One Hell of a Story

This is a sermon delivered at The Upper Room, Newmarket, Auckland, on 30 August 2026.

INTRODUCTION

Good evening everyone. Chun here.

This evening I am going to be sharing my thoughts on a great Christian thinker and writer, C.S. Lewis.

If you know Lewis at all, you probably know him from the Chronicles of Narnia. The books first, and then the film adaptations. But that is only a small part of the story.

Lewis was one of the most important Christian writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an academic at Oxford and later at Cambridge, a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, and for most of his adult life he wrote and broadcast extensively about the Christian faith. Books like Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Great Divorce, and the one we are going to talk about tonight, The Screwtape Letters.

For most of my early Christian life, I knew Lewis mostly through other Christian writers. They would quote him, expound on his ideas, refer back to him. And I was always captivated by the way he conveyed Christian ideas. His prose, the way he thinks, is remarkable.

Only very recently did I actually pick up one of his books and read it for myself. I must admit it wasn't an easy read, it took a lot of perseverance. The book is The Screwtape Letters and the idea behind it is brilliant.

Imagine that somehow you were able to intercept the enemy's mail. Instead of reading a book telling Christians how to live, you are reading private correspondence between two demons discussing exactly how they intend to pull an ordinary Christian away from Jesus.

This is essentially what the book is about. It has 31 letters written by Screwtape. Screwtape is a senior devil. And they are written to his nephew Wormwood, who is a junior devil out on his first assignment. And the purpose of the letters is training. Screwtape is passing on the tactics, strategies, tricks of the trade, to help Wormwood pull a recently converted Christian (in Screwtape, the Christian is called the patient) away from his newfound faith.

The Screwtape Letters is a blueprint for spiritual warfare, written from the enemy's side and Lewis lets us read the enemy's mail.

In a way it's a slightly uncomfortable read because it sets out exactly the tactics the devil uses to pull people away from Christ. If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you will recognise a lot of what you find here. Because these tactics are still being used on you and me.

Now some of you may be asking, why the preoccupation with the devil or demons? Arguably we are the smartest generation of all time, with AI and all, we should be past that.

Lewis rightly sounds a warning. Even before he begins, he writes:

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

Disbelieving in the devil altogether or being obsessed with him. And Lewis says the devils are pleased with either one, because both errors take our eyes off the one who actually matters, Christ.

So what I am thinking and saying tonight is not really about demons. It is really about us. About the ordinary, everyday, unspectacular and subtle ways that you and I are being pulled away from Jesus.

I want to take you into four of these letters. We are going to look at the seasons where God feels absent and we wonder if our faith is even real. We are going to look at how we can miss God if we live anywhere except being in the present. We are going to look at the strange boredom that has crept into our faith and this generation's relentless pursuit for novelty. Finally, we are going to look at how the book finishes, which I think is one of the most striking endings in twentieth century Christian writing. I will not spoil it yet.

I hope these four letters speaks to you as much as they spoke to me.

LETTER VIII

Let us start with Letter VIII.

In this letter, we see that the recently converted Christian (or the patient) is beginning to lose some of the fervour of his early faith. The excitement he had at his conversion is fading. His prayer, which used to feel warm and alive, has gone dry. Reading his Bible feels different than it did a few months ago. To use Screwtape's phrase, from his perspective, his religious phase seems to be dying.

I suspect most of us have known this experience for ourselves, whether we are new Christians or decades old. The times or seasons where God feels far and absent. Our prayers are dry and we find ourselves simply going through the motions. Our worship feels lifeless. We read the bible and feel uninspired.

Wormwood, in his inexperience, thinks this is a sign that they are winning. That the Christian or patient is on his way out of the faith. But Screwtape corrects him. Screwtape tells Wormwood that this is the intended design of the human experience. He gives it a name. He calls it the law of Undulation.

The pattern of peaks and troughs in our lives is normal.

There will be seasons when God feels near and close, and there will be seasons when he feels far and absent. There will be seasons when our prayers are full of life, and there will be seasons when they feel empty. There will be times when life is good, and there will be times when trials and tribulations come.

The peak and the trough follow each other as surely as summer follows spring. So enjoy the peak. But do not despise the trough.

I want us to remember that, it is at the trough, surprisingly, that God does his deepest and most meaningful work in our lives. As John Nash says - God's silence is not evidence of his absence

God desires for us to make the choice to follow Jesus. Freely. And more than ever, he desires for us to make that choice in the trough. Because a choice made in the trough is made by our will, and not carried along by the good feelings of the peak. Anyone can follow God when the worship is soaring and the prayers feel alive and the presence of God palpable. But who are we when all of that is gone?

