The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 36 – Max McLean

Episode 36: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Dr. Jeff interviews actor Max McLean about his career, his faith, and his role as C.S. Lewis in the new film, “The Most Reluctant Convert.” McLean discusses how he overcame sociophobia to become an actor and later founded the Fellowship for the Performing Arts to produce theater and film from a Christian worldview for a “worldview diverse” audience.

The conversation delves deeply into the intellectual and philosophical journey of C.S. Lewis from a committed atheist to a Christian. McLean outlines Lewis’s arguments for atheism, rooted in personal suffering and empiricism, and the key turning points that challenged his materialism, such as the problem of reason and the existence of joy. The interview highlights the film’s goal of encouraging thoughtful conversations about faith, meaning, and purpose.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Dr. Jeff Show. This podcast is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. On the show, I interview major thought leaders to show how worldview changes everything, and I cannot wait for you to meet today’s guest.

His name is Max McLean. He’s an actor. You have heard his voice. If you’ve ever listened to the Listener’s Bible, that’s the guy, the dramatic reader of the Bible. But he’s also done a number of stage productions, including Screwtape Letters, one called The Great Divorce, both based on the works of C.S. Lewis. And in a recent movie, or actually a movie that’s coming out right now called The Most Reluctant Convert, Max plays C.S. Lewis himself.

We’re going to have a great conversation about movies, about the performing art, about how Max overcame stage fright to become an amazing actor, and all about the most reluctant convert, C.S. Lewis, and how you can bring friends who don’t know Jesus to have great conversations about their faith. Welcome to this episode of the show.

Max McLean (01:14):
Well, thank you, Dr. Jeff. It’s great to be with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:18):
This is a super busy week for you as you get ready to launch a movie and I cannot wait for people to see it. I watched the screener last night. I was absolutely fascinated by your moving into the world of C.S. Lewis and becoming C.S. Lewis. And it just felt like it was bringing the life of this amazing guy to life to me in a new way.

I cannot wait to talk about the movie, but just tell us a little bit about the Fellowship for the Performing Arts, because this is the organization that you’ve had a passion for for many, many years. People all across the country are interested and involved. In fact, many people who are watching this have probably seen screwtape letters or one of the other performances on stage. Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in theater as a way to communicate truth.

Max McLean (02:11):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I became an actor shortly before I became a Christian. I’m an adult convert to Christianity in my 20s. My senior year of college, in order to get over a fear of sociophobia, the fear of being in front of people, I went to the weird part of campus and took an oral interpretation class at the drama department. And it was there where the theater bug bit.

And I spent my last voice, movement skills, learning how to interpret scripts, and went to drama school in London. And in the interim between college and graduate school, I became a believer, a follower of Jesus. And as a result, I recognized that theater is such a powerful medium by which to get a message across. So Fellowship for Performing Arts was born from the attempt to integrate the faith that I trust in with the vocation that the Lord has given me.

(03:29):
So it brings the two together. And we did that in the ’90s primarily for theater. And then more recently, we’ve expanded into film, but the mission is to produce theater from a theater or film, and now film, from a Christian worldview, meant to engage a diverse audience. Now, the word diverse has kind of been co-opted recently to mean kind of gender diversity or racial diversity. But what I have in mind, what we have in mind when we talk about diversity is worldview diversity, which in our culture is kind of the only diversity that’s not allowed to happen. So anyway, that’s how FPA came about.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:16):
I want to follow up on that. So the people who are coming to the theater to watch screw tape letters, to watch The Great Divorce, to watch the, well, coming to see this film, A Most Reluctant Convert, you’re hoping that people who are not believers are coming to these with their friends.

Max McLean (04:38):
Well, certainly that’s why we don’t play churches. I was in your town recently. We had a wonderful dinner together, which I was grateful for. And we were at the Pike Speak Center in Colorado Springs. And so our mission is to select the right material, which we think will appeal to a worldview diverse audience so that we can execute it to the highest levels that our budgets will allow so that we can play the great venues around the country.

And then we ask people to help us do that. That’s why we’re called fellowship for performing arts. It’s a fellowship of people that believe art and theater and film from a Christian worldview can engage the imagination and influence culture. So that’s the background. So yes, it’s meant for somebody like you. A lot of times people that are non-believers don’t find out about things like this or they think that they’re not interested in this.

