While the radio, the television, the computer, and the iPhone stand as some of the grandest scientific advancements in the history of humanity they also are some of the most effective breakthrough tools ever made for advancing the powers of Hell.  Because of these devices our world is now incessantly and irreversibly filled with noise.  Silence has gone the way of the dodo bird and western civilization courses.  There is almost no square inch of our daily lives that is not now consumed with a buzz or a hum or a ding of an email, phone call, or entertainment device. 
 
These things are changing our souls and bodies.  The famous French mathematician, philosopher, and apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) once remarked,
 
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”[1]
 
This is a solid truism.  Our inability to sit and think or meditate for any significant amount of time reveals our fear of dealing with ourselves in any significantly intimate way.  Study after study proves that we are less capable of being at peace or in solitude than previous generations.  To date it has been shown that we have shorter attention spans than goldfish do, we have higher levels of attention disabilities than ever before, and we have a woeful capacity to retain basic content information.[2]  For example, in a series of 11 studies conducted by the University of Virginia, it was found that the vast majority of people between the ages of 18 to 77 could not spend a minimum of 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think – even if they were receiving a mild electric shock.[3]  In another study, it was found that while 95% of us can find time to do leisure activities over 83% could spend zero time just sitting and thinking.[4]  These statistics reveal a sickness within our post-modern souls. 
 
We have gotten to the place that silence terrifies us.  The late great Dallas Willard (1935-2013) said of silence,
 
“[S]ilence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life.  It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world and leave only us and God.”[5]
 
Because of this fear we fill the silence with the distractions of incessant activities and entertainment.  The problem is there is never enough of these, and we must therefore invent and consume more and more. 
 
We can do this and not even realize we are doing it! 
 
Consider a regular day you have and how much noise you consume.  It may go something like this: You wake up and grab your cellphone to check the news or watch a few trending videos sent to you the night before.  You get out of bed, get dressed, and make breakfast all the while watching the television or listening to the radio.  You leave for work or school, get in your car, and turn on the radio or plug in your earbuds.  You get to work and sit down to a screen for 7 to 9 hours with intermittent moments of music and/or videos playing in the background all day.  You go to lunch, get a quick meal, surf your phone, and watch more videos or listen to music.  You then go back to work, finish out the day, and drive home while listening to music from your iPod or radio.  You get home, make dinner, and sit down to unwind all the while watching the television or listening to the radio or both while at the same time messaging on Facebook or surfing Instagram.  After dinner you get ready for bed, surf on the apps on your phone a few more hours, or fall asleep to the television.  You wake up and repeat the process.  Sound familiar? 
 
In time this kind of living slowly, unknowingly, drowns out the capacity to hear what God is saying in His still small voice (Zephaniah 1:7; Zechariah 2:13) much less to understand one’s self or neighbors in any meaningful way.  This slow death of solitude on the Altars of Clatter inevitability leads us to have less emotional stability (because we always have to have others cheering us up), far more shallow relationships (because of our inability to talk with spouses or loved ones intimately), and far more mediocre spiritual growth (because we have less and less consistency in Bible reading or prayer). 
 
HELL DELIGHTS IN NOISE & FEARS SILENCE
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Screwtape Letters makes the point well through the mouth of the hellish Screwtape when he schools his nephew demon Wormwood on the power and goal of noise in the works of Hell.  Screwtape’s correspondence to the minor demoniac is as such,    
 
“Music and silence—how I detest them both [Wormwood]! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father [Satan] entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light-years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress.”[6]
 
Satan and his minions love our souls stunted.  One effective way to do this is to ensure we never take time to stand with our soul naked in solitude and stillness before our mind's eye or before the presence of God.  Instead, he likes us bunkered down in our souls, perpetually bombarded in our senses with an incessant clatter so we never find true peace. 
 
Noise is an opiate of the masses.  It dulls us and makes it impossible for us to come to terms with ourselves and to listen for God in any sustained intimate attentiveness. 
 
Amid the incessant clamor of social media personalities, political pundits, TikToks, and memes is it any wonder that sitting to pray, meditate, or even read the Scripture for a sustained period is excruciatingly difficult for us?  From cradle to grave we live in a cacophony of distractions muddling our attention spans and mental dexterity and aggravating our cravings for the ever-shinier and catchier.  Hell rejoices in this. 
 
SEEKING & FINDING SOLITUDE
One problem we have regarding silence is how we view it.  We tend to think of it as the absence of anything; it is the absence of doing.  It is not.  Silence is an activity and discipline which is an endeavor of profound nurturing and rejuvenation of the soul. 
 
The discipline of silence helps limit distractions in our prayer, meditation, and scripture reading; it brings a deeper focus in worship; it revivifies the body and the mind; it realigns our spiritual perspective; it helps us domesticate our mouth and thoughts; it helps us understand more clearly the will of God.[7]  But how do we achieve such silence in this busy world? This is difficult to do (or seemingly difficult to do) in the hustle and bustle of our lives filled with work and extra-curricular activities.  I will not give a long list but consider some of these ways:[8]
 
First and foremost, you must get to a place that you say “No” to other things.  This is the hardest battle.  You must get to a place that you say no to additional responsibilities and disturbances.  Say “No” to the television, to the radio, to the iPad, to the iPhone, and the computer.  You must say “No” to taking on more and more obligations that suck away more and more time from you and God.  Is your job sucking away additional time?  Then say no to more hours.  Are your kids’ extra-curricular activities sucking more and more opportunities for you to have peace in the presence of the King?  Then consider cutting back on how many activities your kids will be part of. 
 
You will find time and make time for those things you deem the most valuable in your life!  An overscheduled, overworked, individual will never find the time nor make the time to spend with God. 
 
Second, realign some of the opportunities of alone time you already have towards solitude with God.  Many of us have periods throughout our day or week when we have “downtime.”  This could be a day off, a period of cleaning the house, an extended lunch break, arriving early or leaving early from work, or a commute to and from work in the car.  In each of these, there is time we have that we do not realize.  We tend to fill these “downtimes” with incessant quantities of noise – Tiktoks, Youtube videos, and radio music.  Instead, allow periods like this to be an intimate meeting house of meditation and prayer and listening to God.  Allow this time to be a period of refreshing and peace, a period of conviction of sins known and unknown, and a time of clarity of purpose in mind and heart. 
 
Third, and finally, try and go somewhere physically to be alone for a time.  This can be going on a walk-in nature, sitting in a park, taking a drive, going to the empty church, retreating into a room in the house, or even getting up earlier before everyone else.  I realize this can be difficult if one has small children.  Perhaps in such instances, the husband or wife can rotate such a schedule to allow the other to go off alone at periods to be with God while the other cares for the kids.  Is this impossible?  Well, be reminded of Susanna Wesley (1669-1742), the mother of the famous evangelist's John and Charles Wesley, who had at least nine children living in her home at one time!  She took care of all of them upon her own accord and yet she still found time for solitude.  Her sons remembered her practice of solitude in which she would throw her apron over her head like a tent of meeting before the presence of God.  When this happened all the children in the house grew silent and did not disturb her, knowing she was meeting God in prayer and silence.[9]  Would we be able to get our kids today to respect our time with the Lord like this?  If not, then what does that tell us? 
 
We make time for babysitters to watch our kids when we go on a date, or we have our spouses cover when we have a boy's or girl's night out?  We rearrange schedules all day long to ensure we will have time for the family cookout or a run to Dairy Queen on a Sunday evening, but what about scheduled time with the Almighty?  Why not the same effort and desire when it comes to being with God alone and in silence?  I believe the answer is we do not see this as important. 
 
CLOSING
Dear friends, let us strive to recover the ancient Christian discipline of silence.  It is such a discipline by which our souls are nurtured and we come to hear our God speak His words of wisdom that quiet our restless souls. 
 
Jesus Himself demonstrated the beauty of silence repeatedly in His earthly ministry.  He would go into the wilderness alone (Matthew 4), He would leave large crowds of people and flee into the mountains (Matthew 14), He would rise early in the morning and go out into the wilderness (Mark 1), and He would depart from the masses constantly seeking Him out (Luke 4).  He did all of this that He could grow in His intimacy with God.  He understood that through solitude and silence His Father would give Him the power and wisdom to live abundantly the spiritual life. 
 
Let us follow the Way of our Master.    
 
