Entitlement. Confusion. Pride.
These are the primary weapons the Adversary uses to distract us from a life driven with purpose, the very realities of Truth and Eternity and experiencing the most gratifying human existence—one with God at the helm.
"The Screwtape Letters," written by C. S. Lewis, is a collection of letters by Screwtape, a mature tempter and demon, to his newbie-nephew, Wormwood. When teaching Wormwood to darken his patient’s intellect, Screwtape says,
“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.”
What kind of “claims on life” do people contrive? Maybe that we deserve the right to spend our money how we prefer? Or that the degree of effort that we give depends on our level of energy or feelings toward whoever demands our work? Lewis uses one example we can all relate with: time usage.
“Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him… You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.”
The demons fighting against us encourage a mindset of entitlement. “The money I make is mine, and therefore I control how it is spent.” “The gifts I have are to be used when I am benefited most by them.” “I will help that person, but not until my needs are met.”
What does Satan and those in Hell’s “Lowerarchy” think about this mentality?
“The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels.”
No demon in Hell, who sees eternal realities for what they are, can argue for the idea that we possess our own time. Screwtape continues on teaching about this attitude of ownership, and how it should not be questioned, but encouraged. That is how Hell operates—trying to create passivity in people and to limit the use of their God-given intelligence and critical thinking without giving much consideration to their ways:
“Wrap a darkness about it, and in the centre of that darkness let his sense of ownership-in-time lie silent, uninspected, and operative.”
How they go about manufacturing this mindset is subtle, invokes the use of confusion and begins young in life. Consider the examples Screwtape lists and analyze your heart and speech to see if any ounce of that insidious sense of ownership has crept in. I surely can see it in realms inside of me.
“We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog,” “my servant,” “my wife,” “my father,” “my master,” “my country” and “my God.”… we have taught men to say “my God” in a sense not really different from “my boots,” meaning “the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit—the God I have done a corner in.”
I want to make my readers aware of this, because I have noticed it in myself and if we are not careful, it can cause us to perceive God and other people erroneously, leading us on a path of dissatisfaction, confusion and in the end, destruction.
Because the truth is, everything belongs to the Lord. The psalmist records:
“The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fullness thereof, thou has founded them.” Psalm 89:11 (KJV)
That means time given to us. The bodies we live in. The money granted us. The gifts and abilities we use. All of these are from God and for God. We own nothing. Rather, everything is on loan and how we use it all matters. Screwtape, who even though is a rebellious creature against the Lord of Lords, is a spiritual being, and can therefore see spiritual realities more clearly than we can, despite how we have eternity planted in our hearts, for we are earthbound in our flesh. He ends with this reality that I pray we would thoughtfully consider, allowing God to speak clearly through and consequently submitting to His will, adjusting how we live:
“And all the time the joke is that the word “mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either our Father [Satan] or the Enemy [God] will say “mine” of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out that in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong—certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says “mine” of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it. Our Father hopes in the end to say “mine” of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest.”
Let the generosity of God produce hearts abounding with thankfulness toward God, for this is His will for us (1 Thess. 5:11). Be watchful: this world and its desires will pass away, but the one who does the will of the Father will live forever (1 John 2:17). Be mindful - pursuing the world is a vain pursuit whose satisfaction is always found wanting. Your soul is worth incalculably more than merely this.
