Twoedged Sword KJV

10/08/2026

MERYL STREEP AS ASLAN (Friday Church News Notes, October 2, 2026, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) - In a fitting sign of the vast feminist influence in modern Western culture in general and the movie industry in particular, a woman has been cast as the voice for Aslan the Lion in the upcoming movie based on C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. Narnia the Magician’s Nephew is scheduled to open in theaters in February. In Lewis’s hyper-popular fantasy series Chronicles of Narnia (the books have sold 120 million copies and the film series has grossed $1.6 billion), Aslan loosely represents Christ as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Though Lewis was called “Superstar” in the December 2005 edition of Christianity Today and was rated by a reader’s poll that year as the most influential evangelical writer, we do not recommend anything written by C.S. Lewis, including his children’s fantasies. Lewis did not have a biblical testimony of salvation (see his autobiography Surprised by Joy), held to baptismal regeneration, rejected the infallible inspiration of Scripture and Christ’s substitutionary blood atonement, believed in purgatory, and denied the biblical teaching of hell. In the Narnia series, Lewis taught that those who sincerely serve the devil (called Tash) are actually serving Christ (Aslan) and will eventually be accepted by God. In The Great Divorce, which is about salvation, heaven, and hell, Lewis does not mention faith in Christ, the blood of Christ, or the new birth. It’s all about works and character, which is a false gospel under the curse of God (Galatians 1). For more on this see the free eBook C.S. Lewis and Evangelicals Today, available at the Books section of wayoflife.org.

10/08/2026

CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA CONTINUES TO PAY OUT MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO SETTLE LAWSUITS AGAINST ITS PRIESTS

The total payout for s*x abuse lawsuits by the Roman Catholic Church in America over the past 20 years is over $5 billion and possibly over $6 billion (bishop-accountability.org). A conservative Catholic organization documented this wretched business in the fall/winter 2002 issue of the magazine Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, observing: “[T]he overwhelming majority of s*xual abuse cases in the Catholic Church--about 90%--involve homos*xual priests preying on teenage boys. The major media and the U.S. culture at large want to deny or spin the homos*xual factor out of the scandal.” Though we have no sympathy for the Roman Catholic Church in this sordid affair, we would also comment that the judicial system in America is also corrupt. If a religious “minister” of whatever brand is guilty of a heinous crime, he should be held liable and should pay for his crime, and if a fellow “clergyman” is found to have contributed to the crime by trying to cover it up, then he, too, should be accountable. But an entire group of churches, even unscriptural ones, should not face the threat of bankruptcy by greedy lawyers as the present system unjustly allows. The American judicial system is no longer about justice for those who have been wronged; it is about money, which it drains from every victim that falls into its uncaring clutches. Following are recent cases of settlements as stated by EWTN News: In 2026, the Diocese of Camden, New Jersey agreed to a $180 million settlement for more than 300 “victims of clergy abuse”; the Archdiocese of Chicago agreed to pay $5.5 million to “nine survivors of abuse”; and the Franciscan Friars of California announced a $20 million settlement for “94 child s*xual abuse claims,” which comes after the Friars filed for bankruptcy some years ago. In 2025, the Diocese of Syracuse (New York) agreed to pay $176 million to settle abuse cases ($76 million to be contributed by insurance companies); the Diocese of Rochester (New York) agreed to pay $246 million to “survivors of clergy abuse”; and the Diocese of Buffalo agreed to pay $150 million. In 2024, the Archdiocese of Chicago settled an abuse case for $950,000; the Diocese of Rockville Centre (New York) agreed to pay $323 million; and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to a near-$1 billion payment to “abuse victims.” In 2022, the Archdiocese of Chicago paid nearly $3 million.

