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More Or Less!
Are you wise enough to invest your
life and wealth in that which creates eternal value, or foolish enough to work from early morning till late at night to accumulate
that which you cannot keep?
A Prayer begins . . .
Our Father in heaven, we seek first the Kingdom of Heaven.
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You matter to us!
When the original copy of our SoAmazing Letter is written, it is addressed to Marilyn, my wife. Thinking that if she likes it, so will you.
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Two selected book quotations begin . . .
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Junior Tempter On The Carpet!
Category: Fiction
Keywords: Wormwood, Screwtape, amateurish, blunders, Coleridge, prayer, Harper San Francisco, Harper Collins Edition, Lewis, C. S. Lewis
"My dear Wormwood
The amateurish suggestions in your last letter warn me that it is high time for me to
write to you fully on the painful subject of prayer.
You might have spared the comment that my advice about his prayers for his mother
'proved singularly unfortunate.' That is not the sort of thing that a nephew should
write to his uncle--nor a junior tempter to the under-secretary of a department. It also
reveals an unpleasant desire to shift responsibility; you must learn to pay for your
own blunders.
The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention
of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy's
party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he
remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against
that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and
unregularized; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to
produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and
intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not
pray 'with moving lips and bended knees' but merely 'composed his spirit to love'; and
indulged in 'a sense of supplication.' That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and
since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practiced 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. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily
position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must
always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their
souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us a putting things into their minds;
in reality our best work is done by keeping things out . . . .
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
SoAmazing Review: Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters,
takes a diabolical look at the pitfalls faced by humans as they seek to grow spiritually. The subtleties employed strike close to home.
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Eschew Dated Practices
Category: Evangelism
Keywords: thoughtful, individualistic, logic, evidence, truth, experience-oriented, community, personal truth, absolute truth, spiritually, people, core values, sacred practices, God, Christ, InterVarsity Press, Richardson, Rick Richardson
"Every group begun before the late 1960s is probably wired up to
reach the more thoughtful, individualistic, scientific kind of person who trusts
in logic and evidence and cares about truth. Most people today are more
experience-oriented, hungry for community and concerned about personal but not
absolute truth. Many today don't even believe absolute truth exists; most are
sure that even if absolute truth exists, no one group or person has it. Our
boxes can keep us from reaching those often spiritually seeking people. Every
ministry born in the 1960s or before probably needs significant and sometimes
painful soul-searching and change, especially in the area of its sacred
practices, in order to thrive and be fruitful today. We struggle to commit to
these changes, fearing that if we give up certain sacred practices and
strategies, we will lose our purpose, orthodoxy and identity and cease to please
God.
But there is a way out of our dilemma: distinguishing between our
core values and our sacred practices. We need to embrace and hold on to core
values. We want people to know the Scriptures, to think with the mind of
Christ, to love God with heart, mind, soul and strength, to love their neighbors
as themselves. But churches' and ministries' ways of fulfilling their core
values may have worked in the past but may be holding them back from reaching
people in the process."
SoAmazing Review: Rick Richardson's strong commitment to core values does not
prevent him from finding new ways to help people experience God's good
news.
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