1For God alone my soul waits in silence;
    from him comes my salvation.
2 He alone is my rock and my salvation,
    my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken.
Psalm 62:1-2

_____________________________________________________
[1] I cannot find the exact source for this but I believe it is in his Pensées
[2] Data on these points: https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2018/09/the-human-attention-span-infographic.html; https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/16/got-a-minute-global-attention-span-is-narrowing-study-reveals; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190415081959.htm
[3] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-07/uov-dsi063014.php
[4] https://www.bls.gov/tus/home.htm
[5] Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1991), pg. 163
[6] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 249-250
[7] An excellent discussion on the importance of silence and solitude came be read in Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, revised edition (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2014) pg. 226-238; also consider C.W. McPherson, Keeping Silence: Christian Practices for Entering Stillness (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2002)
[8] I would also recommend reading in some more detail about various ways of silence and solitude in: Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, revised edition (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2014) pg. 238-248
[9] https://www.faithgateway.com/praying-example-susanna-wesley/#.YLT9hqhKguU

Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.), the great ancient philosopher and theologian of the Christian Church, wrote nakedly in his Confessions about a period of his life in which he faced spiritual apathy.  He said,  
 
“I was astonished that although I now loved you…I did not persist in enjoyment of my God. Your beauty drew me to you, but soon I was dragged away from you by my own weight and in dismay I plunged again into the things of this world…as though I had sensed the fragrance of the fare but was not yet able to eat it.”[1]
 
Can you relate to this?  I know I can.  At one time the Christian walk is a state of perpetual wonder and fire, God is front and center, and everything else gives but a bitter aftertaste.  But steadily, regressively, a waxing and a waning seep into the soul.  Spiritual things, God-centered things, lose their glistening luster.  You catch yourself, rebuke the slow fade, and earnestly try to reignite the fading passion, only to have such intentions peter-out as fast as they came to the mind.  The heavens seem to re-calcify and you are once again drawn into a state of mind-wandering indifference.  Sound familiar? 
 
If this is you, or you fear it could be but aren’t sure, here is advice: keep going.  Press through.  Lean into Christ.  Journey across the trough. 
 
The problem is not the trough itself but the view you have of it. 
 
You should expect times in which spiritual drought tries to creep into your soul.  It is a given.  It is a biblical truism.  This is contrary to many a person that is obsessively seeking after some “experience” – running hither and thither to this or that conference or church service – with the hopes of having a perpetual catharsis of gyrating emotional fervor. 
 
The fact is the Christian life is not going to be one perpetually ecstatic revival service.  It does not work that way. 
 
We are told over and over and over again to expect troughs and struggles as Christians, not unending emotional highs.  We are told that our spiritual walk will be marked by perseverance (Romans 5:3-5), that we will war against strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:3-5), that hardships and calamities and weakness are a given (2 Corinthians 12:9-10), that we will have tests of endurance (James 1:1-3), that we will wrestle against spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:12), that we will experience suffering (Romans 8:18, 1 Peter 5), and that our fleshly cravings will war against us (Galatians 5:17). 
 
The point is: struggle and hardship are a given reality of spiritual life.  Get used to it. 
 
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) gets all of this across powerfully in The Screwtape Letters through the senior demon Screwtape advising the junior devil Wormwood on how to exploit his Christian patient’s spiritual trough.  Screwtape writes,    
 
So you ‘have great hopes that the patient’s [the Christians] religious phase is dying away’, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?
 
[The law of] undulation [is that] repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life— his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.…
 
Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [God’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks….
 
[The Enemy (God) is] prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning [of their spiritual walks]. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs— to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it [the patient] is growing into the sort of creature He [God] wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood.  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.…
 
I hope [all of this has not] convinced you that the trough of dullness or ‘dryness’ through which your patient is going at present will…of itself, give you his soul, but needs to be properly exploited.  What forms the exploitation should take I will now consider….
 
