The gradual road.

Have you ever sat through a sermon, and your mind completely wandered?

Be honest. You don’t have to look at me, you can look at the carpet!

You’re sitting in the seat, you’re nodding your head as the sermon goes along, but mentally, you are checking your grocery list.

or you’re replaying a conversation from Tuesday.

or you’re wondering how much longer the preacher is going to go, checking your watch.

And yes, I see some of you are avoiding glancing at your watches right now, because I brought it up, and now you feel self conscious about it.

But. If you have ever done that. I want you to take comfort in the fact that you are in incredibly good company.

In July of 1940, in fact, it was this weekend in the year. July 21, 1940, so 86 years ago almost to the day.

A Dull Sermon and a Sudden Idea, July 1940

C.S. Lewis was sitting in his ordinary parish church. Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry near Oxford. He was listening to a sermon that he later described as profoundly dry and dull. And as his mind began to drift, a sudden, bizarre thought struck him.

He wondered. What does this moment look like from the other side?

That moment right then, as they all sat in church listening to this sermon.

What does this moment look like from the other side?

What if the real battle for a human soul isn't happening in the grand, dramatic choices of history, but right here, in the quiet, foggy, distracted moments of an ordinary Sunday morning?

Before the final hymn was even sung, the idea for one of his greatest books was born.

He immediately went home and wrote a letter to his brother, Warnie, detailing this flash of inspiration:

I was struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first 'patient'.

C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters, Volume II

The idea, he wrote, was to give the whole psychology of temptation from the other side.

We know it today as The Screwtape Letters.

It is a masterpiece of moral psychology, written as a series of thirty-one fictional letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his young, inexperienced nephew, Wormwood.

Wormwood had just been assigned his very first human "patient" to tempt.

Now, reading this book feels a little different because of the perspective we are reading from. We are reading from the perspective of the demons and tempters.

It’s like stepping into a spiritual mirror-world where everything is completely flipped.

So, before we go any further, we need a quick vocabulary translation guide so we don't get mixed up.

● When Screwtape refers to "The Enemy", he is actually talking about God. ● When he talks about "Our Father Below", he means Satan. ● If Screwtape complains that a day was "disastrous" or "a total failure", that means someone repented, loved their neighbor, or grew closer to Jesus. ● And if he boasts about a "magnificent victory", it means someone successfully ignored their spouse, nursed a grudge, or fell asleep during prayer.

It feels like a totally backward world!

But here is why this matters for us sitting in this room today.

The devil is a terrible theologian, but he is a brilliant psychologist.

He doesn't waste his time trying to convince us that God doesn't exist while we’re sitting in a church service.

He's much smarter than that. He doesn't mind if we come to church.

In fact, Screwtape is perfectly happy if we attend church every single Sunday, provided we leave here completely distracted, slightly annoyed by the person singing off-key behind us. BUT entirely unchanged.

The enemy's strategy isn't to make us a cartoon villain. It's to make us busy.

It's to make us numb. It's to keep us safely floating in a state of comfortable, spiritual lukewarmness where we never actually do anything with the faith we claim to have.

When we started this summer series six weeks ago, I made you a promise.

I told you that Lewis engages both our reason and our imagination.

And I explicitly told you that The Screwtape Letters is where his imagination holds up a mirror to the human heart, sneaking past the watchdog of our intellect, to show us who we really are.

Today, we are paying off that promise.

But before we crack open these letters, we have to clear the air of two major misconceptions. Lewis lays them down in the very first lines of his preface:

"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."

The Screwtape Letters

I just want to preface this sermon this morning by saying that today is not a sermon about being scared of the devil.

It is not an invitation to look for a demon behind every bush or a spiritual conspiracy under every rock. That is the very common error of superstition.

Trust me, if you burn your toast tomorrow morning, it's probably because one of your kids left the toaster on high, not because of a spiritual attack.

But the other error is just as deadly, thinking that spiritual warfare is a fairy tale, or that the enemy has no interest in our ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

It's believing that the battle only happens in horror movies, rather than in the way we respond to our spouse when you're tired, or how we handle our phone when nobody is looking.

In 2 Corinthians 2, the Apostle Paul warns the church to live with a sober awareness.

in order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes

2 Corinthians 2:11

The Screwtape Letters is essentially thirty-one letters of those exact schemes, handed to us, showing us precisely how the enemy weaponizes our ordinary, daily lives against us.

And as I said last week. Today, we’re going to pull back the curtain on his playbook.

Point 1: The Mechanics of the Gentle Slope (James 1)

FIRST up. We will start with the mechanics of this Gentle Slope as he describes it, the mechanics of the gentle slope.