(Friday Church News Notes, October 2, 2026, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) -

10/08/2026

The Popularity and Heresies of C.S. Lewis

The late British author C.S. (Clive Staples) Lewis (1898-1963), who was known as Jack, is extremely popular with evangelicals today. In fact, Lewis is loved with an equal fervor by “conservative evangelicals,” hell-denying emergents, Roman Catholics, Mormons, a growing number of fundamentalists, and even some atheists, a fact that speaks volumes to those who have ears to hear.

Mark Tauber, senior vice president of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins which owns the rights to Lewis’s estate, says, “Lewis reaches kids whose parents are reading [Narnia] to them at seven [years-old] or earlier, then people in evangelical or Catholic settings and in Mormon churches are using his adult nonfiction in their teachings. He reaches across age groups and different faith traditions” (“Exploring C.S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity,” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 14, 2015).

Though Lewis died in 1963, sales of his books rose to two million a year by 1977 and totaled over 200 million in 2026, with no end in sight. No other “evangelical” author comes close to this. (Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life has sold 50 million copies.)

Robert Hosack, executive editor of Brazos Press says, “C.S. Lewis has become a veritable cottage industry in religious publishing circles” (“Exploring C.S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity,” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 14, 2015).

The December 2005 edition of Christianity Today was devoted to “C.S. Lewis Superstar.” In an article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Lewis’ birth, J.I. Packer called him “our patron saint” and said that Lewis “has come to be the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary Evangelicalism” (“Still Surprised by Lewis,” Christianity Today, Sept. 7, 1998).

A Christianity Today reader’s poll that year rated Lewis the most influential evangelical writer. In light of the wretched spiritual-doctrinal-moral condition of “evangelicalism” today, that is a very telling statistic.

In its April 23, 2001, issue, Christianity Today again praised C.S. Lewis in an article titled “Myth Matters.” Lewis, called “the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist,” wrote several mythical works, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which Christianity Today recommends in the most glowing terms, claiming that “Christ came not to put an end to myth but to take all that is most essential in the myth up into himself and make it real.” I don’t know what to say to this except that it is complete nonsense. In his Chronicles, Lewis depicts Jesus Christ as a lion named Aslan who is slain on a stone table. Christianity Today says, “In Aslan, Christ is made tangible, knowable, real.” As if we can know Jesus Christ best through a fable that is vaguely and inaccurately based on biblical themes and intermingled with paganism.

Lewis is praised on all spectrums of evangelicalism and beyond. He is credited by John Piper as a father of his doctrine of “Christian Hedonism,” and he is praised by Rob Bell in his hell-denying, universalistic book Love Wins. Under the Acknowledgements section, Bell writes, “... to my parents, Rob and Helen, for suggesting when I was in high school that I read C.S. Lewis." I would imagine that Bell’s parents regret that recommendation today, since he has rejected and reinterpreted the biblical Christian faith.

LEWIS’S “DAMNABLE HERESIES”

Even Christianity Today admits, “Clive Staples Lewis was anything but a classic evangelical, socially or theologically. He smoked ci******es and a pipe, and he regularly visited pubs to drink b**r with friends. Though he shared basic Christian beliefs with evangelicals, he didn’t subscribe to biblical inerrancy or penal substitution. He believed in purgatory and baptismal regeneration” (“C.S. Lewis Superstar,” Christianity Today, Dec. 2005).

Following are some of the fundamental doctrines of the Bible that Lewis rejected:
The inerrant inspiration of Scripture
The historicity of the Bible
The necessity of supernatural conversion through repentance and personal faith in Christ
The “Penal Substitutionary Atonement”
Salvation by grace without works and sacraments
The sole Mediatorship of Jesus Christ
The existence of heaven and hell
The literal six-day creation
The doctrine of an eternal, fiery hell
The doctrine of the finality of one’s destiny at death
Salvation exclusively through the name of Christ
For documentation of these points, see the free eBook C.S. Lewis and Evangelicals Today at the Books section of wayoflife.org.

WHY IS LEWIS SO POPULAR WITH EVANGELICALS TODAY?