[One chief way of] exploiting the trough [is] through the patient’s own thoughts about it. As always, the first step is to keep knowledge out of his mind. Do not let him suspect the law of undulation. Let him assume that the first ardours of his conversion might have been expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally permanent condition. Having once got this misconception well fixed in his head, you may then proceed in various ways. It all depends on whether your man is of the desponding type who can be tempted to despair or of the wishful-thinking type who can be assured that all is well. The former type is getting rare among the humans. If your patient should happen to belong to it, everything is easy. You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy task now-adays), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours. If he is of the more hopeful type your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all. In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things’. If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point’, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.[2]
 
Notice in the passage the “Law of Undulation” is to be expected, and in fact, is not the sole work of devils.  This law, Lewis writes, is an expected “natural” feature of up-and-down happenings in one’s Christian life.  God can and often is using this “law” to refine His servants.  He is wanting us to “stand on our own two feet” in the sense that we come to a point that we stop leaving our faith on our sleeve and ground it in the reality of everyday struggles and experiences.  He is calling us to a mature faith (1 Corinthians 14:20; Ephesians 4:13-15) that takes serious struggle, pain, and suffering. 
 
What does this mean then?  It means that the danger is not really going through troughs, the danger lies in allowing the trough to become a valley that one takes up residency in.  This is where indifference lies.  It is much more about how we see the trough than the troughs themselves.  Remember Lewis’ (Screwtapes) words,
 
“The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going [Wormwood] are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.”
 
If you are wanting a Biblical equivalent of this then consider the words of the Apostle Peter when he said to the persecuted underground 1st Century Church,
 
6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 
1 Peter 1:6-7
 
Not your usual health-and-wealth constant victory over your lesser self type of sermon is it?  But I digress. 
 
THE DEVILS LOVE A DOMESTICATED FAITH
The devils work their dark magic to massage our souls amid the troughs we go through.  They want to make us yawnish with hands folded and spiritual eyes glazed over – to the point that we no longer resists and don’t care that we don’t care about resisting.   
 
How do they do this?  One way is to bring us to a state where we domesticate our faith.  We come to see ourselves as “grown-up” and beyond the wiles of excessive forms of devotion and prudishness.  We come to believe “moderation in all things” and that “religion is all very well up to a point.” 
 
We laugh at our past selves and how naïve and militantly pious we were: Remember the days when we cared about saying certain ‘bad’ words?  Ha! How virginal.  Or remember when we thought this or that behavior was unbecoming or disrespectful?  Jeeze.  The “good-old-days” of our Puritanical youth am I right?  Or remember that time we preached modesty?  Or recall that time we took seriously discerning what we watched on television!?  Ho! Those were the days!  Am I right?  Those were the quaint, naïve, priggish, traditionalist, Pharisaical days of excessive religious fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism… the only “F” word worth keeping ourselves and our children from. 
 
Such a conversation is all too true for many of us. 
 
It is at this point that the classical arguments of excessive Puritanism rise in the mind.  “You are being far too judgmental!” or “Stop being such a prude!” is what comes to our numbed post-modern minds.  We need to come to terms that we may have, to some degree, allowed ourselves to be nursed to a spiritual slumber in our contentment with things we once found abhorrent.  The Law of Undulation (that up-and-down battle of troughs and peaks) may have flatlined in our souls and we are not even aware of it. 
 
Take inventory dear saint. 
 
THE DEVILS LOVE A HAUGHTY PROGRESSING FAITH
How else do the devils slowly seep spiritual complacency into our hearts?  Well before closing I want to argue that another way they do this is through the seemingly most unlikely path: through our spiritual progress. 
 
Really?
 
Yes.  Spiritual progress can possess within itself a germ of hand-folded indifference.  We can get to the place that as we grow in the Lord we start to “become aware” that we are growing and slowly become complacent in that growth.  Lewis gets this across powerfully through the mouth of Screwtape when the devil reminds Wormwood to keep his patient on track to start thinking about how humble he is becoming.  The high-ranking hellion puts it this way,  
 
“[Do not forget Wormwood that] all virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them….  [In fact the virtues] may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting-point for contempt of other selves….  You must therefore conceal from the patient the truth end of Humility.  Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character.”[3]
 
In short what Lewis is getting at is the fact that we are most in danger of spiritual failure when we are becoming aware of our spiritual growth.  When we start becoming aware of our progress we can begin to suffer from spiritual comparability.  We can begin to measure our spiritual progress to where we were in our past or where others around us are presently.  At such a stage we are in danger of arousing the sleeping dragon of the Idol of Self in our souls.  We can start checking off a list of how modesty we are, how charitable we have become, how humble we now are, how much more often we go to church, and how much more Bible we have memorized compared to others.  We can start seeing others through a tinted lens of spiritual contempt – the whole “I thank God I am not like other men” Syndrome (Luke 18:19). 
 
