Many of us often suffer from a dreadful dichotomy of Faith.  Nancy Pearcey (1952-present) has put it this way,
 
“Our lives are often fractured and fragmented….The aura of worship dissipates after Sunday, and we unconsciously absorb secular attitudes the rest of the week. We inhabit two separate “worlds,” navigating a sharp divide between our religious life and ordinary life.”[1]
 
A prime example of this division between our “religious lives” and “ordinary lives” is within our own homes.  Often when the aura of worship dissipates on Sunday, we leave the church house wiping off our Sunday-go-to-meeting faces, in preparation for getting back to the “real business of living.”  We often go to our homes and nestle back into the monotony of maintaining our same old attitudes and behaviors towards our families as before.  But we must remember that the Gospel is not relegated to a single day nor a single sphere of our lives.  Even amid our domestic lives, among the everyday routines of familial life, we must allow Christ to examine us and be exalted throughout.  He is either Lord of all or Lord of none when it comes to our lives. 
 
FAMILY LIFE AND THE CONTOURS OF OUR SOUL
In a very real sense how you treat your familiars displays more about the contours of your soul than anything else. 
 
You can sing in the church choir and still be full of unforgiveness towards your spouse every week.  You can beat the altars and wail in worship and still possess a disrespectful spirit towards your parents.  You can preach with the fire of a prophet and still display an insensitivity to the needs of your family.  You can even serve in a soup kitchen and still allow hate to reign in your soul towards your sibling. 
 
The point is God is not interested in your displays of spirituality and churchliness.  He is interested in how His holy-love is changing you into the image of His Son amid the little things in life. 
 
Some of the most consistent “little things” of life are how we live with our families and loved ones.  This is why in many ways our domestic lives are the truest barometers in measuring the authenticity of our Faith.  It is in this environment that most of our time is spent and our personalities, passions, and behaviors fully displayed.  Thus, we need to take inventory of how the Adversary uses this area of life to often slowly sap our spiritual vitality.  C.S. Lewis’ devil Screwtape gets this across with convicting sharpness when he begins advising Wormwood on how to inflame domestic tensions between a Christian son and his mother,
 
Keep [the Christians] mind on the inner life…. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror, and neglect of the obvious.  You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office….  When two humans [like your patient and his mother] have lived together for many years, it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unenduringly irritating to the other. Work on that….  To keep this game up you…must see to it that each of these two fools [the Christian and his mother] has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: “I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.” Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken."[2]
 
What a convicting incite Lewis has here.  He is showing us, through a devil’s words, that how we treat our husbands, wives, children, and parents reveals the state of our soul and shapes it.  Marriage, child-rearing, family time, communication between spouses, interactions among siblings, attitudes between parents and children, are all part of this.  Through these situations, we come to interact with the first agents in our socialization not only in society at large but also our socialization within the confines of The Church writ large.  While our spouses are spouses, they are also brothers and sisters of the Kingdom.  While our kids are our kids, they are also agents of Christ.  The Adversary does not want us to see this aspect of family life because he knows it's dangerous.  This is why he works overtime to craft wedges of indifference and animosity and tartness between us. 
 
Do you want to kill your child’s faith?  Then show them habitual indifference to the things of God in the home.  This is where the soil of their heart is tilled way before some secular professor plants the seeds of atheism or relativism.  Do you want to kill your spouse’s faith?  Then show a lack of authenticity in the power of the Gospel to transform your attitude and speech.  Do you want to kill your parent’s faith?  Then show duplicity of respect towards strangers and unabashed disregard towards them.  These are hard things to think about, but if we are to overcome the gentle slopes of spiritual indifference we must come to terms with such things in our lives. 
 
SPIRITUAL AUTHENTICITY
The hardest people to slay one’s flesh before are those we live with.  Why?  Because we see their warts and they see ours.  They see us for who we really are.  Thus, it is most often here the hardest battles in our Christian walk reside.  What do we do?  How do we overcome this?  Well, let me first preface that I dare not presume to give complete answers in this field.  Nor do I dare presume to affirm having all my proverbial ducks in a row.  That said, I believe two things shine forth from Lewis’ insights that are worth considering as we wrestle with the gentle slope of domestic pinpricks (re-read his excerpt before reading below).  Consider:
 
(1)Deliberately displaying spirituality through the ordinary – Too often we Christians like to get “ultra-churchy” with our spirituality.  Christianity becomes a place we go, a mode we get in, a particular lingo we squawk.  This isn’t how it is supposed to be.  Christianity is to be an earthy and practical reality lived through everyday monotony.  It’s more than an experience, it’s a way of life.  It's more than tongues or prophecy or raising hands, it is about how you treat your husband and wife and kids and parents and friends and family and neighbors (Colossians 3:5-10, James 1:19-27, Ephesians 5-6, 1 Peter 3).  This means we need to recover a practical spirituality that takes the initiative to display Christ’s goodness throughout our days in the little things.  For example: How we respond when asked to do chores.  How we react when corrected.  How we serve through cooking and cleaning.  How we go about changing diapers and washing clothes.  Sound ridiculous?  Does not the Scripture say, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31)?  If we are to glorify God even with the baser things of eating and drinking, then would any of the aforementioned be exempt from this? 
 