In light of his lack of a scriptural salvation testimony, his heresies, his worldliness, and the massive pagan influences in his work, why are evangelicals today so enamored with C.S. Lewis? I believe the following are some of the chief reasons:

First, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis because of his intellectualism.

Second, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis because of his ecumenical thinking and his refusal to practice biblical separation.

Third, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis because of their shared fascination with and sympathy with Rome.

For documentation of these points, see the free eBook C.S. Lewis and Evangelicals Today at the Books section of wayoflife.org.

Enlarged October 8, 2026
(first published April 9, 2024)

10/02/2026

We have now come to the famous sermon on the mount. There is nothing to compare with it in all the literature of the world. Even the greatest of the world’s moral, religious, and philosophical statements blush and stammer in the presence of this sublime declaration.

By the time Christ formulated this great sermon, the Greek philosophers had come and gone, leaving the world as morally bankrupt as they had found it. The religions of the East had likewise had their day. They left men groping in utter darkness, hoping for the ultimate bliss of total nothingness or a better deal in some fancied future incarnation. Their philosophers did nothing but add religious burdens to lives already bowed down with care. The so-called sacred books of the East - the Vedas of the Brahmans, the Pinanas of Sivna and Vishnu, the Koran of the Muslims, the Zend-Avesta of the Parsees, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists - all fail and come far short of the sermon on the mount.

As for the Talmud, Edersheim said:
Who, that has read half-a-dozen pages successively of any part of the Talmud, can feel otherwise than by turns shocked, pained, amused, or astounded? There is here wit and logic, quickness and readiness, earnestness and zeal, but by the side of it terrible profanity, uncleanness, superstition, and folly. Taken as a whole, it is not only utterly unspiritual, but anti-spiritual... It is so utterly and immeasurably unlike the New Testament, that it is not easy to determine which, as the case may be, is greater, the ignorance or the presumption of those who put them side by side.

The sermon on the mount was addressed to people with heavenly rather than earthly hopes. The discourse, while embodying the laws of the kingdom as the Mosaic code embodied the national laws of Israel, was not meant for Jews as Jews. It was meant for people who had been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. No natural man - however sweetly dispositioned, however zealous and sincere, however well-motivated and well-intentioned - can keep the sermon on the mount. Only Jesus did that.

Jesus took the Mosaic law, passed it through the prism of His glorious mind, and broke the light of the law into its primeval colors. Then He lifted everything from the earthly to the heavenly, from the natural to the spiritual, and placed it far beyond all human reach. "That is how people are to live in the kingdom," He said in effect. Obviously only people born again of the Holy Spirit, people indwelt and empowered by the Holy Spirit, can live that kind of life. "Christ in you, the hope of glory" is the key (Colossians 1:27).

The genius of the gospel lies in the fact that as Christ once gave His life for us, He now gives His life to us. He lived the life Himself for thirty-three and a half years and now continues to live that life in the lives of surrendered believers. During the millennial age when the precepts of the sermon on the mount will be the legal code of the world, people will still need to be regenerated in order to put them into practice.

While it is true that the sermon on the mount has millennial overtones, it belongs in its primary application to those to whom it was addressed: the Lord’s people in this age. This is evident from the instructions for those facing persecution (Matthew 5:11-12). No one is going to be persecuted during the millennium.

Dr John Phillips

09/12/2026

09/11/2026

Do you live in the Chicagoland area? We invite you to come out Sunday to friends day!

Cornerstone Baptist Church

1210 East 62nd Street, Chicago IL 60637

09/07/2026

Most people need this... Not one of you would pick the seats near the back at one of your favorite sports teams' games if given the choice, but you do at church.

09/07/2026

And don’t be the self-righteous brother. Amen

Luke 15:11-32

11 And he said, A certain man had two sons:

12 And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

13 And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

14 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

15 And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

16 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

19 And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

21 And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

22 But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

23 And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

25 Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

26 And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

27 And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

28 And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

29 And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

30 But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

31 And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

32 It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.