(upbeat music) - The Desiring God National Conference begins on Friday. It's a conference dedicated to C.S. Lewis, and we're titling the conference, The Romantic Rationalist, God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis. The fun starts on Friday at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Pastor John, what do you look forward to from the speakers, and maybe give us a sense of what you'll be sharing at the conference yourself?

- Tony, the more I read and think in preparation for this conference on C.S. Lewis, the more excited I get. And I know that Lewis had his flaws. The more I read, the more I know. Personal flaws, moral flaws, relational flaws, doctrinal flaws, we won't celebrate those, and we won't ignore those.

But here's why we turn to him, frankly, with deep-felt thankfulness, and a desire to honor him 50 years after his death. Let me put it in a quote from Peter Crift in an essay that he wrote 30-some years ago. I just love this quote, and it'll give the people a sense of what we're in for.

"Once upon a dreary era, "when the world of specialization "had nearly made obsolete all universal geniuses, "romantic poets, Platonic idealists, "rhetorical craftsmen, even Orthodox Christians, "there appeared a man, almost as if from another world, "one of the worlds of his own fiction. "Was he a man, or something more like elf or angel, "who was all these things as an amateur, "as well as probably the world's foremost authority "in his professional province "of medieval and Renaissance English literature?

"Before his death in 1963, "he found time to produce first-quality works "of literary history, literary criticism, "theology, philosophy, autobiography, "biblical studies, historical philology, "fantasy, science fiction, letters, poems, sermons, "formal and informal essays, a historical novel, "a spiritual diary, religious allegory, "short stories, and children's novels. "Clive Staples Lewis was not a man.

"He was a world," end quote. That's remarkable. And you read that kind of accolade over and over again for the last 50 years. What kind of man was this? What was it that caused people to write things like that about him? Well, I'm really excited that Philip Reichan, president of Wheaton, is gonna come and tackle the issue of Lewis's view of scripture and errancy, and Lewis, as the patron saint of evangelicalism, I'm excited that Doug Wilson is gonna tackle the issue of what did he really believe about salvation?

Was he a reformed person in his soteriology or wasn't he? Kevin Van Hooser from Trinity's gonna talk about the role of imagination in theology and discipleship. And Randy Alcorn's gonna tackle heaven and the new earth with Lewis as his help. And then we don't even have a second string in this.

The seminars that you saw, well, here's the second, they're not second string. Indy Wilson with the Myth Wars, C.S. Lewis and Scientism, and Colin Duryez, the friendship of Lewis with Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, and Lyle Dorsett, who's written and lectured extensively on Lewis in his Care of Souls, and Joe Rigney, who's read as much and thought as much about this as any young person I know on Live Like a Narnian.

So the lineup here is simply stunning. It's one of the conferences that I expect to learn heaps from. And as far as my own messages go, I've been working really hard on these in the last weeks, and I am so amazed at what I'm seeing. My first job on the first night is to say, why did we title this thing Romantic Rationalist?

And the deeper I've gone into, what do we mean by romantic? What do we mean by rationalist? And how did that work itself out in bringing him to Christ and in the way he did all of his ministry of teaching and writing, speaking, in the use of metaphor and poetry and story?

I think it's getting more profound the more I look at it. And then the last thing I'll do on Sunday morning in the setting of our worship service is to do an exposition of 1 Timothy 4, 1 to 5, which has this phrase in it, "Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God in prayer." And with Lewis's help, I wanna try to unpack how is creation, sex and food, particularly in this text, made holy by the word of God in prayer?

So yeah, I'm really excited. If people haven't signed up to come, I hope they will. - Yes, me too. And there's still time to register for the conference, which you can do through the desiringgod.org website until September 25th. You can register on-site at the conference at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

And if you can't make it to Minneapolis this weekend, the conference will be live-streamed at desiringgod.org/live. Of course, all the messages will be archived on the website for future viewing and listening as well. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I hope to see you in Minneapolis. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)