Be careful saint. 
 
Even here, amid spiritual progress, one can get snagged among the bushes of indifference.  As time goes on the tune of our souls' rhythm can start relaxing and we can become like the caricature of the rabbit in the Tortoise And The Hare.  We are seemingly ahead of everyone else, so much more knowledgeable, so much more discerning, so much more mature, that we can calcify in our passions and sense of wonder. 
 
In closing, I just urge you to awaken yourself to the whiles of the enemy in crafting in you a spirit of settled faith.  You and I need to diligently check our spiritual barometers in the daily and pray as the Psalmist did,
 
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God,
    and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence
    or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation
    and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Psalm 51:10-12

___________________________
[1] Augustine, Confessions, trans, R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York, NY: MacMillian, 1961) pg. 152
[2] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 206-210
[3] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters in The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017), pg. 224-225

For many of us prayer is something we talk a lot about but do far too little of.  It is very often a mundane chore as opposed to a desire or a mere preference opposite a passion.  This is to our own detriment.  Yawnish, distracted, stunted prayers are an essential ingredient in producing the anemic spirituality that characterizes much of modern western Christendom.  It is just such prayer the Lord of Hell gleefully glories in and desires for us.  C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) speaks with piercing accuracy on this reality in The Screwtape Letters.  In the excerpt below Lewis has the senior tempter Screwtape give advice to his demonic nephew Wormwood on how best to meticulously undermine the prayer life of a young Christian.  Read with openness and conviction,  
 
The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the [Christian] patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently re-converted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and un-regularized; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part….  That is exactly the sort of prayer we want….  At the very least, they [Christians] can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
 
If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself [God] we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills…. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.
 
But of course the Enemy [God] will not meantime be idle. Wherever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion. But even if He defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. The humans do not start from that direct perception of [God]…. If you look into your patient's mind when he is praying…you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be images derived from pictures….  I have known cases where what the patient called his "God" was actually located-up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it – to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it – why, then it is that the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation – this real nakedness of the soul in prayer – you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for! [1]
 
There are several points I would like to syphon out of this excerpt without draining its richness. 
 
The Subtilty of What we Classify as “Prayer”
One of the most striking things in this excerpt is the most easily missed.  It reveals a sadistically clever scheme all too often overlooked to our dismay.  Screwtape says, “The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether,” and then he says, “this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood.”  Do you notice what he is saying?  The Devil does not really care about us praying, as long as the type of prayer we do is a useful fiction.  If we keep our prayers dreary-eyed, timely, thoughtless, and childish, he is content and undisturbed. 
 
In such cases the Devil is content for us to live out the hellish inversion of John 5:16: “The ineffectual fervent-less prayer of a sluggish saint avails much for the Adversary of our souls.”
 
Lewis is giving meat here worth chewing.  He is showing us that such feeble prayer really is not prayer at all!   It is prayer masquerading as prayer, which makes us content and ineffective while at the same time delighting the demons.  It is not real prayer because it is comfortable, quaint, and compels no real change.  It is not real prayer because it categorically has no teeth to it!  It is a milk-toast spirituality. 
 
Real prayer is active, Spirit filled, intentional, habitual, God centered, humbling, relational, and power packed.  Prayer is the specific, intentional, spiritual discipline of the Christian life.  John Calvin (1509-1564), the great reformer, said it was “the chief exercise of faith.”[2]  The revivalist Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) said prayer,
 
“is as natural an expression of faith as breathing is of life…[and a] prayerless life [is a life] without God in the world.”[3] 
 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), the 20th Century German pastor and martyr said,
 
“Prayer is the supreme instance of the hidden character of the Christian life.  It is the antithesis of self-display.”[4]
 
One of the things these men of old are getting at is that prayer is the chief means of distinguishing people who are of Faith versus the Faithless.  It is an endeavor that displays in us an active acknowledgement of the presence of the divine in our lives on the daily!  In short prayer reveals that we are aware, humbled by, and actively seeking more than matter and molecules; it reveals that we are a people who “look up” beyond our world to Someone Greater than ourselves for our ultimate answers, hope, peace, security, and future. 
 
