"Lessons From Narnia" Series: You Are What You Eat

(This is the second message in the series spoken on Dec. 11.)














There’s a billboard on Hwy 101 for Kaiser Hospital and it says this…

“You are what you eat. Who will you be today?”

Your physical health is tied to what you eat today and tomorrow. If you eat healthy foods you will be healthy. If you eat unhealthy foods you will eventually become unhealthy.

This isn’t true just about the food you eat, but also about other things you consume!

The information we consume, the experiences we consume, what we consume with our eyes and our ears, what we consume with our time, our energy and our thoughts WILL affect us emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.

We are what we eat! Our results in life come from what we feed on!

Now, if we only hungered in all these different ways for good things this wouldn’t be a problem. But, the apostle Paul describes our situation in Romans 7:14-21…(NLT)

“14The law is good, then. The trouble is not with the law but with me, because I am sold into slavery, with sin as my master. 15I don't understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate. 16I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience shows that I agree that the law is good. 17But I can't help myself, because it is sin inside me that makes me do these evil things.
18I know I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn, I can't make myself do right. I want to, but I can't. 19When I want to do good, I don't. And when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. 20But if I am doing what I don't want to do, I am not really the one doing it; the sin within me is doing it. 21It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong.”

Today, we’ll look at the character Edmund from “The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe”.

When we look at this kid and his choices we’ll see a reflection of ourselves!

But, before we start I want to make sure something is clear.

I want to say some thing up front about the book and the movie “The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe”.

It’s not a Christian book or a Christian movie!

Here. Let me tell you what it says about this on Dummies.com…

“Perhaps the single most common question about The Chronicles of Narnia asks whether Lewis wrote the series as an allegory. After all, even if your biblical knowledge is limited to a few Sunday school classes in third grade, you probably notice that Aslan has many similarities to Jesus Christ. If Lewis added that symbolism on purpose, does that mean that everything in Narnia represents something in the Bible?

"C.S. Lewis makes clear that he didn't write the Narnian Chronicles as a biblical allegory. But you may be asking: How can this be true given the obvious symbolism used throughout the series? In order to understand Lewis's side of the story, you need to understand the difference between allegory and something he called supposal."

Then it goes on to say…

“Although Lewis makes it clear that The Chronicles of Narnia isn't an allegory, he doesn't deny that some symbolism was written into the series. But, to understand his approach, you need to recognize that Lewis differentiates allegory from something he calls supposal. In a December 1959 letter to a young girl named Sophia Storr, he explains the difference:

"I don't say. 'Let us represent Christ as Aslan.' I say, 'Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there.'

"Allegory and supposal aren't identical devices, according to Lewis, because they deal with what's real and what's unreal quite differently.

"In an allegory, the ideas, concepts, and even people being expressed are true, but the characters are make-believe. They always behave in a way reflective of the underlying concepts they're representing. A supposal is much different; the fictional character becomes "real" within the imaginary world, taking on a life of its own and adapting to the make-believe world as necessary."

"If, for example, you accept the supposal of Aslan as true, then Lewis says, 'He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine, and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary.'"

Remember this is the man that we looked at last week, who was once a dedicated atheist, but whose worldview changed when he chose to believe in and follow Jesus.

Lewis had a lot to say and he believed that fairy tales and myths are sometimes the best way to say what needs to be said.

He wrote this to a girl named Anne a little bit more about this whole supposal idea…

"I think you will probably see that there is a deeper meaning behind it. The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself ‘Supposing that there really was a world like Narnia and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?’

"The stories are my answers. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) the lion is supposed to be the king of beasts; (b) Christ is called ‘The Lion of Judah’ in the Bible; (c) I’d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the work. The whole series works out like this.”

So these stories are not Christian. They covered themes and issues that are real, they’re not something where everything that’s true in them is true of Jesus.

That’s the cool thing about these stories is that if you’re a Christ-follower you can like them and if you’re an atheist you can like them!

Because they cover themes that everyone cares about: good vs. evil, temptation, fulfilling our destiny, etc…

Plus! What kids would want to find a doorway to a magical world where you are the hero they’ve been waiting for?

Alright, now that we have that out of the way, let’s look our twin brother Edmund.

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