Rethink your Christianity to include the baser things.  Christ is Lord of the great things and the baser things. 
 
(2)Intentional and routine self-examination – We must realize that true spiritual authenticity is found through an honest, consistent, unmasked lifestyle among our acquaintances and familiars.  In other words, we need to be asking ourselves how we fall into the equation of our families' imperfections.  It is always easier to find fault with our spouses, our kids, and our parents.  It is always easier to blame them for why we are overworked, short-tempered, frustrated, angry, and so forth.  But is this the whole story?  One striking thing about scripture is its continual call to self-examination instead of casting blame on others (Psalm 139:23-24, Galatians 6:3-5, 2 Corinthians 13:5, James 1:23-25).  This makes us squirm because we intuitively love to think we are right and the problems of the world are foisted upon us instead of us being part of their making.  Sometimes we are.  Sometimes we aren’t.  Sometimes we are partially and others are partially. 
 
We need to look at our loved ones through the lens of Christ.  We need to see them, in all their faults, as Christ sees them – broken yet beloved, imperfect seeking the Perfect One, beggars nourished only by the heavenly Bread.  When we do this how we react and interact can and will be transformed, for the glory of God. 

________________
[1] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity for Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), pg. 35
[2] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 191-192

We have been learning that the Adversary of our soul desires to destroy us through the slow fade of indifference.  A spiritual fall most often occurs methodically and imperceptibly.  As C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, 
 
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.[1]
 
How sobering and terrifying.
 
But how does the Adversary do this in everyday living?  This is the question we want to address in this post and the next several.  We want to look at how the Adversary uses the gradual gradients of life to kill the passion of the Kingdom in our lives.  If your passion seems petered out in your Christian walk, if you seem lulled into hand-folded spiritual contentment, if you seem to lack a desire for intimacy with the Lover of your soul, then you may want to keep reading.  Perhaps, gradually you have slid down the path of spiritual indifference.  Remember that Satan wants you fat, content, and docile spiritually, just like slaughterhouses want their cattle.  Because of this you and I need to be awakened to desire more desiring for He who wants us to want Him. 
 
Our guide in all this will be the masterful C.S. Lewis and his equally masterful work The Screwtape Letters.  As I told you this is a book written as a collection of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape teaching the young devil Wormwood how to effectively tempt and destroy the life of his assigned patient, who is a Christian.   Such a narrative is prophetic in revealing how Satan works “his magic” to progressively slay our hearts. 
 
Let us look at one way the Adversary tries to kill our soul: through the Church.     
 
_________
 
One way that the Adversary works to abort our spiritual walk is by detaching us from each other.  It is a truism that there is almost no more effective way of destroying a people than by inculcating in them the indifference to be “A People.”  Abraham Lincoln said long ago of the United States,
 
As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.[2]
 
If this statement is true of secular nations, how much more is it of the Royal Nation (1 Peter 2) called the Church?  Satan has done everything he can to undermine the work of God’s Kingdom expressed through the work of Christ’s community.  While he works through all the obvious methods (church splits, sex scandals, money laundering…etc) his chief skill comes through melting our perceptions of the Church.  Put more precisely: He kills our heart's desire to desire spiritual community.  Consider the advice Screwtape gives to the young tempter Wormwood regarding shaping his “patients” (the Christian’s) perceptions of the church:
 
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 but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately, it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside [and] he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew….  At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial….  Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman….  [This disappointment] occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together.  In every department of life, it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing….  [If] the patient knows that the woman [in the church] with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question ‘If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?”[3] 
 
Want to destroy Christians?  Then one way you do this is by destroying their appetite for the Church.  Make them cease fighting for it.  Make them cease caring about it.  Make them justify, through coddled hurts and self-righteousness and spiritual complacency, why they do not need to commit to it in any flesh and blood way. 
 
SEEING THE CHURCH AS AN ABSTRACTION
You want to make Christians lose faith in The Church, then one way you do this is by making the Church an abstraction.  Keep it nebulous.  Make it something one is a part of but only in a conceptual sense.  Why?  Because it is always easier to claim to be part of “THE CHURCH” (i.e. Body of Christ) when it doesn’t require sacrifice, time, energy, money, or service; or when it doesn’t require obedience, submission, or correction.  Such a mentality has crafted Christians into a disjointed confederacy of independent islands who desire no accountability or commitment in the context of sacred community.  Online services in the new COVID Era have done a fantastic job of exacerbating this phenomenon by the way.[4]  But I digress.    
 
