Just read a great article that I ran into while preparing for an upcoming message, and I had to share it. As a pastor of one of the churches in Minnesota, I feel that there are a lot of applications to what C.S. Lewis talks about in this article.
In “The Sermon and the Lunch,” Lewis describes listening to a preacher praise the home as the place where character is formed and where we can drop our disguises and be ourselves. Lewis had eaten lunch with that preacher’s family the same day, and the meal was full of interruptions, arguments and hurt feelings.
His point isn’t that the preacher was a hypocrite. It’s that the sermon treated home as if it automatically produces happiness and goodness, when family life has its own temptations. The freedom to “be ourselves” at home can turn into the selfishness and rudeness we would never show to guests.
Lewis concludes that a Christian home needs its own kind of courtesy, and even some rules, and that preachers should either stop praising family life in sentimental terms or start offering honest, practical help with building a Christian family.
You can read the full essay in Lewis’s collection God in the Dock.