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Pray and Obey Anyway: How God Meets Us in the Valley
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.
This brief sentence at the end of the eighth Screwtape letter may not be as life-changing as other sentences have been for me, but it has certainly been faith-sustaining. I realized this recently when I noticed just how frequently I return to it. I quote it twice in my book on Narnia. Whenever I give a talk on C.S. Lewis, I find myself quoting it (even when I haven’t planned to). In counseling sessions with students or members of our church, the words frequently roll off my tongue. Most importantly, I know how often I preach it to myself in the midst of dry times.
Law of Undulation
The sentence appears in a letter from Screwtape to Wormwood about “the law of Undulation.”
Undulation is a fancy word for “wave-like rhythm.” The law of Undulation refers to a permanent feature of human life in our mortal condition. Screwtape derisively refers to humans as amphibians, creatures with one foot in the spiritual world (like angels) and one foot in the material world (like animals). As spirits we belong to the eternal world, but as animals we inhabit time.
“In all areas of our life, periods of emotional richness are regularly followed by periods of dryness and dullness.”
While our spirits can be directed to an eternal object, our bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual flux. The result is undulation — “the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” In all areas of our life, periods of emotional richness and bodily vitality are regularly followed by periods of dryness, dullness, numbness, and poverty.
Peaks and Valleys
Screwtape explains why God has subjected human beings to the law of Undulation. Fundamentally, God aims to fill the universe with little replicas of himself. He intends for the lives of his image-bearers to be a creaturely participation in his own life as our wills are freely conformed to his will. God wants us to be united to him and yet distinct from him.
Troughs, especially spiritual troughs, serve this larger purpose. At times in the Christian life, God makes his presence manifest and felt. He makes himself sensibly present to us, with an emotional sweetness that empowers us to more easily triumph over temptation. Obedience flows from us like rivers from a living spring. Prayer is like breathing — the most natural and normal overflow of God’s felt presence in our lives. These are the peaks of the Christian life.
But then come the valleys, the troughs. God withdraws himself, not in actual fact, but from our conscious experience, from our felt reality. In doing so, he removes the emotional support and spiritual incentives that made obedience seem so natural and effortless. In these times, God is calling us to carry out our duties without the emotional richness and relish that his felt presence provides (though not apart from his sustaining grace). In doing so, we grow into creatures whose wills are more fully conformed to his own.
Desiring Versus Intending
This brings us to the faith-sustaining sentence, “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” (Screwtape Letters, 42). We can break it into parts in order to understand it better.
Lewis here makes a distinction between “desiring to do God’s will” and “intending to do God’s will.” This distinction is produced by the law of Undulation. Doing the will of God feels hard in the valley. It’s heavy and burdensome because the emotional sweetness of God’s presence is not felt.
In these times, we feel divided from ourselves. At one level, there is no desire. This is the level of the passions, those almost instinctive and intuitive reactions to reality that are closely tied to our bodies. At that level, we feel no desire to do God’s will because God is sensibly absent. His presence is not felt, and so our passions (i.e., desires) are not stirred up. But at another level — the level of reason and will — there is intention. This level is higher (or perhaps deeper) than the level of passions. Here there is a deep and fundamental commitment, even a deep and fundamental and enduring desire to do God’s will.
In such moments, we are like Christ in Gethsemane, saying, “Not my will, but yours be done.” “Not my will,” that is, “I don’t want to do this; I don’t desire to drink this cup.” Nevertheless, at a deeper level, “Your will be done.” That is, “I still intend to do your will, and this intention reflects a deeper and more enduring desire in my heart.”
Gap Between Want and Ought
Lewis expresses this division elsewhere in a discussion on prayer in Letters to Malcolm. Prayer, he notes, can feel irksome. “An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome” (113). And this is deeply unsettling to us, since we were made to glorify God and enjoy him forever. “What can be done for — or what should be done with — a rose tree that dislikes producing roses? Surely it ought to want to?”
