One of the great blessings of the modern day, in my opinion, is the fact that movies about Christianity have become en vogue.

I love taking my family… and anyone else who will go, to see one of the many movies about being a Christ follower, becoming a believer or the struggles Christians face. It’s such a pleasant change from the standard Hollywood efforts that contain too many “F words”, bad jokes and downright goofy story lines.

There’s quite a list of Christian movies, in case you’re not familiar, from makers like the Kendrick Brothers and Sherwood Pictures.

While I don’t pretend to be a movie critic, the Sherwood Pictures movies tend to be a little quirky, have lots of great actors and, at times, a few fill-ins who seem to be movie rookies. That’s usually because they are.

Sherwood Films is based in Albany, GA and has used sites and actors to make movies across the Southeastern US. Regardless of the occasional non-Hollywood critiques, the message in each of the films comes through, crystal clear. There’s lots more about the Kendrick Brothers efforts here.

Another one of the amazing productions is CS Lewis’ “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.” It’s actually a Walt Disney Film and is an amazing production of CS Lewis’ installment in the Chronicles of Narnia series of 7 books. Maybe Disney will continue making the other 6 movies in the near future. Just a thought.

So I give you all of that background to get to this- if you’re not familiar with one of CS Lewis’ other efforts, “Mere Christianity“, you should be. It’s an amazing and incredibly thought provoking read… but probably isn’t the kind of book that will be struck for movie production anytime soon.

The reality is that Mere Christianity was actually a series of Lewis’ radio broadcasts from London during the 2nd World War. Only after the broadcasts were complete, and requests for the “script” of the audio kept streaming in, did anyone think about making a book out of the dialogue.

And oh what a book it is.

Quite frankly, I credit Mere Christianity, and my wife Amy, for bringing me to Christ. I won’t jump into my Testimony now, but that’s the truth. To that end, if you want to analyze the technical side of Christianity, with a book written by an atheist who had set out to disprove Christianity itself, then this is your read.

One of the great analogies that Lewis walks through is the idea that humans, in the world, must run on God, just like cars runs on “petrol”. In his words,

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”

There’s lots more to the analogy than that, and it only gets more enlightening as you read on…

Lewis adds-

“What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could “be like gods”—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

…And that, my friends, is where we find ourselves today. We take the words, written by an atheist-turned-Christian writer, from over a half century ago… and we find that nothing could be more true in the present day. People, on too many occasions, don’t realize what the real human fuel actually is.

But the fuel is out there! If you feel like your tank is a little low today, God is right there, ready to not just fill your tank back up, but to keep it full. All you have to do is pray over it and ask, just like we’re told in Matthew 7:7-

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

May God bless you and yours, today and every day! He’s blessed me… and I certainly don’t deserve it.