Hey, this is John Ortberg. This is passage to wisdom. I wanna say at the start today, this is for imperfect people. This is for messed up, broken, confused, um, misguided, often stumbling around, uh, people who are looking for hope and help in God. I can’t. And I’m deeply, deeply aware of that in my life. And just wanna say is you’re tuning in. If you find yourself discouraged or feel like you’re not sure if you’re on the right track, this is a place where you can be you. I was talking to my friend, Jimmy earlier this week, I had seen on my phone that he had called me. So I was calling back cuz that was kind of cool. Like Jimmy what’d you wanna talk about? And he said, oh, I, I didn’t do that on purpose. I must have pocket dialed you. I had never heard that phrase pocket dialed before, but immediately I knew where it was coming from.
Jimmy grew up Southern Baptist and although he is in his fifties, now he could not bring himself to say the word, but even to me, his good friend, he just the word, but dialed could not come out of his mouth. You could take the boy out of the Southern Baptist, but you cannot take the Southern Baptist out the boy. And I grew up Swedish Baptist. So I get to tease Baptist because I’m, uh, deeply grateful for that heritage and that, uh, opportunity to learn about God and Jesus. But the reality is we all struggle with having clarity on what is good, what is worthy of feeling guilt and, and what’s messed up, what’s wrong. And where does our religion get distorted? And how do I think about God? How does an intelligent person think about the afterlife? How do we think about heaven or about hell not in cartoon images, but in serious reflective adult fashion. And that’s part of why we’re getting wisdom from CS Lewis and the book, screw tape letters. And part of what I, I wanted to share with you today is, um, thinking well about heaven and about how so that I can set my life on the right course and receive wisdom and guidance beyond myself.
So here’s what Lewis writes. He, he has a little, uh, uh, essay that he wrote explaining his thinking when he was putting screw tape letters together because it became such a popular work. And he writes about how often people think badly about hell and about Satan in foolish ways that obstruct our faith. And he says the really pernicious image is Gee’s MEO, Garrity wrote Faust and MEOS is the Satan character in that. But Lewis says it’s a distorted picture, which actually does a lot of damage. It is, Fous not MEO. In other words, the human being that sells his soul it’s FOSS who really exhibits the ruthless sleepless UNS, smiling concentration upon self, which is the mark of hell. The humorist civilized sensible adaptable MEOS has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating. And how often in popular treatments in books or television shows or movies, is that image of evil or the devil kind of SWA Orban sophisticated.
And that, uh, lends itself to the thought that, well, if I don’t have to worry about good and evil or God or accountability, and I can do anything, I want to, there’s great freedom in that. And of course there is not that’s part of what Jesus taught and when I devote myself to whatever it is that I want, ultimately there’s always enslavement. I was talking to my friend, Dr. Rick this morning, and he was telling about a couple of people that he’ll be talking with today that went down that road. And, uh, the damage that was done to their marriages, to their children, to their values is very, very difficult to calculate. Evil is not liberating. We have a hard time thinking about it well because, um, self-righteousness creeps in so quickly. Lewis goes on a little man may sometimes avoid some single error made by a great one. And I was determined that my own symbolism should at least not err, in GTA’s way for humor involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside, whatever else we attribute to beings who sin through pride. We must not attribute this. Satan said Chester and fell through force of gravity.
We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance where everyone lives, the deadly serious passions of envy, self importance and resentment. So I want to pause there. That means to live with God, involves letting go precisely of this. And I know what it’s like to live with a heavy weight of my own sense of grievance. And it will always be distorted and always make me look to myself like more of a martyr than I actually am. And to let it go, I am learning, although it can be painful in the moment. I, I don’t want to let it go, but there’s so much freedom on the other side, let it go. Don’t be concerned with my dignity or my advancement today. Lose goes on. I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in a managerial age in a world of admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sort of dens of crime that Dickens love to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those, we see its final results, but it is conceived and ordered. Moved, seconded, carried in minted in clean carpeted, warmed and well lighted offices by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth shaven. SHEEX who do not need to raise their voice. Hence naturally enough. My symbol for hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state,
Or this is a little scary. The offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. Milton has told us that devil with devil damned firm, Concord holds. In other words, in the work that is devilish of evil, there’s a kind of consistency, a kind of binding together, but how certainly not by friendship. Again, this is thinking deeply and seriously about the nature of good and evil and God and hell. Certainly not by friendship. A being which can still love is not yet a devil here. Again, my symbols seem useful to me. It enabled me by earthly parallels to picture an official society held together entirely by fear and greed. I mentioned a while ago, a friend of mine that got an MBA and the class went one time to visit a corporation. And the professor asked the question who’s winning today, fear or greed. And those were the only two options I’m either motivated by. I gotta get more. I could be able to get more. I could enrich myself and acquire more or I’m afraid we might lose the market might be going bad. I might be losing my job. Something might be going downhill. Fear agreed. Who’s winning.
It was so interesting after I talked to Mark Nelson, who you all got to meet about what he called the hedonic paradox, that if I aim at happiness, if that becomes my primary goal, I’ll never actually be happy. It comes as a product, a byproduct of something else. And he said in the business community, there’s a similar paradox around profitability. If a company says we’re just about profit, we’re gonna be driven either by greed more and more and more or fear, we gotta make sure we don’t lose too much. It’s actually less likely to be profitable than if the aim of that company is to produce some good beyond itself profits like happiness and uh, most El else of life come as a byproduct. When we are pursuing something greater,
This enabled me. Louis says to picture an official society, held together by fear and greed on the surface. Manners are normally suave. And by the way, just by the way, sometimes churches can be held together by a combination of fear and greed. And I think one of the reasons why so many young people in our day are deconstructing their faith is they are tired of seeing churches that are held together by fear and greed. And I say that as somebody who has been involved in leading church and who has been motivated by either fear or greed way too much
On the surface manners that normally suave rudeness to one superiors would obviously be suicidal rudes to one equals might put them on their guard before you were ready to spring your mind for of course, dog eat dog is the principle of the whole organization. Everyone wishes. Everyone else is discrediting demotion and ruin. Everyone is an expert in the confidential report. The pretended Alliance, the stab in the back, over all this they’re good manners, expressions of grave, respect their tributes to one another’s invaluable services form a thin crust every now and then it gets punctured and the scalding lava of their hatred spurts out. And I’m gonna carry this on a little bit next time for now. I just want to pause and, and say God, oh God, oh God, deliver us from hell. Deliver me from taking my life. My dignity, my resentments, my grievances with that kind of seriousness. Let me walk through life today with the freedom and lightness and joy of heaven. Have a really good one. I’ll see you next time.