(05:43):
So what it is, people like you can feel confident that you can bring a friend to an event like this and really give an imaginative, multi-layered, winsome, funny, doesn’t shy away from the tough questions, exposition of the Christian worldview.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:08):
I think that’s fascinating. And I love that idea. I’ve bought tons of tickets to different shows that you’ve done here in Colorado Springs to make sure that my friends can come and the people who are part of the Summit Ministries community can come. But this film is going to bring a lot of life.

I do want to talk about it, but I’ve got another question for you. It really struck me that you said that you had sociophobia and now here you are on stage having entire performances where huge bits of material directly quoting C.S. Lewis. Tell us about that because I think a lot of people say, “Yeah, I’m kind of afraid of public speaking.” And I think I’m completely surprised to hear that that was you at one point.

Max McLean (06:59):
Yeah. Yeah. God has an amazing sense of humor. I mean, it kind of reminds you of Moses in the burning bush, not that I’m equating myself to Moses and the burning bush, but it’s like, “No, don’t send me. I can’t do this. I can’t do that.” And yet the Lord says, “No, I have a plan for you.” So it’s actually one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith because most of us, when we recognize the Lord’s call on us, it’s not an exciting experience.

It is something that is really a little bit scary because we have to give up our own autonomy. In the flesh, we don’t want to follow God. That’s the last thing we want to do. So we come into the kingdom many times, and that’s the story of the movie, kicking and screaming. And then we realize what God has in mind. We go, “Oh, okay.” And it’s so much greater than our mission because we just can’t see what he sees.

(08:16):
No eyes see, no ears heard. And I just couldn’t imagine, and I don’t think anybody that knew me in my 20s, it says, “If people that know me in my 20s go to this movie or hear this interview,” they go, “That’s Max McLean?”

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:35):
I love that. I’ve always asked my students, “If God gave you a scroll with his plan for your life, would you read it?” And of course, most of them say yes. Then they ask me and I say, “No, I wouldn’t read it because I think I’d look at it and think, you want me to do what? This is too big.” But the you that existed in your 20s, God saw all of that potential and the ministry impact that you would have.

Max McLean (09:04):
Yeah. And the potential is there. I mean, because we are created in God’s image, so it’s there. We bury it, we suppress it because we want to, someone said something that I’ve been ruminating on quite a bit that we, in our culture, we have been trained, we have been taught, we have been educated to exchange a perception of freedom at the expense of meaning and purpose. Wow. And I said, “Yeah, that’s true. That’s so true.”

So we have all this, we have this perceived thing that we’re free to follow our hearts desires wherever it wants, but when we’re in a quiet room alone by ourselves, we’re so aware of the emptiness, lack of purpose, lack of meaning. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:01):
Yeah. What we think is freedom has actually shackled us to that meaninglessness.

Max McLean (10:07):
Yeah. Enslaved to sin.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:09):
Yeah. Yeah. I love the fact that in your work with the Fellowship for the Performing Arts, you’ve done performances such as the Gospel of Mark, you focused on historical figures such as Sir Thomas Moore, Martin Luther, and then lots of things with C.S. Lewis. Is there any tie-in? What drew you to performances to focus on those?

Max McLean (10:33):
Well, there are people that the Lord has worked in. God has set eternity in our hearts. So we need to be able to see that in real life stories, particularly these stories, like you mentioned, Thomas Moore, kind of a Christ figure, in a sense, the worst possible thing happening with one of the best possible people.

And so it’s a way of capturing the imagination, particularly about people that recognize that here we have no continuing city, we await the one to come. God has made us a little lower than the angels, said the Psalmist. And so there’s a sense that we’re always going back to scripture because the metaphors are so good. We’ve sold our souls for a mess of porridge between Jacob and Esau. That’s been the constant refrain of the biblical story and it’s our story.

(11:42):
So I want to tell stories that remind us of that, that give us a bigger vision. Because one of the reasons I’m so attracted to Lewis is that he reminds us, he says that there is another world, and that is where we come from. And he points us to that of the world. And if you bear down the simplest point, he’s basically saying, God came from someplace else and entered into our created universe and came out again and pulled us up with him. That’s the story. That’s what is to be believed and that’s the Christian theory. The alternative theory is this guy’s a madman on the level of someone who claims to be a poached egg and not to be taken seriously at all.

(12:38):
Or he’s a liar from the devil from hell. And Lewis says, unless you can believe that and I can’t, you turn to the Christian story that this man was and is who he says he is, the son of God who came up from another world to bring us out of this world, into that world. And that story, there’s layers and layers of it, is so mesmerizing. It makes you want this other world, particularly when you recognize that this world is, as he says, a shadow land.

