2 peter 1:5-11
philippians 4:4-9
Letters between two particular demons in attempt to foil the lives of their Enemy’s creatures. I suppose it would take a team effort to scheme and weasel through all that is good and turn it to despair ad discouragement.
As long as he (the human) lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty…they are a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make good use of it. To decide what the best use is, you must ask what use the Enemy (God) 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 favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. 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 qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. This 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 now you see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any way 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, would 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 wetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, in not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on it’s 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 (for consumption) 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 there He is pleases even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still 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.
Exert from “The Screwtape Letters” by C S Lewis
2 corinthians 10:4-6
John 1:1-5,9-13
James 4:14