That is what the trough reveals. And that is why God allows it.

Screwtape says this and it is one of the most profound lines in the whole book. Speaking of God, he says:

“He cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

In other words, God will not force us into loving him. He wants to be chosen. And the trough is where we make the choice, it is where the choice is real.

And here's the biggest lesson of this letter. Screwtape tells us exactly what hell is most afraid of and I quote:

“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.”

[Pause. Consider reading it a second time, slower.]

Still obeys.

Screwtape says hell is never in more danger than at that moment because that kind of obedience proves that faith was never just a feeling.

In 1964, Mother Teresa, wrote one line that captures what we just talked about:

“I accept not in my feelings, but with my will, the Will of God.”

So if you are in a trough tonight, hear this. You are not failing. It is not a problem, it's actually a clue. A clue that you may be where God does his deepest work. Keep showing up. Keep the Christian practices, prayer, church, community, giving, sacrament. Keep obeying.

Hell has no answer for that.

LETTER XV

Now let us move on to one of my favourite letters. Letter XV.

It is my favourite because I think it is an antidote for our modern life.

Think about the world we are living in right now. Our daily lives are being disrupted by AI, and we worry whether our jobs will still be around for much longer. The cost of living is making life more stressful and more uncertain than ever before. There are wars, and political instability, and conflicting ideologies pulling in every direction. And underneath all of it, we are unsure what we can do to stop the pervasiveness of social media and our devices, and what it is doing to us particularly the younger generation.

If you think this is unique to us, It's worth noting that the people who first read these letters were reading them in the middle of the Second World War while the bombs were falling on London. So when we come to this letter feeling anxious about the future, we are certainly not the first, or the last for that matter.

What does Screwtape say about this in his letter?

He tells Wormwood that, the tactic is keep the Christian anxious about or preoccupied with the future. And what that means is that Wormwood must try to pull humans away from the present, to keep them out of it. Get them to them focused on the future - the unknown. Keep them anxious and fearful about what is to come and worrying about something that is hard or impossible to control.

Why the future and not the present?

Because the present, Screwtape says, and I quote “is the point at which time touches eternity”.

[Pause]

Let me say that again. “The present is the point at which time touches eternity”. This is one of Lewis' most beautiful ideas.

Think about what that means. The past is gone. We cannot live there. The future does not exist yet. We cannot live there either.. And Screwtape knows that if he can keep us anywhere but the present, then we will likely miss God.

So how do we want to live our Christian lives in times like these?

Here is how I think and feel about this.

For a Christian, it simply means living in daily obedience, bearing today's cross, receiving God's grace today and giving thanks for what God has presently given, That is where we will meet the eternal God.

We do our best work, and our most creative work. We are purposeful about our calling, in every area of our lives, whether that is our study, our job, our marriage, our parenting. We serve our church, we do community.

We go to work. We spend time with our families. We eat meals with our friends. We play our sport. We do the ordinary things of an ordinary week, and we receive today as the gift it actually is.

Lewis' encourages us to do 'human and sensible things' even under the real threat of the atomic bomb in his essay On Living in the Atomic Age.

And then we let go. We commit it all to God, and we get on with living in the present.

Jesus says:

In the Sermon on the Mount:

“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34)

Paul says:

“Behold, now is the favourable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2)

The present is here and real. And God is in it with us now.

LETTER XXV

Now let us move to the next letter. Letter XXV.

In this letter, Screwtape advises his nephew to feed our desire to chase the next new thing or novelty. To keep us bored with ordinary life and rather bored with the same old Christian life. He tells Wormwood to plant in our hearts what he calls the 'Horror of the Same Old Thing'.

Screwtape and Wormwood, wants to keep us unsatisfied, restless and always wanting.

The world we live in now, our devices, and social media, is built to do exactly that, to keep us seeking, wanting and consuming more. In other words, Screwtape wants us to have a fear of or even perceived to being stagnant.

The scary thing is that, without us ever knowing, it shapes our faith. We are in danger of always looking for the next church, the next worship trend, the next prayer technique and so on.

Recently, the NZ Herald talked about The rise of the Bible diet, a social media eating trend based on the Scriptures.

Screwtape has a name for it. He calls it 'Christianity and'.

So we get Christianity and the Bible diet. Christianity and self-care. Christianity and success. Of course, none of this is wrong in itself.

But we do face a fight to keep our faith centred on what it actually means to be and live as a Christian

In this letter, Screwtape is devious because he understands something true. He knows that change was God's idea in the first place. God built change into the world. But he built it and held it inside permanence. And Screwtape's whole plan is to pull those two apart.

God made us to love change but held it inside permanence. That is why He gave us the seasons in the natural world or the rhythm of a week, month or year. Change that keeps returning to something fixed.

We see it in action at The Upper Room when we follow the church calendar year after year. We see it when someone opens the Bible, the same Bible the church has been reading for generations, and finds something in it they have never seen before.

Change held inside permanence.

What Screwtape wants is for us to chase change with no permanence at all. Change for its own sake and novelty at any cost. Because he knows that if we do, we miss the whole point of being a Christian and we move outside the intended design.

Screwtape knows that novelty always fades. It gives us a little less each time, so we need the next one more if not sooner. Screwtape calls it, in effect, the ultimate diminishing return.

And you know what the remarkable thing is. Science says exactly the same. A psychiatrist at Stanford named Anna Lembke wrote a book about this, called The Dopamine Nation. She spent years studying people caught in every kind of compulsion, from drugs to gambling to endless scrolling. And she found the same pattern every single time. The more we consume the less we are satisfied. Her conclusion: the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain.

So what do we do? How do we insulate ourselves, as Christians, from this?

First, we recognise it for what it is. Change is God's design and he has held it inside permanence. This means we can stop chasing or looking. We should not be deceived into believing that the next new thing will meet our deepest longings or let it shape of Christian lives.

We can rest in the familiar. We go deeper, further, and longer, rather than always newer. We keep doing the ordinary Christian things, prayer, bible reading, worship, community. From that, we discover, to our surprise, a kind of delight, serenity and contentment we can find nowhere else.

The truth is, it was never in the next new thing. Ultimately, it is in the person of Jesus.

Read Isaiah 55. It opens with God asking why we spend our money on what is not bread, and our labour on what does not satisfy. And then he invites us, simply, to come and eat, and be satisfied, in him.

There is nothing in God that is the Horror of the Same Old Thing. In fact it is the opposite.

Eugene Peterson, a pastor, wrote a book called “a long obedience in the same direction”. I really like that. The same direction. Year after year.

And there is nothing stagnant about that.

LETTER XXXI

Finally, I want to jump right into the last letter. Letter XXXI.

Here, the patient (or the Christian) is dead. He was killed by a bomb, in an air raid, in the middle of the war.

Screwtape has failed. He was not able to pull the Christian away from his faith. And although death may look like the final thing, it is not. It's actually the climax. The Bible tells us, death has been defeated.

I will not dwell too long here, except to say this.

In death, the patient or the Christian finally sees.

He sees the devils for what they were. All those years of cunning and scheming. The times in the trough, when God felt absent, the times being anxious about the uncontrollable future, and all the times he chased the next new thing. All of it, he now sees, was one long campaign to pull him away from God.

And then, most remarkably, he sees Jesus.

And he understands, for the first time, that Jesus has been with him his whole life. The book talks about the presence he half-felt as a child. The moments of unspeakable beauty. The kindnesses. Or all the events he put down to coincidences. The music that stirred something in his heart.

The patient looks at him, and says:

“So it was you all the time.”

Here is the promise for us too.

Jesus said, I am with you always, to the very end of the age. He is and has been with us the whole time.

And one day, we will see him. And I believe we will say:

“So it was you all the time.”

CLOSE AND LAUNCH

I hope that tonight, through the Screwtape Letters, you have seen something of the depth and the richness of C.S. Lewis. I hope you have seen how contemporary he still is, how relevant these letters are to us, modern people living modern lives. And more than that, I hope it stirs something in you.

Like I said it right at the start. They are not easy to read. It took me real perseverance. I suspect this is true for many of us.

On Classics for Today, every book is laid out with the original text on one side and a modern, readable paraphrase right beside it. There are study guides, whether you want to go through a book on your own or with a group. It is built to be calm, and simple. No clutter. No noise. Just you and the text.

We are starting with the Screwtape Letters, the very book we have been in tonight. But the dream is bigger than one book. It is to take the best Christian writing of the last two thousand years, Lewis, Bunyan, and many more, and put it back within reach of ordinary people like you and me.

Please, take your time with it. Do not rush it. My real hope is that it becomes a place of solace for you. A place of growth. And for some of you, the beginning of a deeper relationship with Jesus than you have ever known.

Thanks.

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Leading a home group? This sermon now has a four-week study guide, one week for each letter: One Hell of a Story: Four Letters from Screwtape.