We’re kind of driven to distraction. The thing that this world offers so often is a way of distracting us from reality. It has absolutely no resources to handle pain and suffering, none. And hence our reaction to COVID, nobody wants to take a risk. That’s not what this interview’s about.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:47):
Well, it’s sort of the subtext in a lot of things. What would stop us from living lives that are fully committed to Jesus and that fear, the fear of what other people might think, the fear that this really isn’t our core purpose, that we might not be made in the image of a loving God, all of those things are fears that people face.

And in the movie, you really draw all of that out. So this movie, a most reluctant convert, my goal in this interview is to get everybody who’s watching this to get excited about going to see it, and they can view it. This is happening right now. So November 3rd to the 7th, it will be in theaters and in the end, in the outro, I’ll give the website where people can go to find out where it is in their area and to get tickets for it.

(14:46):
But let’s just talk about the movie a little bit. I watched the screener last night. I thought it was fantastic. Now I’ve seen A Most Reluctant Convert on stage, but I just love the way that you as an actor, as the movie begins, and I don’t want to spoil anything here, but as the movie begins, you transform into C.S. Lewis from being an actor in the trailer, getting ready to all of a sudden you become C.S. Lewis and you enter into his world and in the opening sequence, you come right into a museum in Oxford and then right out into the city of Oxford, which feels… I’ve been there many, many times, spent weeks there. It feels like you’re right in C.S. Lewis’s world.

(15:35):
And at the beginning of the movie, you, as Lewis, lay out a brilliantly worded case for atheism, which is completely unexpected, at least it was for me. And then in the course of the movie, we watched the process of Lewis’s conversion. But as I was watching that case for atheism and listening, I thought, wow, that’s actually really hard to respond to. I’m a worldview guy. I should know. I should be, I felt this tension of, oh my goodness, this is C.S. Lewis laying out a case and I’m not sure I even have the resources to refute it. So I thought that was fantastic.

And then how the movie plays out from there. Anyway, you just have to see it. But what would you say was the turning point for Lewis as he laid out that case? So this wasn’t just a, “Oh, I feel differently now.” It was, “No, this is a hard boiled case for atheism.” And then there was a turning point where those arguments, in essence, became arguments in favor of the Christian faith.

Max McLean (16:49):
Well, there are very major turning points, maybe backing up just slightly what you described, it’s an empirical view of the universe, what we see empirically and leaving everything else out. Lewis gives a radical case for atheism, kind of on the level of a Christopher Hitchens because he has those kinds of gifts.

And so he concluded that either there’s no God behind the universe based on his empirical evidence, no God behind the universe, based on his empirical evidence, no God. And then that was supported by the fact that he lost his mother to cancer when he was nine years old. He was raised in a Christian family. His grandfather was the vicar of the church he attended.

(17:53):
And he said early on, he said that when his mother’s case was pronounced hopeless, I remembered what I was taught that prayers offered in faith would be granted. And so he prayed and he said he approached God not as savior as judge, but as magician, he simply wanted him to restore the status quo. And then he came to the conclusion that prayer didn’t work and that he was used to things not working. So he had a pessimistic view of things not working out, and that was supported by many other things. With all of that, he had a really bad relationship with his father.

And then as a young man, he enlisted in the army and became a second lieutenant and found himself at the age of 19 in the trenches in France during World War, World War I, the Great War. And when he saw the butcher, he said, he called it the hell where youth and laughter go, where he saw horribly smashed men still moving about like crushed Beatles, he said.

(18:56):
So that was the basis for his lack of, his disbelief. And then in college, he got to meet some friends, the associations, Owen Barfield, other people, but Owen was really significant. And he asked him if logic and reason brings forth indisputable truth, can he trust his mind? And he goes, “Of course.” He says, “Are your moral and aesthetic assumptions valid and meaningful?” He goes, “Of course. What I see is…”

Then Barfield challenges him, then your materialism has to be abandoned and he goes into a very long speech, which essentially is that if materialism is true, everything is physics and biochemistry, and it’s only the movement of Adams and skulls. Your consciousness is a result of molecular collisions. Yes.

And he just said that was like a wake-up call to him because he simply couldn’t go there. So he comes to the place where he comes to the realization that rock bottom reality had to be intelligent, had to have some kind of cognition that what’s true here is true in the farthest nebulae, is true in the farthest past. I mean, that’s the only reason we can look at dinosaur bones and make any kind of conclusion from them.

