Friday
I have often heard Christians talk about being under “spiritual attack” when they are struggling in some way. I think it is important to point out that Satan can and does launch attacks against believers. Sometimes he works top discourage us our hearts through failure, and self-doubt. Sometimes his tactics are to get us to go along with the culture around us so that we will gradually drift from the truth of the Gospel. Other times he accuses us in our hearts and causes us to doubt the love and forgiveness of our God. However, we must also keep in mind that not every difficult situation or spiritual dry spell is an attack of the evil one. I think we may sometimes forget that while Satan is working hard to thwart the work of God in our lives, the Holy Spirit is working even harder to bring about genuine spiritual transformation. In fact, throughout the Scriptures we see God doing some of his best work in the hearts of His people through pain and struggle. Listen to the words of the psalmist from Psalm 42…
As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’ These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. - Psalm 42:1-5
In his remarkably insightful book “The Screwtape Letters”, C.S. Lewis writes about the reality of spiritual warfare in the midst of what he calls “troughs” (spiritual dryness, or the feeling that God is distant). Keep in mind that in this book, Lewis is writing from the fictional perspective of one demon advising another on how to destroy the spiritual life of a human being.
Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on 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… He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Be He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at lest from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its 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…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. (C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters”)
The devil wants very much for the Christian’s troughs and droughts to appear terminal and permanent to him or her. He wants very much for us to lose sight of our Savior’s use of such periods in our lives for His glory. He desires that we should forget that some of our Lord’s favorite subjects have endured these droughts for long periods and have come to know His love and mercy even in the midst of them . Even in our feelings of spiritual desertion, we may still obey the Savior. Such obedience meets with joyful reward. Jesus promised: “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” (1 John15:10)
Jeff Frazier
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment