Preached 5/9/10

Confirmation Sunday/Mother’s Day

Preached by Dr. Paul R. Smith

West Side Presbyterian Church

Contact: office@wspc.org

A BRIEF CORRESPONDENCE

WITH THE DEVIL, VOL. IV

[Matthew 19:16-26]

Introduction: I have a letter to share with you this morning, part of a series of correspondence, apparently, which contains some interesting insights that have enabled us to pray for and challenge our Confirmation Class for the last several years. Many of you are familiar with C. S. Lewis’ collection, intercepted somewhere along the line (he couldn’t tell us exactly how), a correspondence between a senior devil and a junior devil – The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, of course, is the name of the senior devil and he has a nephew, who is kind of a rookie tempter, whose name is Wormwood. And this correspondence is . . . well, “encouraging” may be stretching it a little bit because they are demons after all, and encouragement is not what they do, but it is instruction to his nephew about how to be more effective in tempting. Well, that correspondence, of course, has continued. Those demons are still very active and, it turns out, they are also very focused and personal. And we’ve been able, fortunately, to intercept correspondence that relates to our own Confirmation Class. This is the fourth year we’ve been able to do this. And based on that correspondence, I’ve chosen this passage from Matthew 19 which I think is very significant. Actually, I was tipped off to it by Screwtape himself though he didn’t realize the impact it might have.

Beginning with Matthew 19:16: “Now a [young] man came up to Jesus and asked, ‘Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?’” That’s a question we all have, isn’t it? How good to I have to be to get eternal life?

[Read Matthew 19:17-19]

This is the way Jesus himself had summarized at least half of the law: loving God and loving your neighbor.

Verse 20ff. : The young man said,

“All these I have kept [I am a good man] . . . What do I still lack?”

Jesus answered. “If you [really] want to be [all I created you to be, if you want to be] perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

This was obviously a challenge for this young man because he had great wealth, verse 22 tells us, so “he went away sad.”

[Read Matthew 19:23-24]

Verse 25-26: “When the disciples heard this [they knew he was talking about more than wealth here], they were greatly astonished and asked, ‘Who then can be saved?’” If it’s that hard, who can be saved?

“Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’”

Let’s pray that this word will be clear as we consider this correspondence and how it might apply to us and to our Confirmation Class in particular.

Prayer for Illumination – Lord, as we come now to the climax of this worship service, we really want to hear you. So I pray that you would help us to know what to do about this correspondence, about the specter of temptation that haunts our Confirmation Class, indeed haunts us all. We want to listen to your voice and to your word. So we ask you to open our minds and our hearts to hear, to understand, to receive your revelation of truth. We pray it in Jesus’ name, AMEN.

Let me just read the letter. I think it will be self-evident.

My Dear Wormwood,

I don’t want to hear any whining about this year’s Confirmation Class at West Side Presbyterian Church. You amaze me with your lack of development as a demon. We’ve been talking about this for years. You should be ashamed of yourself.

You tell me this isn’t fair – that you are at a severe disadvantage with this particular class of young people. And as near as I could tell from your garbled message on my hell phone, the reason for your complaint is that every one of these students is just basically such a good kid. Every one of them has been raised in a Christian home by loving Christian parents. Every one of them has a good background in the Christian faith through Sunday school, Bible school, youth activities, and now the Confirmation class. And now every one of them is publically declaring their intention to follow Jesus Christ.

“Demon up,” boy! If our job were easy there wouldn’t be any need for us. If all we had to do was herd a mass of politically-correct lemmings over a cliff, what would be the distinction in that? The real test is what we do when the odds are stacked against us. And frankly, if you’re going to have a “melt down” over being assigned a half a dozen good kids to deceive, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving here. This is where we begin to separate the Pro-Tempters from the Pretenders, and our Father Below will not tolerate any excuses for failure.