(20:45):
So he said that rock bottom reality has to be intelligent. And he goes, he was shocked that that thought had never come to him before. But then he also said what it was, his absolute phase. It was a God that was up there. It would never come here and make a nuisance of itself, which I think is a great line, because he just thought that God had wound up the clock and then just led us to ourselves, but he still thought that there was a place where God existed. And then from there, he had other conversations with people like J.R.R. Tolkien, Neville Calgill, other people, and they started talking similarly about the moral imperative.

(21:36):
The problem of guilt, the problem of guilt is no problem because why should you follow the dictates of consciousness if it’s just physics and biochemistry? The moral imperative is merely a social construct, so there’s no reason to believe it. And he said, and that was just going further and further against the reality. It was also the literature that really resonated with him, the Miltons, the Dantes, the Herberts, even the Shakespeares.

He said, they really talked about the roughness of life where the Voltaires, the Gibbons, they were really entertaining, but they were, I love this word, they were tinny. And I thought they didn’t capture the roughness of life, the reality of life. So all of these brought him to the point where he finally, the hound of heaven, he used a wonderful metaphor about if Hamlet and Shakespeare could ever meet, he was kind of giving a picture of the incarnation.

(22:50):
If Hamlet and Shakespeare could ever meet, he would have to write himself into the play. And he said, that’s what God did. He wrote himself into the play with the incarnation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:07):
I get chills, yeah, when I hear that, because that was in the movie, for me, that felt like a huge turning point. Would Shakespeare and Hamlet ever meet? Well, they would if Shakespeare wrote himself into the play and you’re thinking, wow, when God wrote himself into the play, that was major for me, just watching the film.

And there was another point, which I thought was interesting because so much of the movie is about the books, Lewis finding books in the attic when he was a child, Lewis spending so much time reading. But there’s a point where he’s in a library and he says, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

Max McLean (23:55):
That’s great.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:56):
And I laughed when I heard that, but I kind of reflected as well because that’s the opposite of what most people think today. They think that if they read more and study more, they’ll be less believing. Why did Lewis say that?

Max McLean (24:12):
Well, that was his experience with the books that he read. Of course, he was a literary person. I don’t really quite understand the premise of that question except to say that it was probably the experience of many, let’s say, Christian college students that go to the university. The challenge there, you’re going, it’s not a level playing field.You’re dealing with people who do not want Christianity to be true and feel it’s kind of an obligation to teach or to frame whatever subject from a materialist perspective.

And the question that’s never asked is, so build a straw man of what the Christian worldview is, but the question never gets asked compared to what? What is the alternative? The alternative is a meaningless universe and that they say, “Well, we just don’t know yet because there’s a multiverse and da, da, da.” And this is all just pure speculation based on a desire to not have the Christian story be true because one thing you cannot have in that context is that it’s assumed that the Christian worldview is impossible.

(25:54):
It just cannot be. So it’s not even discussed, right? Right. So that’s one of the reasons why I think, but I think a fair hearing, and of course, one of the things you do, of course, is you show the alternative, and that’s really, really key. You can’t be showing something in a vacuum, like Christianity against the field. It’s really one-on-one. It’s, compared to what? Right. And then you line both up and it becomes much clearer to see.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:31):
Yeah. It seems like there was a point in Lewis’s life where he really gathered together all of his memories about the pain that he had experienced and the disappointment and the hurt and the suffering. And then he asked the question, “Well, can the worldview that I am cynically embracing help me answer any of these questions?”

And he realizes that joy is a key thing that he’s missing there, that he has had enough experiences of joy to know that it’s real and that a meaningless worldview, a worldview that just says it’s all, as Richard Dawkins said, it’s DNA and neither knows nor cares. DNA just is and we dance to its music can’t account for what he knows is possible.

Max McLean (27:18):
And everybody knows that. In the film, he said that my argument against God was that the universe is so cruel and unjust. Then he asked himself the question, “Where did I get this notion of cruel and unjust?” I call a line crooked because I have some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing the universe with when I called it cruel and unjust? He says, “If the universe has no meaning, I would never know it has no meaning.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:51):
That’s right. We’d never have discovered that.

Max McLean (27:53):
How would you know because it has no meaning. So meaning is meaningless. So that was all very key to his sense. And then you mentioned joy. Joy to him was a signpost that he had these feelings. He read fantastics. He remembered this experience as a boy when his brother brought in this toy, the lid of a biscuit tin, which he garnered with moss and twigs and flowers to make a toy garden.

Lewis said it was the first beauty he’d ever seen. He said it’s impossible to explain the feeling that emerged. He says, Milton’s enormous bliss comes near it. It was a sensation of desire. And he said all his life, he was looking for desire. He was looking for this feeling, this longing that took him to another world. He could have gotten it when he went for a walk, this beautiful landscape, listening to a piece of music, reading a particular book would launch these feelings of longing, of desire, but a desire for what?

(29:10):
He said, “I desired something, but the desire had no object.” And ultimately, he had that very famous line, and we put it in our film, that if I find in myself a desire that no experience in this world could satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:31):
Wow. Yeah.

Max McLean (29:34):
And that goes back to Lewis’s theme. There is another world, and that is where we come from.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:39):
Yeah. In the movie, Lewis contrasts joy with happiness. Yes.

Max McLean (29:49):
He says it. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:50):
I thought that was interesting. And I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about that because I wonder if somehow our pursuit of happiness may be keeping us from it experiencing the true joy that Lewis was.

Max McLean (30:03):
Yeah, it’s a substitute. I think he says that, “I called this desire joy, which must be distinguished sharply from either happiness or pleasure, except that those who had experienced joy like happiness and pleasure will want it again.” But he also says it’s something else that it’s hard to explain, but he says, “It’s almost like a feeling of grief, but it’s a kind of feeling that we want.” He says, “It’s like the scent of a flower. We’ve not found the echo of a tune. We’ve not heard news from a country we’ve not yet visited.” He said, “I doubt that anyone who’s ever tasted joy would exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:54):
Wow.

Max McLean (30:55):
And then he says, “But joy is never in our power and pleasure is.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:02):
Wow.

Max McLean (31:03):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:04):
Wow. I just need to watch this movie three times because it’s just so full of moments like that where you think, “That’s incredibly profound.” And I just need to reflect on that. Let me ask you this because there’s a scene in the movie which I absolutely loved and it’s Lewis in his room, his rooms at Oxford, he is wrestling with whether there is a God.

And the quote is, “In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in and admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed. Perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” which is where the title of the movie comes from. “I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing, the divine humility, which will accept a convert even on such terms.” And you watch Lewis make this change from this empirical, materialistic, hopeless, cold, meaningless view of the world into this realization that God intended us to experience joy.

Max McLean (32:25):
That’s great.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:26):
I thought it was a fantastic moment in the movie and it left me wondering, why is it that so many people in the world never get there, where Lewis got?

Max McLean (32:37):
Yeah, I’m curious. But that is the Christian way. I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but I understand the name Israel means struggle with God. One who struggles with God, which is, Jacob was renamed Israel. And I think the nature of the fall, the nature of sin is that we fight against God. We don’t join him, but God’s going to outlast us. We’re going to put up a good fight and we do, but God will outlast us. So that scene of I gave in just said, “I’m worn out. The reality is too much. It’s true. And so now I have to conform to reality rather than create my own reality, which is what I’ve wanted to do.”

(33:48):
And Lewis, at first, and I think all of us would agree that giving up our own reality for the real reality is not what we want to do. But then we find out when we do get into God’s will that that reality is pretty amazing. We talked about that earlier because at that conversion point, nobody knew Lewis was going to be Lewis. That wasn’t obvious, right? Yeah.

And it’s pretty clear that prior to his conversion, he said that my single ambition, which he never wavered, this is in his youth, was to be a writer, not just to be a writer, but to be, quote, known as a writer. He wanted to be famous as a famous writer and that he failed, he said. At my age, Keats and Shelly were dead. Chesterton had already completed his most distinguished works. All I’d done was write two volumes of poetry that no one read.

(34:57):
And he said it wasn’t until his full conversion to Christianity that pressure of that overwhelming presence that he gave in, that he began to find his voice. And the literary flow that emerged from C.S. Lewis from that moment to the day he died never ceased. It was amazing.

Soon after his conversion, he wrote his first Christian book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, in two weeks. It was an allegorical telling of his conversion story. And then what came after that, the space trilogy, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, Great Divorce, on and on, miracles on and on and on and on and just the number of articles and essays, just unbelievable output.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:05):
Because he decided to embrace reality, the reality of the risen Christ, it became a lens through which he then reexamined all of his previous assumptions that had previously led him to a place of cynicism and pain. Now, I get it now, why Surprised by Joy was the title of one of his books.

Max McLean (36:34):
Yeah. That’s the primary source for the movie.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Max, I want people to have a chance to see this. It’s going to be a great experience for them in the theater on the large screen to enter into the world of Lewis, to enter into the world of Oxford and those amazing discussions with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield. So if people want to see it, they just go to thecslewismovie.com.

