Tag: Sensitivity

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” —2 Corinthians 10:5

According to AI, most people spend between 2 and 4 hours a day using their imagination. God created us to imagine, so it is safe to say that when we made him Lord, we asked him to be Lord over those thoughts as well.

In Oswald Chambers’ classic, My Utmost For His Highest, the February 10^th devotional asks, “Is Your Imagination of God Starved?” Chamber’s words are based on a message he spoke from Isaiah 40. God asks the prophet, “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? Says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out the host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing” (Isaiah 40:25–26).

Oswald teaches his readers, “Rouse yourself, take the gibe that Isaiah gave the people, and deliberately turn your imagination to God.”

How do we “rouse” ourselves today, and deliberately ask God to sanctify our imaginations? How would that change our thoughts and creativity if we did? What might we accomplish for God if our imaginations were sanctified, made holy, for God’s great purpose?

C.S. Lewis would encourage us to “baptize” our imaginations

Lewis was the author of some amazingly imaginative books. As a young man, he often enjoyed reading fantasy literature. One day at a train station, he picked up a book by George MacDonald titled Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Man and Women. Robin Mark Phillips wrote an article about C.S. Lewis’s fascination with the book. Phillips said, “While Lewis found in the narrative of Phantastes all the qualities that had charmed him in other romantic writers, such as the novels of William Morris, there was something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. ‘It is as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new.’”

C.S. Lewis found in McDonald’s work, “a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death.” You see, Lewis was still an atheist, and MacDonald was a sanctified Christian. Phillips wrote that years later, after Lewis’ conversion, C.S. Lewis “looked upon MacDonald as his spiritual master, saying, ‘I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself…I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master. . .’”

C.S. Lewis would go on to write books like The Screwtape Letters and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from his brilliant imagination. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis described his discovery of MacDonald as having “baptized his imagination.” 

Has God sanctified your imagination?

If the AI article is correct, we spend a good bit of our day using our imaginations. How then can we give those thoughts over to God?

I have always loved to read a great novel! My second major in college was English, and I was tasked with reading some of history’s best literature. A secret goal of mine has always been to write a “great” novel. I would rather write one Gone with the Wind than a hundred different book series that use the same characters in different circumstances. My favorite Christian fiction writer has always been Francine Rivers. She, like Lewis, came to faith later in life.

Rivers has been honest about her writing before and after her salvation. Rivers wrote popular romance novels under a pseudonym. I heard her speak once, and she described her early work as racy and lacking moral restraint. She met God, and he changed her life and her imagination. Her testimony, which can be found on her website, describes how the Lord sanctified her thoughts. She said, “My main desire as I started writing Christian fiction was to find answers to personal questions, and to share those answers in story form with others. Now, I want so much more. I yearn for the Lord to use my stories in making people thirst for His Word, the Bible.”

Why would Francine Rivers yearn for the Lord to make people thirst for God’s word? The answer to that question is the path to a “baptized” or “sanctified” imagination.

How can you allow the Bible to transform and make holy your imagination?

We can learn a lot from God’s message to Isaiah. Again, God said, “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? Says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out the host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing” (Isaiah 40:25–26).

Every time we open our Bibles, we can read words on a page, or we can hear God speaking to us from heaven. We can read factual, truthful stories from history, or we can use our imaginations and walk with Paul, Peter, King David, and others. We can imagine how it felt to be Joseph or Mary, holding the Son of God in our arms. We can sit by Jesus in the Garden and feel his agony and shame at the thought of accepting our sins. We can read the Revelation and wonder what it means, or we can read the Revelation and imagine seeing what John saw in heaven.

I’ve been teaching God’s word for a long time. There are times I teach a lesson, and it is factually accurate to the best of my ability. The best lessons I teach are born of the moments I spend stepping into the passage with my imagination. We should feel the moments God’s people felt in our Bibles. We should do our best to bring our Spirit-led, sanctified imaginations to Scripture. 

I am going to teach Paul’s journey to Rome this week. As I was preparing the lesson, I actually began to feel seasick on that boat with Paul! I imagined the terror that those on the ship must have felt. Later, I imagined the wonder they must have felt when they washed up on the island of Crete and later watched Paul shake the poisonous snake off his hand.

I may not ever be able to write my fiction novel, but I will likely want to try. I just don’t yet feel called away from the time I spend writing about God’s truth, from his Holy Word. I enjoy teaching the Bible because I know that when I spend time in God’s presence with the Bible, the Creator God of the universe speaks to me from its pages. 

God can sanctify your imagination through his word

I will close this blog post by sharing these words from Francine Rivers. Her words are my heart as well. She said, “I pray that you will finish my books and pick up the Bible with a new excitement and anticipation of a real encounter with the Lord Himself. May you search Scripture for the sheer joy of being in God’s presence.”

I hope you will begin or continue your journey of allowing God to sanctify and baptize your imagination. Someday in heaven, C.S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers, and Janet Denison will enjoy hearing your thoughts and stories about God’s amazing truth!