This abstract view of the church has been helped greatly by the “Me-and-Jesus Syndrome” that plagues many modern Christians.  Today we enlightened moderns look at our Faith as something just between us and God with no practical relevance to our relations in the spiritual community.  Faith is JUST personal; it is not communal.  Faith is just about spirituality; it is not sacramental.  And we see all this as somehow more “intimate” or more “spiritual.”  The problem is it is a lot more American and a lot less biblical than we think (more in a moment).  The result of this is we become stunted spiritually by the self-made echo-chambers that tell us all is well, and we need no correction or prodding in our spiritual walk. 
 
SEEING ONLY THE WARTS ON THE PEW
Want to kill the desire for community in a Christian’s life?  Make the Christian see only the messiness of his fellow pew-mates.  It is easy to not want to come into a spiritual community when you concentrate on “the absurd hats” and “squeaky boots” and noticeable sins of those annoying people that inhabit the church house.  Why not be with a church?  Simple: because it’s full of hypocrites, Pharisaical judgers, irritating parishioners, and bad music.  Right?  We look at the people around us in the pews and can pinpoint every cork and annoyance that grits our teeth and makes us squirm.  We see these same people in Walmart and even work with some of them, so we know how they “really are.” 
 
And just to be clear this prideful spiritual cynicism expresses itself in equal measures among the skinny-jeaned tattooed Millennials as it does with floral-dressed, blue-permed Boomers.  For one there are too many hymns, walkers, and perfumes, and for the others too many lights, skinny-jeans, and piercings.  Both concentrate more on the seemingly irreconcilable differences rather than fighting for love and unity.  Again, I digress. 
 
As a result of such a development the “I’m-not-feeling-it Syndrome” seeps in a spiritual of self-justifying begins.  Why am I not “feeling it” in the church?  Simple: it’s those people in the pews or on the stage.  Right?  It can’t possibly be me.  It can never be me.  It’s not tied at all to my lack of prayer, fasting, meditating, or Bible reading.  It’s tied to the fact that those around me just aren’t “as spiritual” as I am.  The problem with this attitude is that it fails to take account of one’s own warts (re-read the question Lewis asks in the quote above). 
 
We are not called to measure ourselves or our commitment to the Body of Christ to the spiritual levels of our neighbors.  To do so is to follow people.  We are called to align our view of our own lives and commitments to the character and person of Christ.[5]  His life, His work, His way, His teachings are our litmus test. 
 
FIGHTING FOR SACRED COMMUNITY
This method of leisurely killing our joy for the sacred community is one of the gentle slopes the Adversary uses to choke out our spiritual vitality.  But we must fight it and we must awaken to its cunning processes.  Be reminded that THE CHURCH is made up of many a cracked pot.  Be reminded that the Church is not a place of moral perfection but beggars who desire the Bread of Life.  Be reminded that the Church is not a museum of saints, but a living and breathing organism of failures seeking faith.  The Church is the Whore who became a Bride (Hosea).  It is the Prodigal given an Eternal Inheritance (Luke 15).  It the Cosmic Rebel made into a Celestial Saint (Romans 1-2; 1 Corinthians 6).  Is a sanctified hot-mess of interconnected gifts and personalities that unite to learn, grow, fellowship, worship, get correction, and get edification (Ephesians 4:11-16; Hebrews 10:22-25). 
 
The Church is messy. 
 
It is through this messy and diverse Body of broken saints that Christ's truth is to shine into all areas of human life through the diverse gifts, traditions, and passions of its members. 
 
We are not made to worship, learn, or grow in a spiritual vacuum.  While it is all the above it is even more. 
 
The Church is a Body (Romans 12:4-5), it is a Household (1 Timothy 3:15), it is a Temple (Ephesians 2:20-21), and it’s a Nation (1 Peter 2:4-9).  In all these metaphors there is the essential understanding that we are made for community.[6]  We need each other because we are made in the image of God, who Himself is a Trinitarian indwelling of inter-personal and intra-personal communion.  He is unity and diversity, we as a Body are unity and diversity.  He was incarnated to display in flesh and blood that Trinitarian reality, we as the Church are to incarnate that same reality through our individual and social lives.  It is through sacramental communal relations found in church that we come to demonstrate how the power of the Gospel not only changes our personhood but our societies, our cultures, and our communities. 
 
To lose this sense of communal spirituality is to lose a part of who we are meant to be.  To put it another way, our completeness in Christ is only found in the context of our relations within Christ’s community.
 
This is why Satan hates the Church and he hates Christians who want to want it and find joy in it (even in its messiness and annoyances).  This is why all the more we as believers must fight to keep that joy alive. 

________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 220
[2] http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm
[3] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 188-189
[4] The data shows that since COVID only 1 in 3 Christians attend church and sadly the data shows they may not be coming back https://www.barna.com/research/new-sunday-morning-part-2/ and https://www.barna.com/research/watching-online-church/
[5] Consider these verses about us imitating Christ: Romans 8:29, Galatians 2:20, 1 Corinthians 11:1, 1 John 2:6, Ephesians 5:1-2,
[6] There are plenty of scriptures on this that I encourage you to read: Proverbs 18:1, Proverbs 27:17, Matthew 18:20, Acts 9:31-32, Romans 12:5, 1 Corinthians 1:10, Colossians 3:16, Ephesians 4:11-13, Hebrews 10:24-25, 

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. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.[1]

These profoundly sobering words were uttered by a devil. A provocative thought. To be more precise they were uttered in C.S. Lewis’ (1898-1963) masterful work The Screwtape Letters (1942) which is written as a collection of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to a young trainee demon named Wormwood. Throughout the letters, Screwtape gives his wise analysis and advice on how the young upstart tempter can best destroy his “patient” (a Christian) and ultimately separate him from the “Enemy” (God).  

