Screwtape is an evil spirit, writing to his nephew, Wormwood, who has been sent for "training" on a mission to live in the life of an unnamed man, also known as "your patient" in the letters. He is supposed to keep in correspondence through letter writing to make sure that Wormwood is doing the correct things in keeping his patient from becoming a Christian (or, later, staying one), and in the process of these letters, we soon start realizing that the enemy tempts humanity in more than one way. In these letters, everything is from the viewpoint of a demon/evil spirit; therefore, whenever God is referenced, he is called "the Enemy." This can lead to confusing reading at points when we're so used to the enemy being Satan; but, seeing as we're reading it from the viewpoint of a spirit who sees Satan as "our Father", having God be "the Enemy" is only natural. Lewis notes in the foreword that, "Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle...There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth" (Lewis 125). With that short foreword to this blog, let me commence.
Often times we think that when we're in the Church we are safe. We are surrounded by praying people, we are led by someone that (we hope) is grounded in the Word, and being part of the body means being equipped with armor. We say nasty words to our families in the car before coming to church and then once we're in the building, we magically become one body that, at the end of the service, dismembers itself and we become who we want to be on the weekdays. This is the sad state of our churches today. Let me propose this -
When we are together on Sunday mornings, we are more prone to attack.Sure, the devil attacks us on weekdays (if you want to get a better picture of this, please read The Screwtape Letters. It opened my eyes to new arenas of spiritual warfare.) But what he hates a LOT is when we worship. He wants to be the focal point of worship, and if we go in asking, "What can be done for me today?" forgetting to ask how we can help each other, essentially, we will be worshiping him. The devil is the epitome of selfishness; he wanted to be God. You may know the phrase: "Better to be a god in hell..." yeah. What else is that other than selfishness?
Lewis puts it this way:
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like 'the body of Christ' and the actual faces in the next pew . . . Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous . . . What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balancei n the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can. (129-30)False humility is as much of a vice of Satan as is sexual sin, lying, etc. False humility is pride, and we so often get caught up in it, thinking that we deserve God more than the person next to us who didn't put as much in the offering plate as we did, even though we know that they make more money than we do. We then put ourselves in the place of God. It's idolatry at its finest - not only do we craft idols for ourselves, we become our own idols. We've conjured up thoughts of ourselves that are so lofty that we take the place of God.
This is not only deadly for the individual, it will also hurt the Church. If we are going to go on the body imagery of the Church, then think of it this way. When people put themselves in the place of God, they become dead cells. Dead cells quickly turn into tumors. Before long, the body needs to go under surgery to rid itself of the tumor - but the body will never be the same. Other parts of the body will feel the pain of the incision, the tug of the sutures, the healing of the place where the tumor was removed. Things will be healed, but they are awfully painful at the moment.
Our mindset as we enter worship changes worship for the entire Body of Christ. Our treatment of our fellow Body-members changes the way worship looks.
We desperately need humility in the Church.
So what does humility look like for you?
All text taken from : Lewis, C.S (Clive Staples). "The Screwtape Letters". The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. HarperSanFrancisco: SanFrancisco, 2002.
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