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the law of nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologize to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left, I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact. the fact that this year, or this month, or more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money, the one you'd almost forgotten, came when you were very hard up. And what about how you promised to do this for old so-and-so and have never done it? Well, you never would have promised it if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behavior to your wife or husband or sister or brother, if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at, and who the dickens am I anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the law of nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I'm not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as you're armed. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the law of nature. If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently. The truth is we believe in decency so much we feel the rule of law pressing on us so that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For, if you notice, that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry. we put our good temper down to ourselves. These then are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings all over the earth have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave that way. They know the law of nature, they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. And so ends chapter one. Very interesting. So, I wanted to draw your attention to Deuteronomy 12.8. Kind of an interesting verse. In context, Moses has been given the Ten Commandments earlier in the book, and we will point to those again a little bit later on. And so, things have happened and things have progressed, and the beginning of Chapter 12 is God. speaking to the people, telling them what to do. And this is just sort of a blip in that, but I did want to read it. Deuteronomy 12.8 says, You shall not at all do as we are doing here today, every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes. So God is telling people, hey, it's not an okay thing to do whatever is right in your own eyes. I find that very interesting, especially with what C.S. Lewis has been saying. Go ahead and turn to James 4.17. Very quickly, another one that I found pretty interesting. James 4.17. So James 4 is talking about dangers of pride, and judging, and presupposition, those kinds of things. asking, where do wars and fights come from among you? That's the beginning of chapter 4. At the very end of chapter 4, after all of these things have been said, and you can read that for context, he says, therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin. Interesting. If we know what is good, if we know what is right, and we don't do it, therefore we do wrong, it is accounted as sin to us. We are in a fight against God. We are fighting against God by not doing what we know we should be doing. Therefore, it is sin. It is saying, God, you're wrong, I'm going to do my own thing. I find that pretty interesting. So, let's pick up Chapter 2, because C.S. Lewis moves right into what he was saying. In fact, I have to read to you the last sentence from Chapter 1 in order to move into Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is called Some Objections, and I believe that there were some people who wrote to him after his first broadcast with some questions and things, but I love how he turns those objections into further proof of what he's been saying. So, the last sentence of Chapter 1 is These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. Chapter 2. If they are the foundation, I had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this law of human nature or moral law or rule of decent behavior is. For example, some people wrote to me saying, isn't what you call the moral law simply our herd instinct? and hasn't it been developed just like all of our other instincts? Now, I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct, but that is not what I mean by the moral law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct, by motherly love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel Just that sort of desire to help another person. And no doubt, that desire is due to the herd instinct. But, feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help, whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger, you will probably feel two desires. One, a desire to give help, due to the herd instinct. The other, a desire to keep out of danger, due to the instinct for self-preservation. But, you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing, which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. Not true. The moral law tells us the tune we have to play. Our instincts are merely the keys. Another way of seeing that the moral law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the moral law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning, the moral law tells you to help him all the same, and surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is. I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the hurt instinct by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, and so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing, but clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it already is. The thing that says to you, your herd instinct is asleep, wake it up, cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note. Here's a third way of seeing it. If the moral law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call good. Always in agreement with the rule of right behavior, but you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the moral law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none of which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses, say motherly love or patriotism, are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasion on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire needs to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining motherly love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse, and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of the piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the right notes and the wrong notes. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts. It is something which makes a kind of tune, the tune we call goodness or right conduct by directing the instincts. By the way, the point is of great practical consequence. I love this because it gives us application. The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set up it as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice, you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials for the sake of humanity, and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man. Other people wrote to me saying, isn't what you call the moral logist a social convention? Something that is put into us by education? I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it, but surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made differently if they had liked. I fully agree that we learn the rule of decent behavior from parents and teachers and friends and books, as we learn everything else, but some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different. We learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been a rule to keep to the right, and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the law of human nature belongs. There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great, not nearly so great as most people imagine. And you can recognize the same law running through all of them, whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality or Christian morality or Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call reformers or pioneers. people who understood morality better than their neighbors did. Very well then, the moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are in fact measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are in fact comparing them both with some real morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that right than others. Or, put it this way, if your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something, some real morality, for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said New York, each meant merely the town I'm imagining in my own head, how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if the rule of decent behavior meant simply whatever each nation happens to approve, there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other. no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse. I conclude, then, that though the difference between people's ideas of decent behavior often makes you suspect that there is no real natural law of behavior at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, 300 years ago, people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the rule of human nature or right conduct? But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe that there are such things. If we did, if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here. The difference is simply about a matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches. There is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house." That's how he finishes chapter two. So chapter two, I don't want to call it boring or anything like that, but chapter two is a little bit maybe more difficult because he's answering these people's questions, but he's really getting at some roots of some really interesting things, things that we hear even nowadays. And a lot of times we think, oh wow, that's kind of the hip new thing. And wow, how do we get around that? But we see that really there's nothing new under the sun. This is stuff that people have been asking, you know, from, I guess, the beginning of time, and sort of trying to fight against those things, you know, with the whole herd instincts thing, and well, it's just because of education, and all of those different kinds of things. And the reason that I just said, nothing new under the sun, was because as I was reading this chapter yesterday, in preparation for today, somebody asked me about Ecclesiastes. He said, I've just started Ecclesiastes, I've read through the first chapter, and wow, can you give me any, shed any light on that? I kind of want to understand it, and I don't really understand it, and where is it sort of coming from, and those kinds of things. And I was thinking about it, and I was actually kind of thinking about the similarities between Ecclesiastes, in some portions specifically chapters one and two which I read through yesterday and sort of preparing my mind again to talk to him about this and You don't have to turn there, but I wrote a note in my Bible at the beginning of Ecclesiastes obviously not my words, but it helps me get in the right frame when I'm reading through the book and the note says Solomon wrote this near the end of his life, no later than 931 BC. So it incorporates human wisdom, or foolishness, since it comes after his heart was hardened, according to 1 Kings 11, 1-11. But, he never let go of his faith in God, according to Ecclesiastes 12, 13, and 14. So, we have to have that mindset when we read through Ecclesiastes. What is the context? What are we looking at here when Solomon says, I'm so depressed, there's nothing new under the sun, everything's already been done as he does in chapter one. Is he speaking from God's point of view or is he speaking from the point of view of a man who has tried to go after these things that he feels will make him happy, right? And it's interesting because he's talking about these things and he says, These are the same things that have existed since ancient times. These are the same things that people wrestled with way back then. I'm wrestling with them now, Solomon, and we're wrestling with them now, you know, nowadays in 2014. Another view of this is the idea of the right and wrong that C.S. Lewis has been talking about. These standards that have always existed throughout time and people have sort of tried to battle against those. And then in chapter 2 of Ecclesiastes, Solomon says that pleasure is vanity. He talks a lot about pleasure. I went after pleasure. I went after these things which I thought was going to make me happy. I went after my own self-gratification, right? But, as my wife and I always say, Everything in moderation, you know, you can't just go after one thing and say all I'm going to do is please myself because at the end of the day or many years later if you're in Solomon's case You're you're actually Not content with that. There wasn't anything of any substance to that and therefore you're left with a gaping hole so everything in moderation and as Lewis says If we take one impulse as our guide, we will be cruel, right? A cruel and treacherous man. That's what C.S. Lewis had just told us. If we take one thing and we go too far with it, and I would say that we would even be depressed like Solomon in that same way. There has to be a governing factor in there, and that's why I like chapter 3 because I feel like C.S. Lewis is getting us closer to that idea of exactly what drives us, what is that moral standard and that defining thing in between these impulses and that kind of stuff. Does anybody have any comments up to now or any questions or anything? I know