Finding Your True Self in the Valley

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 favourites 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. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) 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 be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). The Screwtape Letters (pp. 38-39). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Suffering is a strange thing. Lewis talks about it as the "trough". In Letter 8 of "The Screwtape Letters" (Lewis' writes from the perspective of Screwtape, a demon who is writing to his nephew and protege as he works to derail the faith of a human) he contrasts what God wants for us, and what the realm of evil desires for us. The chief difference is that evil takes, and God gives.

The irony is that we would tell ourselves that if we can live how we truly desire, if we can make our own choices, if we can control our own destiny, then we will be a sort of pseudo-god; certainly we'll be the gods of our own universe. This was the lie that was told since the beginning, when the bond between God and man was shattered when man decided that instead of accepting the psuedo-God likeness he already had, he would attempt to replace it with an image he found more desirable. Rather than replace the image, what we found (and find, in our own lives), is that sin doesn't give us more identity, but actually robs us of our identity. The status we thought we'd gain turns out to be a lie. We end up being less ourselves than we would have been otherwise.

This is often the result of suffering. All that we would identify with begins to be stripped away and we find that at the core, in the deepest parts of our soul, was written an identity long ago that is more us than we have ever known; deep inside is the true us, the one that is now being filled again with the perfection of sons and daughters through Jesus Christ.

Screwtape would rather that men blindly give in to passions/desires/sin. God would desire that men willingly and gladly follow. They are replicas, but only because they are distinct.

The Trouble with Religion

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”

— The Horse & His Boy, C.S. Lewis

Religion is a wicked taskmaster. It is a tyrant that tells you how you can be "good", how you can be "better", that your ultimate righteousness is just one step further ahead–and at the same time, your destruction only a step behind.

The worst part about religion, at least in the sense that the New Testament most often describes it, is that it teaches you how to be good and do good things. The religious leaders in Jesus day and the plethora of other religious teachers throughout early church history had a similar theme to their message: Yes, God loves you...but only if you obey. Consequently the adherents of the religious teaching would look good, do good things, help others, and serve God, but it was always out of fear. Fear that others would find them out, fear that they may not be as good as they had hoped, and ultimately, fear that God would stop loving them. The truth is that religion is a never-ending ladder that you just can't climb.

The Gospel frees us from the tyrant of the law, and it's taskmaster, religion. It turns the old teaching in it's head: God does not love us because we obey. We obey, because God already and always loves us. The Gospel story is the story of God's one-way love towards us, even when we didn't deserve it, couldn't obey, were running in the opposite direction, trying to displace God with our own "gods"...God loves us anyway. When we begin to really understand that reality, our obedience has nothing to do with fear that God might somehow stop loving us–why would he stop loving us now? He has always known who we really are–but rather is driven by the fact that he will never stop loving us! God loves us. The more we understand that love, the more we will obey.

Unfortunately, when people are set free from the driving whips of religion, they often find that they do not exactly know how to have the discipline of obedience. Their obedience in the past was driven so hard by external forces and people and perceptions and law that it never really took root in their heart of hearts; they never really learned how to obey. They just learned how to avoid getting the whip–and these are different things.

For some it happens when they go to college and find that once the taskmaster is no longer around, they no longer have to obey. This is not because of the Gospel; it is simply evidence of what we already know to be true: if our obedience was only the result of a fear of a negative consequence, then once the fear is removed, so is the obedience. 

But for others, the same phenomena is seen when they finally discover the Gospel. Sometimes, the freedom they begin to experience as they hear the truth leads them not to more obedience, but for a time, to what appears to be less obedience. Perhaps this is why the apostle Paul had to remind the early church not to take license with Grace. Just because you are saved totally, freely, and forever, does not mean that you go on sinning. Actually it will lead to the opposite. But for many people freed from the shackles of religion, there is a time when they realize that they don't actually know how to obey. They have to relearn, because they have to be retrained. Obedience is no longer the result of the whip; it's the result of a heart softened by love.

Religion is a wicked taskmaster because the law can never produce what it promises. In fact, it always results in the opposite. Press a person with religion, and for a time, they will appear to have improved. Stop pressing, and you'll find that they haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. As soon as there is no one to force them to do something, they find they don't have the power to force themselves.

Only the Gospel ultimately leads to obedience, because the Gospel starts with the heart and transforms our very desires. We can't force ourselves to be better, but when our heart changes, we find that we don't have to force ourselves at all. It starts slow, eventually seems to come naturally, and one day, it will come perfectly.