To fail to be a prayer is, in a very real sense, to live as a functional atheist.  To live a “spiritual life” with a complete absence of ever seeking to touch the Spirit or communion is to deny the very foundations of Faith itself.  It is living in the world on a regular basis as if God is not intimately and actively within and among you. 
 
But this goes even further than mere awareness of the transcendent in our lives. 
 
Prayer is also a fundamental means of awakening us to the reality of our present situations and to the Ultimate Fact that we stand naked before the eyes of a living God who knows us far more intimately than we could ever hope to.[5]  It reminds us that we cannot hide from God.  He knows our facades.  He knows our fakery.  He knows our insecurities.  He knows our needs.  Prayer is that place where we reveal our souls to our God and He in turn reveals more intimately His heart to us.  It is the meeting of wills.  It is the meeting of souls.  Lewis put it this way,
 
“It is a personal contact between…incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.  Prayer is the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.”[6]
 
It is such rawness of prayer that the devils loath for us to experience.  Thus they (along with the World and the Flesh) ensure we ingest enough busyness and distractions to keep us from ever reaching such intimacy.  But really, as Lewis points out, the devils do not have to work too hard at this because most of us do not even care to experience such rawness before God.  As Screwtape so candidly affirms,
 
“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out….  [In fact to avoid] the real nakedness of the soul in prayer – you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!”
 
This is to our own dismay for it is in such nakedness that we can truly be ourselves and see ourselves as we more clearly come to see the One who holds us. 
 
It is in prayer that we stand before an Audience of One. 
 
How Our Physical State Can Many Times Affect Our Prayer State
Another profound truth worth chewing is Lewis’ insight of how easily our physical states affect our spiritual states.  He points out how the postures we make in prayer can reveal and even shape the sincerity and depth of focus we have before God.[7]  Do not misunderstand this!  He is not saying we should bask in pagan asceticism or external posturing.  What he is driving at is us coming to terms with how our bodies shape our souls as much as our souls shape our bodies. 
 
In the history of the Christian Church there has been a consistent trajectory of teachings and reflections upon taking serious how we posture ourselves in worship and prayer.[8]  This is not out of a sign of stiff-necked ceremonialism but a recognition that we are a unified complexity of spirit, soul, and body that intertwine and interact with one another and therefore affect one another.  A slouching posture can indicate a slouching spirit.  A casual stature can reveal a casualness of soul which tends to express itself casually when coming before God in worship and prayer.  God becomes a familiar to us – just “another relationship” among the myriads we have.  We come into His presence and prop our feet upon Him instead of prostrating ourselves before Him in worship and reverence as the Cosmic King of Justice and Mercy He is.
 
I know this personally. 
 
Tiredness physically leads to fogged mental states which inevitably misdirect my thoughts in prayer.  I will start a prayer in earnest and within 40 seconds I begin to drift and think of all the work I have to accomplish, or I begin to daydream or become lethargic.  Or I will pray as I drive to work, only to find my eyes wondering to a sign along the road or a pedestrian crossing the street.  What is happening in all these?  I am forgetting before Whom I stand when I am praying.  I am slouching before God.  I am yawning in His presence. 
 
One way to fix this is to fix my physical state.  Train the eyes, train the mind, discipline the body.  If need be, stand to pray.  Walk.  Look upward.  Lift hands.  Kneel.  Be uncomfortable.  By doing these things one begins to take seriously the physical discipline of directing the body in the realm of spiritual life. 
 
Generating Synthetic Piety
We can grow up on healthy doses of certain stylized versions of prayer.  There are more liturgical types, more charismatic types, more blustery types, more tranquil types, and so forth.  Lewis causes us to be reflective on this.  We can begin to equate ‘true prayer’ with certain emotional expressions or experiences to the point that those expressions become the only means by which we define prayer (this also applies to all of spirituality). 
 
This is where the danger creeps in. 
 
