Family Life Revealed

While listening to a sermon by Britt Merrick, the following quote from C.S. Lewis was stated.  Shook my world.

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”

Over the past few weeks I have been spending 30 minutes or so each day, dissecting the works of Bob Briner in his book Roaring Lambs.  As a graduate of a Christian University, I agree wholeheartedly  with his thesis on Christian higher education.  Here is an excerpt from the chapter “The Christian Academe: Underachievers” :

I’m afraid too many of our Christian colleges have developed an inferiority complex.  Obviously, relatively small Christian colleges cannot compete with giant research institutions in terms of facilities and equipment.  There will probably never be any atom smashers or giant radio telescopes on Christian college campuses.  So What?  Undergraduate education — even in the sciences — does not demand expensive, sophisticated equipment.  Basic laboratory equipment and solid, godly science teachers who demand excellence will give our students the knowledge and skills necessary to get them into medical schools and into graduate programs at the universities.  More and more employers are looking for graduates from liberal arts colleges — graduates who have been well schooled in the world of books, words, ideas, ideals, history, ethics, speech, communication, and creativity.  No expensive equipment is needed here.  For the most part, we already have the most important “equipment” in the form of well-trained, highly motivated, dedicated faculties.  We need to pay them better, encourage them to reach higher in their own scholarship, and expect them to set examples of excellence for our students, while accepting nothing but excellence from them.  In many cases, our faculties, like our students, are not being adequately challenged.