Let me suggest a strategy – and may I say, this has actually worked very well in the church at large for many centuries! You are going to think I’m crazy when you hear this, but that is just the point. It is such a subtle strategy that most Christians fall for it. . . . I want you to keep on encouraging them to “be good.” I’m serious! This may not be as easy as it sounds. True, they have grown up basically with the habit of being good. But right now they are in their teens, and their parents are fearing that they may rebel and do bad things. That is just what we do not want, and the reason is that their conscience has been forming for many years. If they do something now that is really contrary, both to their parents’ rules and to God’s will, they are at risk of recognizing that and feeling genuine remorse and possibly even making a stronger commitment to follow Christ than ever. You can see where that might lead!

But that’s not really the most brilliant thing about this strategy. What we really want is for them to be satisfied with being good, and to come to believe that all God cares about is that they be “good.” What they must not be allowed to see is that God has not called them to be “good,” He has called them to be disciples! He has not just called them to do their best to obey Him, He has called them to take their relationship to Him so seriously that it revolutionizes their life! If we can keep them congratulating themselves that they have been good – or at least a good deal better than the average – they may never see that the actual call of a Christian is to dare to challenge our Father the Devil for the souls of men and the revolutionizing of their world.

One of the greatest failures of Hell in decades of hilarious and relatively easy successes in corrupting the younger generation was the sudden appearance of those two brothers, Alex and Brett Harris, and their disgusting book, Do Hard Things. Slimebog got a hundred years in solitary for that failure. And you never know what’s going to happen when such a movement gets started among youth. The two of them are now leading the charge in a growing movement of Christian young people who are rebelling against the low expectations of their culture by choosing to "do hard things" for the glory of God. They actually feel called to do the extraordinary for God, and to make real and substantial changes in the world. In other words, they understand that Jesus never called anyone to be a Christian. He called everyone to be a disciple.

Wormwood, we need to reverse that impulse before a whole generation of “good kids” begins to actually change the world and undermine all the corruption we have worked so long and so hard to spread. I hope you understand the trade-off here. If we can get them to settle for being good, we can keep them out of trouble and on the sidelines in the real battle for their generation’s soul.

Our job, to put it simply, is to substitute the idea of “being a good Christian” for Jesus’ actual call to be a “bold disciple” – to convince them to settle for “not making trouble” and to miss the fact that God wants them to “make a difference.” We want them to settle for doing the acceptable thing and never think about doing the hard thing. We want them to be satisfied with not breaking things and never see that their real call is to fix things. We want them to think that “going to church” is the same as “being the church,” that “having Jesus in your heart” is more important than taking Him into the world.

They often make a big deal of “not following the crowd,” but that will not be nearly as disastrous for us as their recognition that they need to step up and lead the charge. We have generally been quite successful with this. Most Christians will settle for avoiding opportunities to do bad, and never give a thought to seizing opportunities to do good. They think of Christianity as being primarily about what they don’t do, rather than what they do do.

The original disciples saw this, and unfortunately they wrote about it in their gospels, but fortunately for us, most Christians miss it. The disciples tell about the time that a very nice young man came to Jesus and asked what good things he would have to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus gave him a basic list of things not to do, and he said he always avoided doing those things. So Jesus told him, that’s a start, but was he willing to step up now and do the hard thing. Ah, that was a different story. It turned out he was willing to be good, but he was not willing to be a disciple, so he didn’t qualify for eternal life.

Do you see where this is going? Basically, all we have to do with this group is get them to settle for being good. But if you let any of them see that this is not enough – that they need to be willing to step up and act with courage in the power of God’s Spirit – you’re going to end up in the cell next to Slimebog.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape

Well, okay. That’s the word. You have a heads up. You can watch for it. I want to pray for you.

Closing prayer – Father, thank you that your word is eternally relevant. I believe this is an insight into how you might be at work to tempt not only these young people who have just completed the Confirmation Class but a whole lot of the rest of us here as well. So thank you for the heads up. Thank you for the rather sad example of the very nice young man who was willing to do all kinds of good things but not willing to do the hard thing of really being a disciple. I pray that we might be able to see the difference and understand what your call really is. We pray this in Jesus’ name, AMEN.