Prayer is not less than emotion, but it is far more than emotion.  This is what Lewis is wanting us to remember.  True prayer is rooted in authenticity and reverence – an emptying or unclothing of oneself before God.  It is not to be grounded in “turning our gaze towards ourselves and keeping watch on our own minds” as we think about how we are “feeling” as we are doing it.  It isn’t about us!  It is about Him!  It is “other directed,” being lifted above our present circumstances into the realm of God Himself.  It is only there that true answers, freedom, clarity, and focus takes place. 
 
God is not interested in artificial emotionalism.  He is not interested in syntax, He is interested in the sincerity.  He is not interested in fervor, He is interested in faithfulness.  He is not interested in hooping, He is interested in humility.  Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) said it this way,
 
“The heart is the source, the seat, and the essence of supplication.  Prayer with the heart is the heart of prayer: the cry of our soul is the soul of our cry.”[9]
 
He went on to say, “There is as much grace in the bark of a dog or the grunt of a swine as in a form of prayer if the heart be absent.”  It is not enough to go through a set of disciplines or emotions when it comes to prayer.  The heart must be pruned.  The heart must be nursed to desire the sweetness of communion with God. 
 
Generating False Images
One of the easiest things we can do is to make images in our head of Who God is whenever we pray.  As Lewis makes clear we can derive our images of God from pictures, we can focus on a composite object, or we can think of some distant image in our imagination.  In all these there are two things happening: misdirection and distance. 
 
When we pray to God with a preconceived vision of what we think He should be we miss the true beauty of Who He is.  This misdirection skews our understanding of God’s nature, person, and work.  As a result, when we worship and pray God tends to become who we are.  He likes what we like, He approves of what we approve, He hates what we hate, and He will give what we ask.  It is all a total misdirection of who God really is.  This is not assigned to just heretics or spiritual relativists; this happens in regular Bible believing churches!  But as Timothy Keller (1950-present) has said,
 
“If your god never disagrees with you, you might be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”[10]
 
But not only is such misdirection an outcome of this corrupted iconoclasm, there is also a distance created.  Lewis makes the point that when we generate images of God in prayer, we can detach Him from our midst.   He becomes an object among many within our minds eye.  He becomes, as Lewis says, “located-up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside [our] own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.”  What is he getting at here?  He is showing that in a very real sense what happens is we tend to “see God” like an object or a person crossing before our eyes afar off.  By doing this with prayer we lose the sense of inner intimacy of His presence within us and living around us. 
 
Now, again, do not misunderstand Lewis here!  He is not promoting some pagan pantheism or New Ageism mumbo-jumbo.  What he is reminding us of is how easy it is to make God “away from us” as we pray.  He becomes a detached deistic Being looking down far away from us as we call out to Him and look up at Him on Olympus.  But such a vision doesn’t take seriously the immanence and intimacy of Who He is.  God is not a detached Father.  He is, as Jesus Himself taught us, our Heavenly Father (Matthew 6) – that impossible to contain, quantify, or composite Cosmic King Who is equally immanent, relational, and accessible to His children.[11]
 
We need to recover this reality when we pray!  This is what Lewis is getting at! 
 
The Bible is profoundly clear that we have an intimate union with God through Christ that eliminates “distance” between us and Him (Romans 5 & 8, Galatians 2, Colossians 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 John 4).  This understanding is an awareness of our “nakedness” (Lewis says that “real nakedness of soul”) before the eyes of God.  This means that in prayer, we are baring ourselves before our Maker at the deepest levels.  We are recognizing that God is not some celestial confession box but is the Great Knower of our souls. 
 
Praying About Our Prayer
Prayer should be, and in fact is, the lifeblood of Faith.  A prayerless faith is a dead faith.  It is “the chief exercise of faith.”[12]  It trumps public worship, fellowship, and service.  It is the key means through which we display dependence upon the Lord through humility.  It is us actively taking time out of our mud and clay lives to acknowledge the transcendence and immanence of the God Who is in our midst and desires that we desire Him.  Prayer really is “spiritual breathing” – the activity that sustains spiritual life itself.[13]  It is therefore no wonder that the Adversary of our souls works overtime in conjunction with our fleshliness to detour our efforts of such a fruitful spiritual discipline. 
 