If you have not read this book, you need to. It is soul food. It is one of the most thought-provoking and spiritually convicting books you will ever read if you allow it.  

As I read back through it three initial insights wash over me: 

INSIGHT #1: EVERYTHING IS SPIRITUAL
As you read through Lewis’ work – and I mean read and re-read and chew on it – you become acutely aware of just how spiritual everything is in life. Paraphrasing the words of Hamlet, 

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies and psychologies.”  

Everything is spiritual in the sense that all we do in some form or fashion shapes our souls and the souls of those around us unwittingly so or not. Lewis is penetrating this profound point throughout the book.  

How we live our lives through the mundane tasks of life shapes our souls. How we treat our husbands and wives shapes our souls and theirs. The tones we set with our children shape our souls as well as theirs. Our work ethic and interactions with coworkers shape our souls as well as theirs. How we perceive the strangers we pass in the grocery store shapes our souls. What we laugh at, what we cry about, and how we joke all shape our souls. The things that we spend our money on shape our souls. How we spend our leisure and resources shapes our souls. 

What we dream about, fantasize about, and hope for all shapes our souls. All these things are little inclines or slopes that incrementally glide our souls toward everlasting splendor or wretchedness. Lewis in The Weight of Glory (1941) said it this way,  

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” [2]

This all means that fundamentally there is nothing in this life that is merely trivial.  

INSIGHT #2: THERE ARE DARK FORCES AT WORK IN THIS WORLD
The second thing that shines forth from Lewis’s work is a sobering vigilant awareness of spiritual powers. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood but dark cosmic spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:12; Colossians 1:13). Lewis says at the very beginning of The Screwtape Letters,

"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."[3]

Similarly, the theologian and philosopher Peter Kreeft (1937-present) puts it like this:

“Satan is equally pleased by our overestimating him and our underestimating him – as the commander of an enemy army in wartime would be equally pleased if your side greatly overestimated his strength and shook with superstitious fear when there was ‘nothing to fear but fear itself,’ or if you greatly underestimated his strength, or even stopped believing in his very existence.”[4]

It is easy in our post-modern hyper-scientistic world today to balk at the idea of a spiritual realm of darkness versus light, much less that we humans are affected by it. 
It is a laughably quaint idea from a bygone age when we believed in things like fairies, objective morality, and civic virtue. But this is to our detriment. We are precisely where the Adversary and his devilish hordes want us to be – blind and proud of it. Our culture (and many a church sadly) has crafted the perfect fatted sheep for the grinders of the War-Machine of Hell.  

INSIGHT #3: THE NEED TO PERCEIVE OUR CHAINS 
Dovetailing off the last paragraph is the understanding that the only way to have spiritual victory is to be aware of the Enemy’s tactics. We must understand the subtlety of Satan. The Adversary’s goal is to ensure we do not perceive our own chains. Therefore, he rarely works through the grandiose. His playground resides in the realm of the gradual, the mundane, and the unremarkable. 

​That is where his greatest work is achieved.  

It is the little foxes that spoil the vine (Solomon 2:15). It is the methodical allure of desires that entice the soul (James 1:14-15). It is the waterless springs of darkness that promise allurements but brings enslavement (2 Peter 2:17-19). For the past several weeks I have become acutely aware of such truth by re-reading Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.  

CLOSING
Because of all this over the next several posts, I would like to focus upon some of the most provocative thoughts in Lewis’ book on how the Adversary slowly tries to destroy our souls. Each post will cover one or two inclines/slopes the Adversary puts along the paths of our lives to slowly kill the Light of Christ. As with every post, these will not be exhaustive but hopefully will provoke and impassion you in your walk of Faith.  

I hope you will come with me along the journey.  
_____________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 220
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001), pg. 46 
[3] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 183
[4] Peter Kreeft, Angels and Demons: What Do We Really Know about Them? (New York, NY: Ignatius, 1995), pg. 112

​Indifference is one of the single most life-threatening obstacles of our post-modern age.  It is the philosophy of shruggish I-don’t-care-ism that is really behind most of our cultures slide into relativism, skepticism, boredom, and promiscuity.  It cleverly and cancerously sucks the vitality, passion, and sensibility from any environment or individual that ingests it.  Such an ethic has killed corporations, civilizations, movements, marriages, churches, and souls with equal force.  While the unbeliever can be and often is consumed and enslaved to this monstrous power sadly and disturbingly many a believer also succumbs to its corrupting influence.  It is to such a reality that I wish to direct attention in this post.  While still relevant to unbelievers the thrust will be upon prodding, provoking, and awakening believers. 
 
