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!