Sadly, I have found that many times my prayer life correlates to the level of comfort in my life.  I say this with personal trepidation.  When things are good, I pray less.  When things are bad, I pray more.  John Newton (1725-1807), the great 18th Century hymnist and abolitionist, spoke poignantly on such a point when he said,
 
“Experience testifies, that a long course of ease and prosperity, without painful changes, has an unhappy tendency to make us cold and formal in our secrete worship.”[14]
 
I can say with shaken confidence this is true for me.  I would venture to say it is true for you.  There is a stinging truism here: we tend to be the most sincere and focused on spiritual things when we are faced with trouble and suffering.  Good times tend to generate spiritual apathy and indifference in our lives.  The more comfortable we are the more complacent we become before God’s presence. 
 
Complacent prayer is most often born by satisfied and secure saints.   
 
Must we then perpetually suffer in order for us to be made into the image of Christ?  I would hope not.  But perhaps so.  Perhaps we need to experience suffering to be refined on our knees.
 
We need to pray about our praying. 
 
We need to ask God to help us desire prayer all the more.  We need to pray even when we are not feeling it.  It is in those times of “not feeling it” that we often need it the most!  It is in that time the Adversary is working his dark magic in our midst, slowly, methodically, driving a wedge between us and our Lord.  It is in that time we need to push and fight for that sacred communion known as prayer. 
 
God, help me to not just write about this but to live it in my life!  Help me to demonstrate this instead of merely teaching it.  Help me nourish my soul in this and not just taste it.  Help me to pray. 
 
I want to leave you with the poignant and encouraging words of Charles Spurgeon,
 
Now the tempter will whisper, "Do not pray just now; your heart is not in a fit condition for it." My dear brother, you will not become fit for prayer by keeping away from the mercy-seat, but to lie groaning or breathing at its foot is the best preparation for pleading before the Lord. We are not to aim at a self-wrought preparation of our hearts that we may come to God with them, but "the preparation of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, are both from God." If I feel myself disinclined to pray, then is the time when I need to pray more than ever….  Whatever thy position, if thou canst not speak, cry; if thou canst not cry, groan; if thou canst not groan, let it be "groanings that cannot be uttered;" and, if thou canst not even rise to that, let thy prayer be at least breathing—a vital, sincere desire, the outpouring of thine inner life in the simplest and weakest form, and God will accept it. In a word, when you cannot pray as you would, take care to pray as you can. [15] 

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[1] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 194-196
[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox, 2011), 3.20 (pg. 850)
[3] Jonathan Edwards, The Works of President Edwards, Volume IV (New York, NY: Leavitt & Allen, 1852), pg. 481
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1995) pg. 163
[5] A good discussion on this can be found in Joe Rigney, Lewis on the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), pg. 119-122
[6] C.S. Lewis, “The Efficacy of Prayer,” in The World’s Last Night, pg. 8
[7] Consider reading this short little treatise on the postures of prayer by Isaac Todd (1787-1886) https://www.covenanter.org/reformed/2015/8/19/isaac-todds-the-posture-of-prayer-or-god-to-be-worshipped-with-the-body-as-well-as-the-mind
[8] Avail yourself to these resources on the topic: https://calvinistinternational.com/2015/04/09/calvin-on-posture-in-worship/; http://www.prca.org/resources/publications/articles/item/4651-the-posture-of-prayer; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-posture-matters-in-worship/;
[9] Charles Spurgeon, Comfort for Those Whose Prayers are Feeble, Sermon given May 1872, accessed from https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/thought-reading-extraordinary/#flipbook/
[10] Timothy Keller, Twitter, Sep. 12, 2014, https://twitter.com/timkellernyc/status/510458013606739968?lang=en
[11] R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew: New International Commentary on the New Testament, (United Kingdom: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007), pg. 244-246
[12] Michael Horton, John Calvin on the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), pg. 154-165
[13] Dane Ortlund, Jonathan Edwards on the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), pg. 124
[14] John Newton, Letter V, Cardiphonia or, The Utterance of the Heart (T. Nelson and Sons: United Kingdom, 1857), pg. 285
[15] Charles Spurgeon, Thought-Reading Extraordinary, Sermon given October 5, 1884, accessed from https://archive.spurgeon.org/s_and_t/feeble.php