it's, if you're not used to reading a British guy from the fifties. Maybe it's a little bit much to handle, but it's just so good, and the great thing is that we're recording it so you can go back and listen to it again, or I would strongly suggest picking up the book yourself and reading through it. So, chapter three, the reality of the law. I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behavior they ought to practice, what you might call fair play or decency or morality or the law of nature. Second, that they did not in fact do so. Now some of you may wonder why I called this odd. It may seem to you the most natural thing in the world. In particular, you may have thought I was rather hard on the human race. After all, you may say what I call breaking the law of right and wrong or of nature only means that people are not perfect. And why on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a good answer if I was trying to do an exact amount of fixing blame, but That is not my job at all. I am not concerned at present with blame. I am trying to find out truth. And from that point of view, the very idea of something being imperfect, of it not being what it ought to be, has certain consequences. If you take a thing like a stone or a tree, it is what it is, and there seems no sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise. Of course, you may say a stone is the wrong shape if you want to use it for a rockery, which I had to look up. It's kind of like a planter. Or that a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you as much shade as you expected. But all you mean is that the stone or the tree does not happen to be convenient for some purpose of your own. You really know that given the weather and the soil, the tree could not have been any different. What we, from our point of view, call a bad tree is obeying the laws of nature just as much as a good one. Now, have you noticed what follows? It follows that what we usually call the laws of nature, the way weather works on a tree, for example, may not really be laws in the stricter sense, but only in a manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means what stones always do. You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You only mean that, in fact, it does fall. In other words, you cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts themselves, any law about what ought to happen as distinct from what does happen. The laws of nature as applied to stones or trees may only mean what nature in fact does. But if you turn to the law of human nature, the law of decent behavior, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean what human beings in fact do. For, as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them, but the law of human nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts, how men do behave, and you also have something else, how they ought to behave. In the rest of the universe, there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story." And then he has a footnote saying, I don't really think that's the full story, but from our perspective right here, that's good. But, men behave in a certain way, and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently. Now, this is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try and explain it away. For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape. Namely, that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first. I am not angry, except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses, with a man who trips me up by accident. I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he doesn't succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not. Sometimes the behavior which I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all, but the very opposite. In war, each side may find a trader on the other side very useful, but though they use him and pay him, they regard him as human vermin. So you cannot say that what you call decent behavior in others is simply the behavior that happens to be useful to us. And as for decent behavior in ourselves, I suppose it's pretty obvious that it does not mean the behavior that pays. It means things like being content with thirty shillings when you might have gotten three pounds, doing schoolwork honestly when it would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her, staying in a dangerous place when you would rather go somewhere safer, keeping promises you would rather not keep, and telling the truth even when it makes you look like a fool. Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still it means what pays the human race as a whole. And that, consequently, there is no mystery about it. Human beings, after all, have some sense. They see that you cannot have any real safety or happiness except in a society where everyone plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently. Now, of course, it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of those Excuse me. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as we do about right and wrong, it misses the point. If we ask, why ought I to be unselfish? And you reply, because it is good for society. We may then ask, why should I care what's good for society, except when it happens to pay me personally? And then you will have to say, because you ought not to be unselfish. or you ought to be unselfish, which simply brings us back to where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not be much good saying, in order to score goals, for trying to score goals is the game itself, not the reason for the game, and you would really only be saying that football was football, which is true, but not worth saying. In the same way, if a man asks, what is the point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, in order to benefit society, for trying to benefit society, in other words, being unselfish, for society, after all, only means other people, is one of the things decent behavior consists in. All you are really saying is that decent behavior is decent behavior. You would have said just as much if you had stopped at the statement, men ought to be unselfish. And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The moral law, or law of human nature, is not simply a fact about human behavior in the same way as the law of gravitation is, or may be simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience, for the behavior we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behavior we find inconvenient, and may even be the opposite. Consequently, this rule of right and wrong, or law of human nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing. A thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves. And yet, it is not a fact in the ordinary sense, in