If we were perfected, Lewis says, prayer would not be a duty, but a delight. So would all of the other activities we classify as duties. In fact, the category of duty is created precisely by this gap between our spontaneous desires and our real obligations. In other words, the distance between what we desire to do and what we ought to do is what creates the whole category of moral effort.
Lewis, however, insists that duty exists to be transcended. Angels don’t know (from the inside) the meaning and force of the word “ought” (115). Someday, God willing, we too will live beyond duty. Prayers and love to God and neighbor will flow out of us “as spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower” (114). Until then, however, we live in the realm of duty, in which our desires and our obligations are frequently divided.
Lewis knows how to encourage us here: “I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling” (116) — though, we should add, not from a deeper level than God’s grace.
God-Forsaken?
Returning to Screwtape, what frequently smothers our desires is that we “look round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished.” The “seems to” is crucial. Every trace of him hasn’t actually vanished. All of reality continually testifies to its Maker. The heavens perpetually declare the glory (Psalm 19:1).
But in the trough, our perception is diminished. Our felt reality is often out of accord with reality. And thus God “seems to” have vanished. This seeming is potent. We mustn’t underestimate the power of appearances, of seemings. But neither must we make our periodic (and even enduring) seemings the dictators of our actions. Lewis shows us a better way.
Acknowledging Our Valleys
What should the Christian in the trough do? Begin with honesty. Acknowledge the trough. Name the valley. If God seems absent, say so. Out loud.
More importantly, say so to God. The patient in Screwtape “asks why he has been forsaken.” He directs his observation upward, to the God who seems to have forsaken him. In doing so, he follows in a great biblical lineage.
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Psalm 13:1)
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1)
O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me? (Psalm 88:14)
In the face of (seeming) divine absence, faithful saints cry out to God and plead, “Why?” and “How long?” and “Arise, O Lord!” They echo Jesus on the cross, who himself echoed the psalmist: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1) This is what faith looks like in the trough.
“In the face of God’s apparent abandonment, the faithful Christian still obeys.”
The cry of desperation and confusion is faith in the face of felt divine absence. That’s why Lewis contends that prayers offered in the state of dryness please him in a special way. Unsupported by rich communications of the divine presence, lacking the emotional sweetness of the peaks, these prayers come from the deep places of the soul, the heart of hearts, which contains our deepest and most persistent longings and commitments.
And Still Obeys
The sentence crescendos with these final three words: “and still obeys.” In the absence of passionate desire, in the face of God’s apparent abandonment, the faithful Christian still obeys. God’s felt absence is never an excuse for sin. The poverty of our feelings, the dryness and the dullness — these can never be used to justify disobedience.
And make no mistake: that is the demonic stratagem in the troughs — to prey upon our experience of divine absence in order to lead us to abandon him altogether. Which is why the satanic cause is never more in danger than when every sensible support has been knocked out and we cling to Jesus anyway. If we, apart from eager desire to do God’s will, and with God’s felt absence pressing upon us, still cling to Jesus and seek to walk in the light, what else can the devil do?
Even more than that, such faithful obedience, over time and through the valley of shadows, is frequently the pathway to renewed experiences of God’s presence. As Lewis’s hero George MacDonald put it, “Obedience is the opener of eyes.” Faithfulness in the Master’s absence leads to the delight of returning to the Master’s presence. “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master” (see Matthew 25:21).
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If Every Gift Comes from God, Why Thank Anyone Else?
Audio Transcript
Well, Why do we thank anyone? It’s a great question, really. Candace writes in to ask it: “Hello, Pastor John and Tony! Thank you for this podcast. It has been a great help to me. And thanking you two plunges us right into my question: How can we genuinely thank anyone but God? If God is sovereign over all things, what role do people themselves play? I just listened to APJ 1195, “How Does God’s Sovereignty Not Violate Our Decision-Making?” but as these truths are new to me, I think I could really benefit from your answer to this specific question: If you go to a restaurant and are served by a waitress, God gives the waitress all the abilities required to do her job, the opportunity to do her job, maybe the willingness to do her work diligently, and her very life and breath and existence. Since she is working, it seems right to thank her for her efforts, but since the Lord gives us everything, it seems right, in another sense, only to thank him. How do you process this?”