Last week, we closed our study of The Great Divorce with a heavy but urgent call to surrender.

We talked about how souls end up on the wrong side of the chasm through a thousand small, daily negotiations.

We looked at the ghost clutching the red lizard of lust and sin on his shoulder, begging the angel.

"Can't we just quiet it down? Can't we manage it gradually, some other time? Not today."

Well. The Screwtape Letters flips the script. It shows us that exact same slow, quiet negotiation, but from the tempter’s side of the desk.

Screwtape’s absolute core strategy, his golden rule of damnation, is that he rarely ever wins with a spectacular, flash-in-the-pan, dramatic sin.

He wins with the gradual drift. He wins by ensuring we never notice the ground moving beneath our feet.

Listen to the somewhat alarming tactical advice he writes to his nephew, Wormwood, in Letter 12.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The size of the sin does not matter, Screwtape goes on, provided its cumulative effect edges the man away from the light. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.

Let that sink in for a second this morning, and remember when he says "Enemy" here, he is talking about God.

Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.

Think about how absurd that sounds to our ears.

We have this spiritual grading scale in our minds, don't we?

We put murder, betrayal, and massive public scandals at the very top in bright red ink.

And then way down at the bottom, in light pencil, we put "playing a few too many games of cards," or today. maybe scrolling through social media, or getting lost in a digital streaming rabbit hole.

But Screwtape doesn't care about our grading scale. The demonic realm doesn't need to get us to commit a felony to win our soul, they just need to keep us occupied with trivia.

The enemy doesn’t need to convince you to become an atheist, or an ax murderer, or to completely destroy our family in a single scandalous weekend.

He doesn't need us to stage a massive, dramatic rebellion against God, all he needs to do is get us to prefer nothing over Christ.

He just wants to distract us, to lull us into a spiritual sleep, until our heart grows completely numb.

In that same letter, Screwtape lays down the ultimate law of the slow downslide.

"Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

The Screwtape Letters

Think about that imagery: without milestones, without signposts.

If we are hiking up a steep, rocky mountain, we are intensely aware of every single step.

Our lungs are burning, our calves are aching, and you are constantly checking the trail markers to see how far we’ve come.

But a gentle, grassy slope?

You can walk down a gentle slope with our hands in your pockets, whistling a tune, looking at the clouds, completely unaware that with every single stride, we are dropping lower and lower.

There are no sudden jolts to wake us up. There are no dramatic ledges to make us gasp. It is just soft, comfortable, easy walking.

This is the exact biblical anatomy of how temptation actually works. The enemy didn't invent the gentle slope, he just exploits it.

Look at how the Apostle James diagnoses the mechanics of our drift in James 1:14-15.

", but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death."

James 1:14-15

Notice the psychological progression James lays out. It isn't a sudden cliff, it’s a slow, organic process.

The Greek word James uses for "enticed" is deleazo, which is a fishing term. It literally means "to catch with a lure."

A fish swimming in a lake doesn't see a sharp metal hook and think, "Oh, look, a painful instrument of death! Let me go bite that."

No, the fish just sees a shiny, colorful little feather dancing in the water.

It looks completely harmless. It looks like dinner!

The fish is lured by its own natural appetite, it takes a tiny bite, and only at that point does the hook sink in.

That is the gentle slope. It starts with a passing desire that entices us, it moves to an unchecked compromise, it quietly conceives in the dark, it grows into a regular habit, and it finishes, when it is full-grown, in spiritual death.

Nobody wakes up on a Tuesday morning and plans to end up spiritually cold, cynical, and completely bankrupt.

They plan nothing at all. And, the nothing, is exactly the plan.

Screwtape brags to Wormwood that in our modern world, he doesn't even need a major intellectual crisis or a grand vice to keep a human being from God anymore.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The man can be kept in company he dislikes, on subjects that bore him, Screwtape adds, or doing nothing at all for long stretches.

Think about how prophetic that is. Lewis wrote those words in 1941, decades before anyone ever invented a smartphone, an infinite scrolling feed, or an algorithmic notification designed to trap our attention.

Yet it reads like it was written about our lives this morning.

I mean, let’s be honest. Have you ever unlocked your phone to check the weather, and then suddenly, thirty minutes later, you find yourself deep in the comments section of a video explaining how to build a miniature log cabin for hamsters?

You didn’t plan to spend half an hour of your life watching hamsters move into a log cabin.

You don't even own a hamster!

But there you are, staring at a screen, completely hypnotized.

Screwtape is laughing. He’s saying.

"Look at them! I don't even have to tempt them with beautiful, world-class art, or great literature, or deep intellectual conversations. I can literally keep them staring at digital static until their lives evaporate!"

The enemy doesn't have to make us look at something outrageous, he just has to keep us looking at nothing of substance. And these days, that’s not hard at all.

How many hours this week did you quietly give way to nothing at all?

Not to some grand, rebellious vice, just to the fog. Just to the drift.

We intended to pray, we intended to open the Word, we intended to spend quality, uninterrupted time with our spouse.

but the time just quietly evaporated.

We sat on the couch, pulled out the remote, opened an app, and suddenly the clock said 11:30 PM and our souls felt like dry cardboard.

In some ways, this hits the steady and respectable believer the hardest.

The absence of a spectacular fall is not the same thing as standing firm.

The devil's greatest trick isn't making us love evil, it's making us comfortable with mediocrity.

He wants us to look around at our life and say.

"Well, I'm not a criminal. I don't cheat on my taxes. I don't yell at my neighbors. I'm a decent person."

He wants to make us a "decency-worshipper."

Because a decent person on a gentle slope is much easier for Satan to manage than a desperate sinner who knows they need a Savior.

If we think we are safe just because we haven't ruined our life yet, look at the warning Paul issued in 1 Corinthians 10:12.

So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!

1 Corinthians 10:12

The gentle slope is soft underfoot in order to make sure we don’t realize how far down we’ve gone until we try to turn around.

So we should all ask ourselves this morning. Where have I drifted without ever actually deciding to?

Point 2: Spatial Disorientation and the Truth of the Gauges

The second thing we will examine this morning is the spatial disorientation and the truth of the gauges.

When we live on a gentle slope long enough. We suffer from a spiritual version of what pilots call spatial disorientation.

I thought it was time for a flying analogy. It’s been too long. Except for VBS, of course, but that was for the kids.

Years ago, over 7 years ago. I shared a story in a sermon called Flying Blind about an F-15 pilot named Jeff.

When a pilot flies into a dense, blinding cloud bank, they lose all visual connection to the horizon.

There is no blue sky above, no green earth below, just a gray, suffocating wall of mist. I have done my fair share of flying through clouds and fog.

And when that happens, something terrifying occurs inside the human body.

The inner ear, the body’s natural balance system, begins to lie.

The fluid in your vestibular system sloshes around, and your brain starts playing tricks on you.

A pilot can FEEL with absolute, deep physical certainty, with every fiber of their being, that they are flying straight and level, or even climbing, while the cockpit instruments show they are actually upside down in a 60-degree graveyard spiral toward the ground.

In his F-15 fighter jet, screaming through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, Jeff’s mind was screaming at him that the gauges were wrong and his feelings were right. He FELT like he was climbing.

He had to make a brutal, split-second choice: trust his shifting internal perceptions, or trust the fixed instruments on the dashboard.

He survived a very close call with a mountain that day only because he made the agonizing decision to ignore his gut and shift his trust entirely to the instruments.

The fact is. Pilots who fly by the seat of their pants in the fog or clouds don't survive. They crash.

And Screwtape’s entire goal is to keep us flying by the seat of our pants.

He coaches Wormwood to constantly manipulate the patient's feelings, moods, and self-perceptions, ensuring he never looks at the objective truth of his condition.

The demonic strategy is to get us to confuse FEELING close to God with ACTUALLY being close to God.

The tempter whispers.

“If you don’t feel inspired right now, God must not be listening. If you don't feel a warm, fuzzy glow during worship, then the whole thing must be a sham. If you feel bored or tired, this religion must not be real.”

In fact, Screwtape even points out that the enemy can use the church itself as a massive tool for disorientation!

Think about how brilliant, and sinister, this is.

He doesn't try to keep us out of the church building. He just waits until we walk through the doors and then starts messing with our inner ear.

Listen to his advice in Letter 2.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity. I mean the Church as we see it at the local parish.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

What follows is the grocer with the oily expression and his shiny little book, and the man in the next pew whose boots squeak.

The tempter whispers in your ear:

"Look at these people. Look at how hypocritical they are. Look at how boring this is. If this religion were real, you’d feel inspired right now. You wouldn't be sitting behind a guy whose boots squeak, or next to a woman who is clearly checking her phone."

Screwtape loves this because it shifts the patient’s eyes off the horizon of God’s grand, eternal truth and locks them onto their own subjective irritation.

He wants our faith to be entirely dependent on your immediate emotional weather.

If you feel warm, God is real. If you feel bored, or tired, or distracted, then the whole thing must be a sham.