the same way as our actual behavior is a fact. it begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality, that in this particular case there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behavior, and yet quite definitely real, a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us. And that ends chapter three. You know, I think to myself about this, and of course, I've been chafing at the bit in order to be able to say, God gave us the Ten Commandments, right? When we think about law from a Christian, Judeo-Christian mindset, we think about the Ten Commandments, and God gave them in Deuteronomy 5, right? And I would encourage all of you to read through Chapter 5 if you haven't read them in a while. There's nothing crazy or inane, you know, about the Ten Commandments. Prior to that, and for all people, in all time, in all situations, there has been right and wrong. There has been a moral law on their hearts. It's written on their hearts. So, I would encourage you, of course, to turn to Romans, chapter 2. Romans chapter 2 is a great place to go. The book of Romans is a great place to go, similar to what C.S. Lewis is doing, building on a foundation, showing us how there is right and wrong, that people have this moral law built into them. Obviously, eventually, sin, the need for a savior, Jesus is that savior, etc. Paul sets up Romans in much the same way, so if you're interested in how to Romans 2.14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts, accusing or else excusing them. Very interesting. Awesome, I love that. So we have the law written on our hearts, regardless of whether you're like the person on the island that Lewis mentioned, or if you're a person who grew up in a flourishing society, whatever it is, you've got this law written on you. And, even beyond that, you have a conscience. God gave every single person a conscience. There is this conviction that is in a person. and there is guidance also from that conscience, and I find that really interesting. I always kind of wondered about the conscience. I believe that when a person becomes a Christian, the Holy Spirit comes into that conscience and really gives meaning and importance to that conviction. And so now it's not just merely, this is right, and this is wrong, and those kinds of things. And if we don't really like that, we just kind of try and harden our heart to it and say, go away, conscience, go away, Jiminy Cricket, right? I don't want to hear that right now. And that's what happens when we see the people who are 40 or 50 years old, and they have no problem with doing this sin and doing this thing, and they say, I feel no conviction about it. Well, of course not. You've hardened yourself to that. But the Holy Spirit, when coming into a person's conscience, into a person's heart, taking over that conscience, makes it what it was intended to be, in my opinion, I feel. And I feel that the godly things then, not just the distinguishing understanding of right and wrong, but the godly things that we need to know about, that's what the Holy Spirit comes into our conscience for. And then we bear fruit, right? It's not like we're doing works for salvation, that doesn't exist, that's not even part of it, right? But the Holy Spirit bears fruit through us, you know, of the spiritual gifts and those kinds of things. about sharing the gospel. Why is it that when I walk by that guy, I just have this strong urge to say, do you know Jesus? I know that might be kind of awkward. I know that this is weird. I know you don't know me, but I just have this thing inside of me that says, I need to talk to you about Christ. Right? And love. What about love? What about the love that John talks about in his gospel and in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, there's a love there that is not just the kind of love that we have when we don't know Christ. Right? There's that kind of love, and then there is a love that extends that measuring stick of forgiveness. Right? Seventy times seven. Those kinds of things. What about the peace that passes all understanding? What about all of those things that we claim to as Christians? What about the faith that we have? All of those things. So yes, we have a law written on our hearts. Every man is held accountable for keeping that law. We also have a conscience. But how much more of a complete and full person we are? when we are Christians. So, lest we leave tonight with just saying, oh, so I should be a good and moral person, you would have to keep reading the book. Obviously, these are only the first three chapters. Don't just go away thinking, I'll just be a good person. Of course not. The understanding of what Christ has done for us on the cross by dying for our sins, the recognition of those sins, the repentance of those sins, and all of those kinds of things are so paramount to understanding what C.S. Lewis is really getting at. C.S. Lewis isn't dreaming this stuff up on his own, he's obviously read the Bible. How did he come to terms with God and become a Christian and feel so led to write books like this and have the influence that he has had if Christ wasn't working through him and if Christ wasn't real? And I find that to be very, very interesting. I will go ahead and pray, and we'll close, and then maybe we can talk about it a little bit. Dear God, thank you so much for this time. I pray, Lord, that these weren't just words, but that you were really ministering through this book, Mere Christianity, that has been around for decades, and I know it has really influenced a lot of people. I pray that for those who don't have access to the book, don't have the book, wouldn't ever read it, can listen to it on sermon audio in kind of the same way that C.S. Lewis initially aired it, I pray for those people to really grab hold of this, that it would excite them and that they would be driven to read the Bible. I pray that we as Christians here in this room that we would desire to know you more completely, that we would desire to share you with others, and that we would get an understanding of the real-life applications that C.S. Lewis has given us so that we can approach our friends and family, so that we can talk to these people and give them real-world examples like the tree, and like the rock falling, and gravity, and all of these different things, and that there's something different about humans. You have made us different, and there's something to be said about this human nature, and this understanding about right and wrong, and that you have knitted us together with that, Lord, and we thank you for it. We pray that you would continue to move, give us strength for the rest of the week, and I just pray that you would bless the discussion after this. In Jesus' name, Amen.