That said, read on. 
 
THE WEIGHT OF OUR LOVE
Christians have always struggled with the battle of indifference.  Even Augustine (354-430 A.D.), the great philosopher and theologian of the Christian Church, prayed back in the 300s A.D.,
 
“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]
 
What naked honesty.  Augustine prayed what I think many of us have prayed in our faith walk – to be reignited, to walk closer to God, to be stirred up, to be revived, to desire Him more, to be dragged into His presence, to be drawn to His beauty, and so forth.  But often it seems as if our words peter-out as quickly as we say them.  The heavens seem to calcify, the heart is once again snagged, and the mind once again wanders.  It seems as if we go through these continual oscillating phases between desire and apathy throughout our walk. 
 
There is a terror in all this. 
 
Slowly, incrementally, unknowingly a shift can begin to take place within us.  As we plod through these vacillating stages we progressively (or rather regressively) become less and less desirous of desiring.  Our enjoyment of God not only begins to deaden but our awareness and care of that deadening begins to deaden.  This is the danger of all dangers.  This is where indifference rests. 
 
Augustine revealed a seed of this problem in his own life when he said, “I was dragged away by my own weight and in dismay I plunged again into the things of the world.”  Our “weight” is what gives mass to our choices.  Augustine said it like this,
 ​
“My weight is my love.  Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”[2] 
 
At bottom, what we truly love is exemplified by what carries us through life.  Ask yourself, “What is your weight?”  To answer consider what you live for.  Whatever gives you hope, peace, comfort, solace, sanity, identity, and meaning is at its root what you love.  Whatever consumes your energy, time, effort, resources, and happiness is, at bottom, what you love.  Augustine is not being novel here.  He merely echoes the Master Carpenter of our souls who told us,

            “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”[3]
 
This is truth.  As we go through life the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13) becomes buried under a mountain of lower quality jewels that we collect.  They all do hold value to our lives, and should, but as time goes on, we keep laying more and more of them upon the foundational and Greater Beauty of the Kingdom.  As a result, the Kingdom becomes harder and harder to shine through.  To use the analogy of Augustine, our senses become saturated by a myriad of fragrances that begin to dull the aroma of Christ. 
 
THE DEADLY TOXINS OF LITTLE THINGS
This process of indifference does not happen immediately.  It is steady, subtle, and happens almost always through good things.  Therein lies the true deadliness of its power. 
 
The road to indifference (spiritual death) is made up of a myriad of glistening bricks that individually are seemingly isolated beautiful things.  Family, friends, work, eating, drinking, buying, laughing, relaxing, playing, child-rearing, fellowshipping, serving, creating, and on and on are all elements that can and often do make up the road to indifference.  Successively each of these things, although independently beautiful aromas of life, gradually begin to consume everything about us.  They begin to overpower and surpass our sense of the One Thing needful (Luke 10:42).  In other words, they begin to distract us from the deeper longing that each of them only mirror – intimacy with the Maker of our souls (more in a minute on this). 
 
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French mathematician and theologian, defined this problem powerfully when he said,
 
“Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.”[4]
 
In short, we are agents that seem to perpetually become obsessed with the “little things” in life and regressively unconcerned with the “big things.”  Let me try and forcefully modernize it for us:  We tend to become far more concerned with binging through our latest television series than we are binging the Scriptures.  We tend to become far more concerned with leveling up our video-game scores than leveling up our own spiritual beings.  We tend to become far more concerned with looking right for the family summer barbeque than being right for the marriage supper of the Lamb.  We tend to become far more concerned with ensuring our kids play sports than in training them up for the spiritual race of life.  We tend to become far more concerned with cleaning our houses than having our spiritual houses in order.  We tend to become far more consumed with surfing tabloids and Facebook posts than with prayer and meditation.  The thing about all of these is that they are not bad things in themselves.  They are good things.  They are things that give us joy.  But these things begin to mount up in our lives and progressively obscure the Kingdom, which is the everlasting Reality of joy. 
 
We always assume that our slide “into sin” or our “backsliding” could come or would come in a rushing wind or a clanging symbol.  But it never does.  Sin is a road.  It is a root.  It is a cancer.  It is the inverse of the Kingdom Reality of Christ who says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 4:6).   The path of indifference proclaims that same truism – that it is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  But it isn’t. 
 
Indifference is therefore the most effective and hellish tool in the arsenal of the Adversary.  It is the most effective because it is the most unnoticeable for it uses good things to its own end.  It is the most hellish because it does not seem like its rebellion, but it is.  It is another form of hate towards God.  It is not an impassioned skeptical hate; it is a yawning unrecognized hate.  That is why it does not seem as dangerous.  With militant rebellion there is at least a passion and purpose to it.  That form of hatred says, “I want to kill you!” or “I hate you God!”  But with indifference there is a slow deadness to care or cause.  It says, “I do not care whether you live or die” and acts as if God isn’t relevant at all. 
 
Hate is like the rush of a tsunami or the burst of a volcano.  Indifference is like the slow, methodical, corrosive leakage of a toxin.   It is not noticeable.  It still kills.  But by all outward signs everything is fine.  Until it is not.    
 
When we are indifferent to the things of the Kingdom what we really are doing is yawning in the face of God’s beauty.  It is saying, “I don’t care about You,” which is just another indirect way of saying, “I hate you God” without actually saying “I hate you God.”
 
LOSING SITE OF ETERNITY
Is there a way to reverse the steps of indifference?  Yes.  Where there is life there is hope and where there is hope there can be life once again.  I do not presume to give an entire analysis in one post on the nature of indifference nor solutions to it.  But in the last part of this post, I want to address at least one underlining cure for the malady of indifference. 
 
If we want to curb the encroaching snares of indifference in our lives, then we need a renewed look at life through the lens of Eternity.  The subtilty of spiritual indifference happens when we slowly lose sight of eternity and focus more on the evanesces of earthly life.  It is the “Here and Now Syndrome” that needs to be broken in us.  Pascal tells it bluntly like this,
 
One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us….  Nothing could be more real, or more dreadful than that.  Let us put on as bold a face as we like: that is the end awaiting the world’s most illustrious life.  Let us ponder these things, and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good thing in this life is the hope of another life, that we become happy only as we come nearer to it, and that, just as no more unhappiness awaits those who have been quite certain of eternity, so there is no happiness for those who have no inkling of it.[5]
 
To be frank, Pascal is saying we do not think often enough about our death.  This sounds morbid.  But there is a truth in it.  He is not speaking of a macabre nihilistic suicidal mentality towards life.  Quite the opposite.  He is getting across the understanding, that is deeply biblical,[6] of seeing life through death.  Put another way, seeing Eternity through the earthly or the Big things through the little things.  To have this understanding is to have a healthy sense of existence.  C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) said it like this,
 
“All that seems earth is the beginning of Hell or Heaven.”[7]
 
This world, our life, is nothing more than an extension of Heaven or Hell.  This life is but the foyer to a grander or more terrifying world of Eternity.  You are no more eternal than you are right now.  But the primeval plans of the Adversary are to ensure you do not dwell on this fact very often or at all.  His job is to implant obstacles into the midst of our lives to gravitate our weight (our love) ever downward rather than upward.  And he does this almost exclusively through the little good things that eventually become distractions to this Ultimate Good.  We are even warned over and over in the Scriptures about this.  We are told that our lives will be marked by perseverance (Romans 5:4), tests of endurance (James 1:3), wrestling’s with spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:12), and cravings in our flesh (Galatians 5:17).  Such struggle is to be a given.  But what isn’t a given for many of us is that such a struggle can and often does take place through all the beauties and aromas that give joy to us.    
 
Such a view of death and eternity is not meant for us to be solemn and joyless.  Nor is it to create in us a sense of escapism.  Rather it should craft in us a sense of joyous diligence.  My late mother put such a philosophy in the simplest yet most profound words, “Live a last breath life.”  That philosophy has the power to shake apathy and drive us off the path of indifference. 
 
To give a little more robust application to this let us just consider the words of the author of Ecclesiastes,
 
11 He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man.
Ecclesiastes 3:11-13 (ESV)
 
What a beautiful scripture that encapsulates what I am trying to get across.  Now I am not going to do a full exegetical study of this passage in all its richness because of brevity, but I want you to recognize a few points as I close this post:

1. All of Life is Sacred – Every aspect of your life is stamped with Eternity “eternity is in man’s heart.”  This means the laughs, the joys, the experiences, the work, and the loves you have in life reveal to you a higher more transcendent Joy found ultimately in the giver of laughs and loves, God Himself.  These are what C.S. Lewis would call that “signatures of the soul.”[8]  Your soul has the shape of a lock and there is only one key to unlock it ultimately, which is a God sized key.[9]  
2. True Joy Happens with True Good – You cannot have true joy if you do not bask in that which is good and you cannot do the good without being infected with joy.  So if you feel no joy in life, have you reflected on the state of your soul?  Is it weighed down with the deadness and darkness of moral decay?  If you feel no good but have joy, is that real or illusory?  Have you thought deeply about what it is in life that is making you happy?  What if you lost that thing or person?  These are mutually exclusive realities – JOY and GOOD.  Why?  Because they originate in God Himself who is the giver of both.  He is the paradigm of Love (1 John 4:8) and Light (1 John 1:5) and giver of Life (Psalm 36:9).   
3. The Sacredness of Joy and Goodness Exists Only Through Eternity – Notice what the author says, “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good AS LONG AS they live.”  This is a mix of beauty and somberness.  Only the wisdom of the Scriptures can achieve this.  The author affirms life is full of joy and goodness… but recognizes that life is fleeting.  And that sense of frailty informs the finality of everything he does.  How beautifully terrifying to reflect on for you and me.  God is reminding us there is more than eating, drinking, and toiling to life.  Life is these things, but it is more than these things.   