Well, I think this is a very good question, even though some people probably will think it’s totally unnecessary since a spirit of thanksgiving seems like such a healthy trait in a Christian soul. Why would anybody ever question it? One of the reasons why it’s such a worthy question is because — now this is going to surprise a lot of people — I’m not aware of any single place in the Bible at all where one human being explicitly thanks another human being for anything. Isn’t that amazing?
I mean, I could be wrong, so if our listeners find an exception to that, they should write you, and you can forward it to me if you think they’re right. That’s where I am right now. So when I hear this question, I say, “Yeah, I’ve got to come him to terms with that.” I know a very godly Christian scholar who sees that, what I just pointed out, and he infers that that’s his duty. He does not thank people for anything. He thanks God for people, and he may tell them that.
Thanks Be to God
So, it may seem like an unwarranted question, but really it’s not. Now, my own conviction and practice is to say thank you a lot. I say thank you a lot to a lot of people — or something like, “I really appreciate that,” or, “You have encouraged me so much. Thank you.” Candace is asking the question like this: Since God is the ultimate giver in the end — through all things, in all things — why would it ever be appropriate to thank anyone but God?
So, Paul says, “From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36). He says, “Nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25) So, if I’m served well at a restaurant, God created the server, God gave the breath, and God inclined the heart to courtesy. God gave everything that makes my meal pleasant, so God be thanked, not the waiter or the waitress or the server.
“In all of our thankfulness, we should have God ultimately in mind as the giver.”
Of course, that’s true. God did give everything, and God should be thanked. In all of our thankfulness, we should have God ultimately in mind as the giver and sustainer and the providential guide in every good that happens to us — indeed, in every bad thing that happens to us, which God turns for good if we’re Christians. Which is why Paul says, by the way, “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18), and, “[Give] thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20).
Instruments in God’s Hands
But here’s why I don’t think any of those truths means we should not thank other people for benefits we receive through their hands. I think we all would agree that human beings become instruments in the hands of God for doing many good things that God wants done.
So, for example, Jesus says about Paul when he commissioned him, “He is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel” (Acts 9:15). Then he says to Paul, I am sending you “to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins” (Acts 26:18). And of course, this is the way God has worked ever since the beginning. He gives commandments, he gives promises, he gives warnings, he gives help, but there is no doubt that human beings are God’s primary created instrument for accomplishing in the world what he wants done.
So, the question becomes, How does God think about our instrumentality? What status does the instrument itself — us — have in God’s hands? Can the instrument in God’s hands be called good or praiseworthy or faithful or obedient or pleasing? Does God view the instrument in his hands as proper recipients of his rewards, his commendation, his praise? And if God does view the instruments in his hands as fitting recipients of his own commendation and rewards and praise, then what should our attitude and response toward those human instruments be?
Well, the Bible is very clear that God is the rewarder of those who seek him. Several times in Matthew 6, Jesus says that the Father will reward us for acting certain ways. He says, “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:12). Time after time, we are told God rewards us for the good that we do. Ephesians 6:8 is an amazing statement: “. . . knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord.” Wow.
And even more than reward, Paul says that we’ll all receive our commendation — and literally the word is praise — from God (1 Corinthians 4:5). That’s almost unfathomable. C.S. Lewis calls it “the weight of glory” that we would ever hear “Well done.” How could God speak such a thing to a worm like me, right? So even though everything good that we do is enabled by God, it is sustained by God, it is made useful by God, nevertheless, God has graciously chosen to look upon obedient instruments in his hands as pleasing to him and fitting recipients of his rewards and commendations.
