Faith Well Grounded

I'm a pretty boring, geeky guy. Along with my Bible study, devotional, and prescribed reading, I do a lot of reading in support of my apologetics interests. Yesterday and today I started and finished "The Screwtape Letters", by CS Lewis. It is more or less an apologetic fiction work (or maybe better described as theo-fiction), and I can't even describe what a blessing it was to me-- and what it will continue to be in the future. I HIGHLY recommend it if you enjoy reading, or even if you don't.

It takes the form of a collection of (obviously) fictional letters sent from an "overlord" demon to a younger menion. The overlord (Screwtape) is instructing the underling (Wormwood) on how to best keep his charge from Christianity, oppress him, and (once he is converted) then keep him distant from God and damage that relationship. It reads like both correspondence and a strategy book on spiritual oppression.

One point Screwtape made impacted me greatly. He tells Wormwood that one of their greatest weapons is to get humans to live somewhere outside of the present. If they can get us living in the past, then we are either so wrapped up in the hurt there, or so living in the "good old days", that we miss the opportunity to live with God right now, this present moment. Right now, when we are receiving the grace that He is raining on us. Conversely, if they can get us living in the future, then we are still living somewhere else than God's grace. If we are making plans to act in the future, we are not acting now. If we are living in fear of what is in store for us, then we have lost our joy and (yet again) are missing the grace and protection that God is giving us right now.

Most of these fears are imagined anyway. And they will never be as bad as we figure they will be, mainly because most of the fears are opposed to each other. We will never live all of the many possibilities we imagine may or will come. They will never be added up and heaped on. We only stack them up in our mind and, in doing so, we live in fear as opposed to faith.

Read the book. Lewis makes his own points better than I can begin to try to. The point is, live in the present. Live in the grace that God is granting you RIGHT NOW. He will not stop granting it when the next moment becomes your present moment. As Lewis puts it, the future is nothing more than that which you will travel into exactly 60 minutes an hour. It is a journey that you are taking with God.

Mat 6:26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

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