Tempt To Virtue?

I have been struck by this quote from Rory and Wendy Alec, producers of God.tv:

"...the Lord said something to us some years ago - He said - When you hate sin because it HURTS ME - then it will lose its grip on you. When you hate sin because it displeases ME - its hold diminishes."

As I've written before, there is a prayer I say nearly everyday, "Lord, please teach me to hate the sins I currently love." And through time and culling of sinful, distasteful habits, behaviors, and thoughts I'm moving more towards the light and more Christlike in my life. Am I there yet? Not even close, yet further along then I was a year or more ago...each day--a step in the right direction. I think C.S. Lewis spoke of me when he wrote, "Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased" (The Weight of Glory).

It drives me a bit crazy that I am so easily pleased and so vulnerable in certain aspects of my life and that I am not totally surrendering some of the sins I still love. I long for the day when the character of Jesus Christ will be fully formed in me and I will move consistently and completely in the gifting the Holy Spirit pours over my life. For now I can only mumble a portion of what Paul wrote, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10).

I am such an unfinished work of God, and working out my salvation...with fear and trembling; a total reverence for God. I must try to maintain those few areas of my life that have already been refined and cleansed by God and continue to tackle the many areas of my life that are still in need of serious attention and purging. It's not something I can do alone, no, I need God's strength, the Holy Spirit's counsel, and the prayers and sharpening of the Body of Christ... I need you.

I think the stuff God is revealing as dross up in me...and some day some to dross OUT of me is a bit painful...but it sure has my attention and it has me turning deep in my being to God. I like what C.S. Lewis said of this pain: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world" (The Problem of Pain). He sure has shouted to me of late.

I am surprised at how God uses me and takes such risks on me every day. I totally trip out how in my weakness He is strong...for I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. God's amazing grace is truly amazing and He knows what I am made of and yet still uses me and allows His will to be done through my life. I ponder how many times I halted, hindered, detracted from His will being completed through me? How does my freewill play into the possibilities of God? Wow, that sure gets me thinking and wanting to work harder at hearing AND obeying Him.

Lastly, I find it truly amazing, yes, amazing that God enjoys seeing me try...and even fail, yet trying again... to follow Christ; to love God; heed the counsel of the Holy Spirit; and to choose God. Yeah, I'm not down on myself right now, though I am conscious of a need to press through on some things "sticking" to me and that I need to work on with God. I am seeking His joy even as I go through some internal hardships combined with some external struggles and unfulfilled desires...just like everyone else I suppose is too.

I just love letter 8 from Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. This a great book and this is my most favorite letter from it. The book is a great study via reverse theology, as one demon writes to his apprentice nephew about the life of a Christian.

I will leave you with this letter and I hope you will read it over a few times:

VIII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

So you "have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away", have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) 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. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE