Screwtape Letters – Week #5

Hi! This is Sue Shetler. Nita is at a conference and will return next week.

How is it going for you, reading The Screwtape Letters? Are four chapters a week a good amount to read? Are you reading along, but just not commenting in the blog? We’d like to hear from you to know what your response is to Nita’s Book Club. Would you take 5 minutes to let us know what you’re thinking? You can email either Nita or me or simply comment in the blog. Thanks in advance for your input!

Questions for Chapters 17 - 20

1. Chapter 17 talks about a kind of gluttony in which the amount of food eaten is not the issue. What is the heart of the issue?

2. According to Satan, when is a marriage no longer binding (Chapter 18)?

3. Can Satan understand love? How does Wormwood perceive what happened between Satan and God (Chapter 19)?

4. Desire is a gift from God that enables us to seek the good; it is also a tool that Satan can use to destroy our lives. How do we keep our desires in the right place (Chapter 20)?

Are you new to blogging?

Learn how to comment.
or
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1082&topic=23

Screwtape Letters - Week #4

Thanks to Sue for her help this past week and to those of you who have made comments. Grace and peace to you all!

Just a couple of observations on the letters # 9-12 that we read this past week:

1. C.S. Lewis had a clear understanding of joy and pleasure being part of God’s nature. He says through Screwtape in Letter #9: “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.” This reflects the nature of God. He is a joy-filled Person in whose Presence is fullness of joy and at whose right hand there are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16)! The Scriptures tell us in Nehemiah that it’s the Lord’s joy that is our strength, not a joy that we crank up of ourselves. And so we are energized by the presence of a glad God who is full of joy and pleasure.

2. One of the “wiles” or tricks of the devil shows up so clearly again in letter #9 with the following words by Screwtape: “…your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all…Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things.’ If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all – and more amusing.” From my observations of my own life and that of many believers around me, this has been one of the more “successful” tactics of the evil one in the western Church over the past decades. The word “balance” has become a popular word; and while there is need for balance in our faith, it must be applied to the right situations, not to passion for God which will often take the form of what the lukewarm/balanced church would label as extremism. And while we will readily permit fanaticism in many other areas of life, we try hard to keep a new believer from being too fanatical about the most fascinating Person of all, and in time they, like Wormwood’s patient, begin to think that their early First Love may have been too extreme and we help make them into the stale and bored believers that we have become, giving the world grounds for rejecting Jesus.

3. If you didn’t have a chance to read Letter #12 thoroughly, I would recommend your going back to it – it is loaded with truth about how important it is to the devil to keep a believer on the surface of faith without dealing rightly and thoroughly with repentance of specific sin but rather keep him/her in a state of “dim uneasiness.” If the evil one can succeed in keeping us in this shadowy state of constant feeling that something isn’t quite right, it will make us reluctant to think much about God and will lead us into a life of wanting to be distracted from God and true prayer and dreading real contact with Him. Finally, as Screwtape says, “…one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’”

4. I can’t end my observations without quoting the end of Letter 12, because it is an eloquent summary statement of what Christianity is all about: knowing God intimately. Knowing this, Screwtape says to Wormwood: “…so remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick…”

Questions on Letters 13-16:

1. In Letter 13 Screwtape refers to God's notion of "losing their selves." How does Lewis' approach to this differ from some interpretations of death to self that border on self-hatred?

2. Two things to note in Letter 14: one is the acknowledgement in the first paragraph of the "danger" to Satan when a believer increasingly realizes that he is dependent on God's grace every moment of his life; the second is Lewis' wonderful teaching on self-acceptance as true humility.

3. What does Lewis mean when he says (Letter 15) that "nearly all vices are rooted in the future"?

4. What insights in Letter 16 strike you related to the believer and his/her relationship with a local congregation?

Have a blessed week! And if you have a moment, share your thoughts with us...

Screwtape Letters - Week #3

Hi! This is Sue Shetler and I am blogging for Nita while she is on vacation. Nita will be back to the blog next week.

The Screwtape Letters was assigned reading in my secular college’s English course back in the 70’s. I was a new Christian then. I remember thinking how much I wished I could explain the truths to others in my class about God and Satan. However, it was enough for me to try to understand C. S. Lewis and what he was saying! I couldn’t manage explaining it to others.

So, 30 years later I am reading it again. I thought it would come much more easily to me this time, but I find I still have to concentrate and think really hard as I read in order to comprehend the truths. Can any one relate?

This coming week we will be reading chapters 9 – 12. I’ve written out some questions, in case you like to learn that way. Please feel free to answer the questions in the blog or simply write any thoughts that come to your mind as you read the chapters. If you are having problems knowing how to write your comments in the blog, click on the “Learn How to Comment” link below.

Chapter 9
How does Satan work in the “dull, dry times” in our lives?

Chapter 10
How does Satan use relationships to pull us away from God?
Screwtape told Wormwood how to tempt his patient into wasting time. How do we avoid wasting time?

Chapter 11
Why would Satan have disdain for joy and fun?
How can humor be twisted?

Chapter 12
How can a churchgoer be “heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space?”
Lewis describes the gradual road to hell. How does it begin?

Are you new to blogging? Check out the link below:

Learn how to comment
or
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1082&topic=23

Screwtape Letters - Week #2

Greetings in the name of the Lord Jesus! I trust you are well and that you've had a good week in Him Who is our Life...Thanks very much to those of you who have made comments.

Because there is way too much packed into the pages of this book, I will make only two general observations from the reading of this past week (Letters 1-4) and make comments on those. The realities that I want to focus on are:

1. God is a Lover of humans in all our sin, weaknesses, and limitations.
2. True prayer is what the evil spiritual forces most fear.

God is a Lover and He loves freely! We know this partly because of, as Screwtape says, "His curious fantasy of making these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls ‘free’ lovers and servants.” His desire for free and voluntary lovers is a reflection of His free and voluntary love for us weak humans. We can only be what He Himself is to us first (I John 4:19), and He is a Lover.

In my journey into the heart of God, one of the most fascinating things about Him is this desire for voluntary human lovers and also His amazing ability to win us over without violating the human will in the process. To bring it closer to home, I'm fascinated with how He has won my voluntary love to such a degree that fear of man has lost its foothold in my life, enabling me to love God as my First Love and thereby love others freely.

I'd like to encourage you right now to pause and ponder I John 4:19 "We love Him because He first loved us," and let the wonder and mystery sink in of the affection God has for you at this moment just as you are in your weakness and failure...and thank Him for this even if your feelings about this don't align with His truth.

Secondly, true prayer is what the evil spiritual forces most fear in a believer's life. There's a great "hidden" reference in the Fourth Letter to contemplative prayer, which shows Lewis' understanding of the value and power of correct waiting ("passive") praying. In urging Wormwood to take advantage of the new believer's idea that prayer must always be "spontaneous, inward, informal and unregularized...a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part," Screwtape makes a subtle remark that ranks contemplative prayer at the pinnacle of prayer:

"...(lazy praying) is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy's service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time..."

Prayer is not for lazy people; however, that reality should not hinder us from understanding that the work and discipline of prayer leads us to the rest of prayer. Coming to a place of resting in God in prayer doesn't mean we quit the work of prayer, but increasingly, the work of prayer becomes restful because of increased trust. It's a mystery, but one of the most powerful forms of prayer is contemplation, which Henri Nouwen describes as: "...an attitude in which we recognize God's ultimate priority by being useless in His presence." (Josef Pieper's book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, is a wonderful study on how contemplation is and has always been a preservative element in human society.)

The power of prayer is emphasized in the following words of Screwtape:

"Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him toward themselves...Wherever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action...to human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion..."

Wow! This is so true, and it shows why the evil powers seek desperately to keep the believer from a vital life of prayer in God. If he can't keep us from the practice of prayer, he will attempt to get us to turn inward rather than truly engaging the Person of God in prayer.

My prayer for you and for myself is that the grace of the Holy Spirit come on us to learn to pray, as the disciples asked of Jesus. My recommendation to you is that first of all, you consciously make the request that the disciples made in Luke 11:1 "Lord, teach us to pray...", and then simply watch how He leads you into this through His Word (the Psalms was Jesus' prayer book so is a great source of learning to pray), through books, teachers, etc.

Questions for next week's reading (Letters 5-8)

1. In general, what are you seeing about the nature and character of the devil in the way he speaks of humans and of God?
2. What do the following words about God by Screwtape suggest to you about God and His posture toward weak humans: "He often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He thinks bad on the monstrously sophistical ground that the humans thought them good and were following the best they knew..."?
3. In Letter 6 Screwtape says, "He (God) wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them." What does this suggest to you and does any Scripture come to mind related to this?
4. Note the importance of real Christ-likeness in our inward being in Screwtape's words (Letter 6): "It is only in so far as they (the virtues) reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.)" What does he mean by this?
5. I love the line in Letter 7 that reads, "All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged."!
6. Letter 8 is a marvelous study on how God leads us into maturity. Screwtape tells Wormwood: "One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not...mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His..."

The Lord bless you this week - please feel free to make your own comments on your reading by clicking below on "comments." The comments that are beginning to come have been a blessing to read!