If you want a New Testament equivalent to this ancient truth of eternal thinking consider what the Apostle Paul said in Colossians,
 
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.  5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you…
Colossians 3:1-5 (ESV)

__________
[1] Augustine, Confessions, trans, R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York, NY: MacMillian, 1961) pg. 152
[2] Augustine, Confessions, trans, Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) pg. 278-279
[3] Matthew 6:21
[4] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. ed. Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (USA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 203
[5] Pascal, ibid, pg. 191-192
[6] Consider these scriptures that deal with the evanescence of out lives: 2 Samuel 14:14, 1 Chronicles 29:15, Psalm 90:12, Psalm 144:4, Job 14:1, Ecclesiastes 1:4, Isaiah 40:6, James 4:13-14.  All of them call us to have a healthy understanding of death so that we may have a proper understanding of life. 
[7] C.S. Lewis as quoted in Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (USA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 142
[8] C.S. Lewis, Signature Classics, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 638-644
[9] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, ibid, pg. 640

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the German atheist existentialist philosopher, once told the parable of a mad man who declared the death of God,
 
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!"  As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. “Why, did he get lost?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?” Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
 
"Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead.  And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."
 
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out….”  It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang his “requiem aeternam deo.” Led out and called to account, he is said to have retorted each time: "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"[1]
 
This parable is not merely the musings of a nihilistic rebel who revels in the death of the Almighty.  Rather it is a sober prophetic vision of what a culture becomes when it kills the Sacred.  Nietzsche, in all his irreverent honesty, shows us that when God is dead in our culture, everything changes.  Reality is unhinged and every excess is binged.  When God is dead, all life, meaning, morality, knowing, being, and doing are redefined and reassigned.
 
Our culture is living out loud Nietzsche’s parable every day.  It has decided to ignite a renaissance of the primordial energies that destroyed Eden.  Those energies are just a rehashing and re-conjuring of every “ism” known to Man.  Humanism has freed us from Divinity by focusing our efforts on immortalizing human nature and progress.  Naturalism has freed us from Faith by making us realize the only reality is what we can see.  Deconstructionism has freed us from Truth by fashioning all narratives as truths and Truth as but a narrative.  Relativism has freed us from Morality by helping us understand that right and wrong are determined from within.  Consumerism has freed us from Restraint by allowing us to indulge in the excess of all our deepest cravings. 
 
Through these energies the shackles of backward concepts like sin, shame, and the sacred are broken and we move towards greater freedom, equality, prosperity, and happiness.  At least that is what we believe, right?  To date about 60% of us agree that “identifying moral truth is up to each individual [and that] there are no moral absolutes that apply to everyone, all the time.”[2]  And tragically 46% of us “evangelical Christians” agree with that same conclusion.[3]  Surprised?  Not really.  We are seeing the fruit of our labors, or rather the lack thereof.  For decades our culture at large has rationalized, relativized, and stigmatized GOD to the level of a mirage or taste.  It has drunk deep of the pop-philosophy of common mantras that shape us from crib to grave: “God wants you to be happy,” “Don’t let anyone tell you what to be or do,” and “Find your authentic self.”  We are inundated with these phrases through the music we listen to, to the movies we watch, to the clothes and food we buy, to the schooling we receive, to the advice we get around the dinner table.  In the words of ex Justice Anthony Kennedy, who represents an essential interpreter of the very jurisprudence that ungirds our civilization, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”[4]    Nietzsche could not have said it any better.  Neither could Lucifer.
 
The Church in all of this is, sadly, no better (and I speak in broad terms here).  Because the world is an ever changing tapestry of choices and beliefs it seems necessary for the Pillar of the Truth to adapt or die.  Methodology, doxology, and theology needs redefining and refining.  You see we must help the Almighty adapt to our more enlightened and progressive post-modern ways.  We must make God relevant again.  Like an adolescent leading along their parents into the technologies and customs of the 21st Century, the Church is shepherding God.  It has grown up, seen the world, and realized its Cosmic Parent is too outmoded and insufficient to achieve His ends on His own merits.  And so, we drink deeply of the methods of our culture’s madness.  We turn obedience to preference, virtue to values, and Truth to experience and wrap it all up into a nicely packaged set of self-helps sermons and seeker friendly business models.  All for “the Cause” of commission of course.  The result is millions of us doing our routine weekly rituals of coming collectively together into thousands of churches across this nation in order to worship a God that accepts everything we accept, believes everything we believe, and behaves in every way we behave. 
 
What is so tragic about this project of cosmic iconoclasm is the delusionary and perverse effects it has on us as a people.   Nietzsche, in all his madness and godlessness, understood profoundly that without any objective transcendent astrological center to life – What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? – all is doomed to meaninglessness.  There is no up.  There is no down.  Why?  Because there is no horizon, which is the leveler to the landscape of existence.  When there is no horizon there is only confusion and madness left.  Mere creatures cannot create horizons they can only be guided by them.  
 