Voice of Humility
So, my heart inclination is to say that if God almighty — in infinite perfection and having no need whatsoever — can look with favor, and reward, and commendation, and praise upon the imperfect work of his people, might it not be fitting that I would look upon human instruments in his hand with a humble sense of expressed, glad indebtedness? That would be my definition of thankfulness: expressed, glad indebtedness to them for their instrumentality in mediating to me good from God.
“Thanking other people for the benefits they give us is a fitting, humble expression of our glad indebtedness.”
God should always be, in my mind, the ultimate giver, and he gets thanks in everything, for everything. But the role of instruments in his hands is an amazing role, and I am put in debt to that instrument as well as to God. If something good happens to me because of another person’s instrumentality in the hand of God, I am glad, and the mixture of gladness and a sense of indebtedness is what I call thankfulness.
It belongs ultimately to God continually, and I think it is fitting that this gladness find expression toward the morally responsible human instruments in God’s hands as well. In a sense, an expression of thankfulness is simply an expression of humility. It says, “I have become your debtor, and I don’t resent it as though you made me a welfare case. I receive it, and I am glad for it, and I want you to know that my gladness is owing in part to you and what you’ve done.”
So, in conclusion, I would say as long as we are not detracting from God, and we’re acknowledging him behind and in everything that comes to us, then thanking other people for the benefits they give us is a fitting, humble expression of our glad indebtedness.
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Is Sanctification the Pursuit of Perfection?
Audio Transcript
Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone! On this final day of 2021, we end our ninth year of podcasting, and we end it talking about holiness and the pursuit of perfection. Here is the email: “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Christopher, and I live in Louisville, Kentucky. I’ve been listening to this podcast for a little over a year now. First, thank you so much for the incredible wealth of knowledge you’ve given to me and all your listeners through this podcast.
“I’ve heard you on many occasions mention the danger of perfectionism as a Christian. I am guilty of this. After thinking a great deal about sanctification and listening to episode 1663 about pursuing holiness, it only gets worse. I recognize that we are not justified by works, but also that the pursuit to live holy lives is the evidence that we are saved. I feel like this makes it very hard for me to come to terms with my own failure.
“Instead of running back to Christ when I sin, I spiral down into thoughts like, ‘Maybe I was never truly saved.’ It’s almost as though I condemn myself into depression, even though Christ brings no condemnation, and it often takes days to work through it. How do I find the balance between pursuing holiness and moving past my failure to be holy? Is pursuing holiness the same as pursuing perfection?”
Those last couple of sentences really are two questions. He says, “How do I find the balance between pursuing holiness and moving past my failure to be holy?” That’s one question. Then the second one is, “Is pursuing holiness the same as pursuing perfection?” Let me answer both of those as best I can, starting with the second one first.
So is pursuing holiness the same as pursuing perfection? It’s an ambiguous question because it switches categories on me, moving from a quality of holiness to a quantity of holiness — perfect holiness.
You can see the ambiguity if you rephrase the question like this: is pursuing partial holiness the same as pursuing complete holiness? And the answer is that there is a difference between partial and complete. So when it comes to holiness, the question becomes, Which are you pursuing — partial holiness or complete holiness?
Perfection Commanded
What makes that question psychologically complicated is that the New Testament teaches that in this life Christians will not attain sinless perfection, and yet we are commanded to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Not perfect just by human standards, but perfect by divine standards, which are God’s standards.
So when Jesus says in Matthew 5:48, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” I think it’s just another way of saying, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37), which is the great commandment.
Matthew 5:48 is also another way of saying what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7:1 — “Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” — or what James says in James 1:4 — “Let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
Perfection Awaited
And yet, in spite of these repeated commands to pursue perfection, we are taught in the Bible that our victory over the power of sin will be incomplete until we’re in the presence of Christ. For example, James 3:2 says, “We all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body” — including the tongue. But then James goes on to say, “No human being can tame the tongue” (James 3:8).
“Our victory over the power of sin will be incomplete until we’re in the presence of Christ.”
