Born of the Spirit

"Just as you can hear the wind but can't tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can't explain how people are born of the Spirit.

Who died on November 22, 1963?

"Many will correctly answer, ""President John F. Kennedy."" But also on that day another person died who was mightier in God's kingdom. His name was C. S. Lewis.

His initials stood for Clive Staples, but to his friends he was known as "Jack." Born near Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, he was raised as an Anglican. But at the age of ten his world was shaken when his mother died of cancer. Jack wanted nothing to do with a God so cruel as to take his mother. By his early teenage years he had become an atheist.

Jack's spiritual pilgrimage back to God began in 1926 with a conversation with a cynical friend whose belief in the Trinity challenged Lewis' atheistic presuppositions.

Through the influence of various philosophers he read and conversations with his intellectual colleagues, including J. R. R. Tolkien, he began to realize that an absolute Spirit or God existed and that the events of the Bible had really happened.

By 1931, he had passed from merely believing in God to trusting in him as his Savior.

In 1941, Lewis burst on the literary scene with The Screwtape Letters. Books then began to flow from his pen at an amazing rate.

C. S. Lewis is considered the most influential Christian author of the twentieth century—quite a leap from the atheism of his youth.

adapted from the The One Year® Book of Christian History by E. Michael and Sharon Rusten (Tyndale) pp 654-55"