This is why so many Christians live in a state of perpetual spiritual whiplash. They are constantly checking their emotional pulses to see if they are still Christian.

"Do I feel on fire for God today? Yes! Okay, I'm doing great."

"Do I feel dry and exhausted today? Yes. Oh no, God must have abandoned me."

We are flying by the seat of our pants in the fog.

But Scripture and prayer are the flight instruments on the dashboard of the soul.

In aviation, when a pilot's body is screaming that the plane is upside down, they have to look at the Attitude Indicator, the instrument that tells us exactly where the horizon is relative to the aircraft.

It doesn't care about the fluid in our inner ear.

It doesn't care about your panic or our peace.

It just tells the cold, hard, objective truth.

When our feelings tell us that we’re doing fine while we're actually drifting. The Word of God tells us the absolute truth.

It points out the drift before we hit the mountain.

When our heart tells you God has abandoned us because it’s a random Tuesday in mid-July and our routine feels dry, the instruments on the dashboard say.

"God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear" (1 Corinthians 10:13).

The instruments say: "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5).

The instruments say: "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever" (Isaiah 40:8).

We have to stop trusting the fog of our emotions and start flying by the gauges of the Word.

They won’t lie. And often, those gauges will seem to completely contradict what direction we want to go in, or what direction we feel we are going in, but, we must trust them over ourselves.

Because at 30,000 feet in a blinding storm, our feelings will kill us. But the gauges will bring us home.

Point 3: The Trough and the Double-Edged Weapon

But what happens when the fog of our emotions doesn't lift?

What about those seasons where the emotional warmth of our faith completely evaporates, and we enter a dry, cold desert?

In Letter 8. Screwtape explains a fundamental law of human nature to his nephew, the Law of Undulation.

He notes that because humans are amphibians, half spirit and half animal, our lives are a cyclical series of troughs and peaks.

We experience constant undulations, periods of emotional and spiritual warmth, followed by periods of deep aridity, coldness, and dryness.

Screwtape tells Wormwood that the trough is the absolute best time to strike.

"It is during the trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that the principal temptations occur. If you can once think that the dryness is permanent, you’ve won. We want him to value his religion only as long as it makes him feel good."

The Screwtape Letters

The tempter wants to weaponize the dry season. He wants to convince us that because the emotional thrill is gone, our faith was never real in the first place, so we might as well just give up and drift down the slope.

But here is the breathtaking, beautiful irony of the Gospel, which Screwtape admits with complete theological fury.

God uses the exact same dry season for a completely different purpose.

Look at 1 Corinthians 10:13:

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it

1 Corinthians 10:13

In the original Greek text, the word for temptation here is peirasmos.

And it carries a profound double edge. It literally means both temptation to sin, and testing, trial, or proving.

The exact same dry stretch that Screwtape intends as a weapon for our ruin. God intends as the tool for our foundation.

Screwtape watches this happen with horror, writing to his nephew.

"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."

The Screwtape Letters

Did you catch that?

When we pray and feel nothing, but we still pray.

When we open the Word and it feels like ashes, but we still read.

When we don't feel like showing up for our marriage, or our community, or our church, but we choose to love and serve anyway out of sheer obedience to King Jesus.

that is the moment we stop being a transparent, fragile ghost. That is the moment your spiritual roots grow deep into the bedrock of reality.

The Bible frames this testing not as a sign of God's absence, but as the very proof of His development of your character. Look at James 1:2-3:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance

James 1:2-3

The dry season is not God’s abandonment. It is His invitation to grow a durable, unshakeable faith that no longer requires an emotional reward to keep walking.

If all this leaves anyone feeling anxious, remember the core promise of the Gospel, our standing before God doesn't rest on us maintaining a perfect emotional record, it rests entirely on what Christ has already done.

Screwtape’s favorite trap is actually the opposite of grace, he loves to turn us into anxious legalists keeping a nervous ledger of our own spiritual performance.

But we name the drift and the dry season plainly because the God who names them is the exact same God who walks with us through them.

The trough is not the end of your faith. It may very well be the making of it.

So where does that leave us today?

Next week. Kyle is going to take us across the wardrobe threshold into The Chronicles of Narnia.

We are going to continue in this series by looking at the ultimate power of a stronger Love, and the Great Lion who is not safe, but who is entirely good.

We will see the love that completely baffles the gates of Hell.

But today, we are still standing on the gentle slope.

Today, we are staring down the playbook of our own subtle destruction.

Let’s look at what we covered again.

We’ve looked at the mechanics of the gentle slope in James chapter 1, realizing that the enemy rarely wins with spectacular wickedness.

he wins with the gradual drift, making us comfortable with doing nothing at all until our hearts are completely numb.