There’s also Philippians 3:12: “Not that I have already obtained [the resurrection] or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” Paul never claimed to be perfect. He explicitly said, “I haven’t attained perfection yet.”
Or consider the Lord’s Prayer. Right after we’re told to pray every day for our daily bread, we’re to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:11–12). Now that’s not something we should pray once at the beginning of our Christian life. “Forgive us our debts” is the same kind of prayer as “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus is talking to disciples. This is a command to avail ourselves of regular, repeated forgiveness.
Holy as Can Be
So on the one hand, we have the command to be perfect repeated, and on the other hand, we have the teaching that we will not in this life be perfect. Now back to our question. What should we pursue? Is it even meaningful to say that we are pursuing perfection? It would be like an athlete saying, “I am pursuing a high-jump record of twenty feet, or a long-jump record of one hundred feet, or a one-mile running time of one minute. That’s my goal.” None of those is ever going to happen while human beings are the kind of human beings they are now.
But as long as God is God, his standard cannot be less than perfection, and when he calls us to perfection, he is not naïve. He knows that in this life we will fall short, but he also knows that he intends to give us success in the pursuit of perfection when we see him face to face. The quest is not in vain. We will attain perfection.
And the pursuit of holiness now is essential to attain the final perfecting work of God, so it’s never wrong to say we are pursuing perfection in that sense. As we pursue holiness here, we are pursuing the perfection that God will grant us through the pursuit of holiness someday.
But in the pursuit of perfection — which we will only attain in the presence of God — there is this brief period of time on earth when our pursuit is so embattled, indwelling sin is so strong, satanic opposition is so great, that even though we are counted righteous in Christ by faith, we are not yet completely righteous in our conduct and will not be completely righteous in our conduct until we see Christ face to face.
So perhaps we should say it like this: in our pursuit of perfect holiness that we will one day have in the presence of Christ, let us seek now to be as holy as a justified sinner can be. We don’t know what the limits are on this imperfect holiness, and there are always more victories to be attained.
Patterns of Light
Now back to Christopher’s other question: “How do I find the balance between pursuing holiness and moving past my failure to be holy?” We all fall short not only of what we ought to be, but also of what we could be. So to ask his question another way, how do we not let our failures to be as holy as we ought to and could be depress and so discourage us that we are paralyzed with hopelessness in the pursuit of holiness?
This is difficult, especially when we realize that our lives must bear witness that we truly are born again, have saving faith, and are justified. We know that we’re not justified by works, but we also know that our works confirm our justification. So how do we enjoy the assurance of our salvation when our holiness remains imperfect?
Let me just point to one passage of Scripture that is so important, and I pray that we will all linger over it long enough to let it have its assurance-giving effect. Here’s 1 John 1:6: “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” In other words, how we walk testifies to whether we really have a relationship with God.
“The imperfect Christian does not claim perfection, but he does claim to walk in the light.”
He goes on to say, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). So he is saying that walking in the light is essential to show that we are being cleansed from our sins by the blood of Jesus.
Now 1 John 1:8: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” So he says, “Walking in the light cannot mean sinlessness” — let that sink in. Walking in the light cannot mean sinlessness because he just said, “You have to walk in the light,” and he just said, “If you say you’re sinless, you’re dead wrong.” Well, what then does walking in the light mean?
So he goes on in one more verse, 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So here is John’s description of the imperfect Christian. The imperfect Christian does not claim perfection, but he does claim to walk in the light — because if you don’t walk in the light, you don’t have fellowship with God, and the blood of Jesus doesn’t cleanse or cover you from sin.
What then does “walk in the light” mean if it doesn’t mean sinlessness (1 John 1:7)? His answer is that it means a pattern of obedience that involves regular, sincere confession of sin. The person who walks in the light has enough light to see sin for what it is, to hate it, to confess it, to receive forgiveness for it with thankfulness and humility, and to press on with fresh resolve to love God and people better. I think that’s the apostle’s answer to Christopher’s question, and now we need to pray that God would work the miracle of this biblical pattern into our lives.