Max McLean (37:05):
No, just CSLewisMovie.com.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:08):
CSLewisMovie.com. CSLewisMovie.com. Then they can find the theater that’s, they can get tickets.

Max McLean (37:16):
Yeah. It’s usually geo-targeted to them. So we’ll let them know what the nearest theater is. And by the way, the movie change that we’re working with Cinemark, AMC, and Regal and many independents are adding screens, adding cities, adding dates. So we’re very, very excited about the reception the film has had, even among the movie chains. They’re pretty excited about, obviously they have an alternative motive, but they’re excited that people want to see this movie.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:54):
So you want to come to it. You want to bring your friends and bring your family. You want to bring people who are skeptics.

Max McLean (38:02):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:02):
You want to bring people who are C.S. Lewis fans, but you want to bring those friends who afterward, sitting over a cup of coffee, would be willing to talk through what they have heard.

Max McLean (38:15):
By the way, I should mention this, that on the C.S. Lewis movie website, you can see the trailer, you can see a lot of things. There’s something called resources, various resources, some resources to promote the film if they want to do that.

But one of the things I’m very proud of is we commissioned Dr. Devin Brown, Professor of English at Asbury Seminary, a renowned C.S. Lewis scholar, to write a discussion guide on the film. And what he did was he watched the film like five times and wrote out a discussion guide that I think is just fabulous. So it’s on our resource page of the website.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:00):
Okay, great. So you even have the questions there for those conversations over coffee after the movie.

Max McLean (39:06):
Yeah. Yeah. Or if you take a light dive or a deep dive.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Max, thank you for what you’re doing with Fellowship for the Performing Arts. Thank you for your friendship and thank you for your focus on a biblical worldview. And that’s helped us become friends with Summit Ministries and Fellowship for the Performing Arts. And I’m praying that this will be a fantastic week. Just as we close, what would you hope a young adult who may be in that place where Lewis was when he was working through the cynicism and pain, what do you say to that young person in the times in which we live?

Max McLean (39:47):
Well, I would say enjoy the movie because he’s telling your story. I mean, I think we’ve talked about it at length, but it bears repeating. We live in a world that is so, the assumptions behind it are so antithetical to the Christian worldview, and we don’t even know it in the sense that it’s like fish and water. It’s just embedded in us.

And so we really need to be shocked out of this complacency that has been. Because we’ve been told that all the good in life can be found on this earth, and we’re not allowed to look beyond this earth. And we all know that axiomatically, that’s just not true, but we keep suppressing it. And one of the things about art is it does, at least the way I want to do, it does set eternity. We do have eternity in our hearts, and we do know that God made us a little lower than the angels.

(41:04):
And we also know that here we have no continuing city. So what do we do with that knowledge? And the other worldview needs to be exposed that as the alternative to Christianity, they offer meaninglessness. You have all the freedom you want, but you have no purpose, no meaning other than what you can find in the three scores and 10 years you have here. And that’s why the decisions that our government makes, the lack of risk-taking, the lack of any kind of courage is only going to, this is how societies and cultures fail. And so I’m hoping, I hope this film saves society. That’s what I want for this.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:02):
I just thought it was fantastic. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show, and we’re going to be praying that this will be an amazing week for lots and lots of people coming to a new understanding of the truth.

Max McLean (42:15):
Praise the Lord.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:15):
Thanks for being on the show, Max.

Max McLean (42:17):
Love being on Jeff. Thanks so much.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:19):
Thank you to my guest for today, Max McLean. I can’t wait for you to see the movie, the most reluctant convert. If you want to get more information about that, just go to CSLewisMovie.com, CSLewisMovie.com. You can find tickets there. Get them for your family, get them for your friends, get them for the people you work with. Make the most of this opportunity because it’s only in the theaters for a few days.

If you’re also interested in the Listener’s Bible, that’s just listenersbible.com. It can be a daily devotional for you, a way for you to hear scripture and to listen to it while you’re driving around, while you’re traveling, when you are waiting in appointments and that kind of thing. So this is a cool opportunity. We live in an amazing time where people are asking huge questions about life and about faith and about God.

(43:13):
We want to engage them with powerful arguments and to do it in a very relational way. I’m hoping that this show is helping you do that. If it is, please tell everybody you know about it, and I will look forward to seeing you next week.

(43:29):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool, and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/therjeffshow for more information.

Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place. For your listening enjoyment, you can download it at edifi.app.

(44:33):
Be sure to share this show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review, if you would, on the site where you download the show, that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.