We’ve looked at spatial disorientation, discovering that our emotions are a deceitful compass in the fog, and that we must fly our lives by the true gauges of Scripture and prayer rather than the seat of our pants.

And we’ve looked at the trough, learning that the exact same dry season the tempter means as a weapon for our ruin. God means as the sacred ground where our roots go down deep into the bedrock of reality.

As Screwtape himself admits in a moment of bitter frustration in Letter 14.

The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best and rejoice in the fact, without being any more glad at having designed it than he would be if it had been designed by another.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

He wants each of us, in the long run, free enough from bias in our own favour to see every creature, ourselves included, as a glorious and excellent thing.

God wants us fully alive. He wants us fully free from the exhausting, suffocating prison of self-obsession.

But we cannot get there by hedging our bets.

We cannot get there by trying to domesticate the small compromises in our life.

If we do, we will end up like the tragic soul Screwtape describes in letter 12, a patient who arrives in eternity - not eternity in Heaven, but he looks back at a life wasted on trivial distractions, and utters the saddest words in the entire book.

"I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

The Screwtape Letters

What a tragedy. To not even enjoy the world, and to completely miss out on God. Just drifting in the middle.

So here is my challenge to everyone in this room this morning.

In just a moment, Kyle is going to lead us in a final song.

And just like last week, as the music begins, I want you to step out of the fog of generic religious assumptions.

The Challenge: Name One Compromise

Is it the hour that quietly disappears into a screen while our family sits ignored?

Is it a habit of gossip we dress up as "prayer requests"?

Is it a quiet, cold resentment we have started to feed because keeping the grudge feels safer than offering forgiveness?

Do not wait for a spectacular fall to wake you up. Look at 1 Corinthians 10:13 again.

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted,he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it

1 Corinthians 10:13

God has already built a door of escape right into our schedule tomorrow morning, or right into that tempted moment on Tuesday afternoon.

The question is not whether we have enough willpower, the question is whether we will humble ourselves enough to take the door He provided.

But I know there is another group of people in this room today.

Some of you are sitting here, and if you are honest, you aren't just drifting on the slope, you are completely exhausted.

You have spent years doing exactly what Screwtape wants, flying by the seat of your pants, trying to manage your own life, trying to be the ultimate boss of your own time, your own identity, and your own morality.

You are hiding out in the jungle of your own self-will, just like Hiroo Onoda - I spoke about him last week, fighting a war he was never meant to win, but we are terrified that if we surrender to God, He will turn us into a boring, passionless ghost.

But. Hear the good news of the Gospel this morning.

The Creator of the universe is not an invading tyrant coming to destroy our joy. He is the rightful King who came to end our hiding.

Two thousand years ago. Jesus Christ stepped onto the battlefield of human history.

He didn't just give us a set of rules to manage our lives. He took the full weight of our rebellion, our drifts, our failures, and our spectacular sins, and He carried them to a Roman cross.

He died the death that WE owed, and He rose from the dead to break the power of the dark methods that hold us captive.

The last word of The Screwtape Letters is the image of the patient dying in an air raid and instantly waking up to see the radiant, shining face of Jesus.

All the years of the demon's whispers, all the fogs of temptation, all the dry seasons vanished in a single fraction of a second when the man looked upon the Lord. Lewis writes.

"This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. The clearing of his eyes are the things that hurt him, but the pain turned into joy."

The Screwtape Letters

We don't have to wait for an air raid to experience that freedom. We can have the clearing of our eyes today.

Today, every single one of us has the ability to change our flight path.

It starts when we stop flying by the seat of our pants.

It starts when we look at the dashboard of our lives and honestly confess where we have been drifting.

when we look at the gauges of God's Word and say.

“Lord, my feelings have been lying to me. I’m in a spiral, and I need to trust Your truth, not my emotions.”

The enemy’s greatest weapon is to keep us coasting.

He wants us to think we can just stay on that comfortable, grassy slope, promising ourselves that we’ll turn around "someday."

But "someday" is the safest road to nowhere. It is the drift that quietly ends in the "Nothing."

If you have never surrendered your life to Jesus Christ, if you have spent your whole life trying to navigate the blinding clouds of this world on your own, ignoring the instruments, and running on the empty fuel of your own self-will, the true Horizon is calling you home.

We were never meant to navigate this alone, we have to trust in the Lord, and not drift into the desires of Screwtape and his workers.

We need to stop flying blind. Step out of the fog, hand over the controls, and come home to the Savior who loves us all.