FOR PASTORS: THE LORD OF THE RINGS FORMS

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” – Jesus of Nazareth, John 13:15

In the Year 1978 just before my 35^th birthday, someone sent me J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1937)novel that would prove to be my Doorway to a New Life a year later. At the time, I was a hopelessly addicted alcoholic professor at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, whose life had plunged to the depths of a suicidal depression.

I had conjured (and that’s the right word) to take my life on Halloween 1979 as the only means of escape from my rapidly deteriorating condition that I knew. But Tolkien’s book kept tugging at my darkest fears, that there was in the world of men such things as Courage, and Sacrifice, and Loyalty to the Highest Things that could overcome all the coarseness and hopelessness of the human experience.

Here is one of the early scenes from the first of three films produced by Peter Jackson in 2001 that captures what spoke to my dying heart in 1978. And would lead me to Christ on October 30, 1979, in a ramshackle little Assemblies of God church around 10 am as a last desperate leap across my own Chasm of Doom that morning.

It is a scene that every American Pastor in this Age of Antichrist should view to help them regain their footing on the Rock of Ages, to call out and Resist ‘This Present Darkness’ that is racing across the whole of the Earth. DK