In this series on Great Christians we've heard of successful people who sacrificed potentially enormous success for a life of poverty. We've heard of people who through their lives changed the rights of the oppressed, displaced and dispossessed around them. The story of these great Christian's lives in themselves have been an inspiration to those who encountered them. The story of these great Christians demonstrate a triumph against a great adversary.

Yet, here I am choosing someone who was not particularly known for any of these things, although he was sincerely concerned about demonstrating such qualities.

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29th November 1898 near Bangor in Northern Ireland,. His father was a successful lawyer, who had the money to pay for his son to have a first class education. And first class it was for after a brief spell fighting in WW1 Jack went to University College in Oxford where he gained 3 first class honors degrees in Classics, Philosophy and English respectively.

By 1925 he was a lecturer in Philosophy at Magdalen College - but it was in 1929 that his life became truly interesting. After years of wrestling with various theological and atheistic ideals, Lewis as he put it: "gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed"

The remaining 34 years of his life were spent in prolific dialogue with the great atheistic thinkers of the day at no considerable sacrifice to his academic career - he was prevented from becoming a professor for 26 years because of his overt faith.

During WW2 he radio broadcasted to the nation a Christian message to encourage and uplift the nation each week. The remaining 34 years of his life were devoted to making God accessible and known to all who would listen to him or read his books.

It is because of his books and his accessibility that I have chosen him to be my Great Christian. When I say he is accessible, I mean that almost anyone can read him and know about him. He is well-known in almost every British circle today. Every Christian bookshop has his books. A story of his life was immortalised on the silver screen in the film Shadowlands. One of his books made the top 10 in the BBC's recent The Big Read.

A child's understanding and a child's imagination is perhaps one of the most under-rated resources in the church today. It is because of the power of story, I have chosen C S Lewis. If it weren't for books like the Chronicles of Narnia, I would have had to wait until I was in my mid teens to have any good idea as to what God is like, what God's love for me is like, what heaven is like.

C S Lewis has been to me like a faithful companion as I grew up. His adult books are just as challenging. There's not a Sunday in Britain he isn't quoted. Some of his thoughts have become so engrained in modern Christian thought that they have become commonplace and I'd like to close with one. At the age of 14, I read this quote of his from Mere Christianity, which in turn helped me to become a Christian and therefore helped make God accessible to me.

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."