Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with C.S. Lewis on Christianity. And in this lecture, prayer and the Bible, we start seeing why that difference between enjoyment

and contemplation from the last lecture becomes really important when talking about prayer and

scripture. I love the beginning of this lecture because Dr. Ward, who teaches this course,

starts talking about Lewis's experience with prayer when he was a child. And his

experience with prayer was very frustrating because he believed, and probably rightly so as a child,

didn't have a good understanding of prayer. He believed that willpower was what was necessary

in order to get his prayers answered. And that was very

burdensome to him. He would think about composing the words just correctly, making sure that his

grammar was right, his argument was sound. But of course, that's not what Christ tells us to do when we

pray. He tells us that prayers that are offered in great faith, not perfect composition,

not flawless logic, but prayers offered in faith are the ones that the Lord answers. But that doesn't

even always mean they're answered in the way we expect. And one of the Bible verses that was

informative for Lewis in understanding prayer was Romans 826, which says, the spirit helps us in our weakness,

for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the spirit himself intercedes for us

with size too deep for words. And so if you remember from the last lecture, the difference between

contemplation and enjoyment and looking at the beam of light going into the toolshed and actually standing in the beam of light,

that's the picture that Lewis is trying to paint here with prayer and that we as believers should put ourselves in the moment, essentially, when we're praying, and understand

that the Holy Spirit and God is interceding for us in that moment. So we're, you know, we're

essentially communicating with the living God at the moment, and in a way, God is communicating

through the spirit with himself, and we get to participate in that. So Lewis is saying, don't be burdened by it. It takes the pressure off quite a bit, doesn't it? That's right. Enjoy it. Now, you've written about this, Juan. That's right. I read, we have a blog in our site, which I encourage you to go to our blog. You can find it at Hillsdale.edu forward slash course. That's Hillsdale.

dot edu forward slash course. And we have a blog where we go a little bit deeper into some of the

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