Consider the growing madness of our age:  In our world today, we speak that “wrong” is subjective and “right” is oppressive.  We assert that the only boundaries there can be is to say there are no boundaries.  We preach that the only sin is saying there is sin, and the only Truth is to say there is no truth.  We legislate laws yet legal scholars inform us that everything is permitted before the law.  We condemn corporate greed as immoral yet are taught that there really is no such thing as objective morals.  We censure racists for seeing minorities as animals yet are instructed in biology classes that we are in fact nothing more than animals.  We promote fact-checking to ensure our political integrity yet teach in philosophy programs that facts are just subjective narratives.  We hold political rallies campaigning for gender equality yet write psychology treatises contending that gender is a societal illusion.  We host panels on the toxicity of objectifying women yet have feminist op-eds arguing that prostitution is a legitimate means of empowering women.    We are in fact rebels without a cause.  We rebel against our own rebellions.  Such post-modern madness, such horizonless efforts, are summed up in the poignant words of G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) over a century ago,  
 
"The new rebel is a sceptic and will not entirely trust anything... [T]he fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation applies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces but the doctrine by which he denounces it... In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore, the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.  By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything."[5]

This whole experiment we have going on of present is an old-new project of Bablesch proportions.  We are building towers to the heavens to not merely defy God but to declare to the Cosmos that we are the new improved Almighty.  Shirley MacLaine would be proud.  Nimrod's chest buttons are bulging.  
 
But our culture is living a lie.  Many of us are living a lie.  We have fallen under the spell of the regression of our progression.  Under this allurement we believe that all of these “isms” hold the keys to our freedom, fairness, and happiness, while in actuality they hold enslavement, impropriety, and wretchedness.  The truth is that for all our talk of “progress” we really are just as, arguably more so, enslaved than any era of Mankind.  While we may be more efficient, more scientific, more industrious, and more self-determining than any generation of our species, we have excelled in slowly killing our Humanity.  The data doesn’t lie.  Today we have less meaningful relationships than any of our forefathers;[6]  we have less of a sense of purpose and meaning than any previous generation;[7]  we are more depressed and less happy than at any other period;[8] and we have a growing deficit of empathy towards those with whom we disagree.[9]  So much for being less bigoted and more enlightened than our forbearers eh?   
 
The FACT is we are becoming more diluted in our ability to perceive our own chains.  This is the regression of progression.  We unhinge ourselves from virtue, tradition, morality, faith, and the Giver of All Life and Light, God Himself, in order to recreate the world in our image, only to find that such a vision leaves us wanting and waning.  We are living in the greatest form of enslavement ever concocted in the minds of devils because it is the kind we cannot see and will not see and are proud of not seeing.  We are going back to Egypt, not away from it.  We are skipping towards Gomorrah, not turning from it.  We are blueprinting Babel, not scrapping it.  We are choosing evil to achieve life rather than love to achieve the Good.  We are our primordial father and mother once again listening to the words of the worlds first deconstructionist, Satan, who said, “Did God say?” 
 
The shadow of Nietzsche’s parable of the Madman has and does loom large over our world.   In one way this existentialist German nihilist was right, God had been killed by our hands.  It was He who scaled Golgotha that died a death of a thousand lifetimes.  Paid it all.  Triumphed overall.  Defines and redefines all.  Gives meaning, hope, identity, and peace to all.  If we ever hope to achieve true peace, happiness, wholeness, identity, and meaning, it is only going to come through this One that bruised the head of the serpentine purveyor of the first “isms.”  It is only through the life, the work, the teaching, and the restoration of the Luminous Nazarene that our culture, our churches, our families, and ourselves find their orientation, their horizon.  For it is He who said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). 
____________________________
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pg. 181-82[2]https://www.georgebarna.com/research/282014/americans-see-many-sources-of-truth%E2%80%94and-reject-moral-absolutes
[3]https://www.arizonachristian.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/AWVI-2020-Release-05-Perceptions-of-Truth.pdf
[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-744.ZO.html
[5] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy in The Three Apologies (Mockingbird Press, 2018), pg. 155-156
[6]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/affectionado/201308/what-lack-affection-can-do-you; https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8294451-cigna-us-loneliness-survey/; http://www.getlifeboat.com/report/
[7]https://www.newsweek.com/people-sense-purpose-live-longer-study-suggests-1433771; https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/sullivan-things-are-better-than-ever-why-are-we-miserable.html
[8] https://www.fastcompany.com/90322825/world-happiness-report-teens-are-online-more-less-happy; https://theconversation.com/what-might-explain-the-unhappiness-epidemic-90212;https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/depression-rise-us-especially-among-young-teens; https://www.bcbs.com/the-health-of-america/reports/major-depression-the-impact-overall-health
[9]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088868310377395; https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/04/increasing-number-of-britons-think-empathy-is-on-the-wane; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45508353_Changes_in_Dispositional_Empathy_in_American_College_Students_Over_Time_A_Meta-Analysis