While shaking my fist at my oven tonight (I need to recalibrate the temperature – it runs, I’m guessing, about 50 degrees too hot) for burning my homemade onion & rye bread, I was listening to audio from one of Pastor Strawbridge’s archived sermons from March of last year entitled, “The Spiritual Discipline of Prayer”.
At the end of the sermon, Strawbridge read a quote from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters that stuck with me enough to replay the audio and jot it down. The quote encourages Christians to pray even when we feel far from God or don’t feel like praying.
As you read this excerpt, bear in mind that it is written from the point of view of the devil teaching another devil how to tempt a new Christian. When the devil refers to “our cause”, it is the cause of getting Christians to fall away from the Lord. The “Enemy” is, in this context, referring to God.
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. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; 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.
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.
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.
*Trough
Pronunciation: \ˈtrȯf, ˈtrȯth, by bakers often ˈtrÅ\
2 a: A conduit, drain, or channel for water; especially : a gutter along the eaves of a building b: a long and narrow or shallow channel or depression (as between waves or hills); especially : a long but shallow depression in the bed of the sea — compare trench