Scripture: Philippians 1:27-2:11
“My Dear Wormwood, I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian . . . There is no need to despair . . . One of our greatest allies at present in the Church itself . . . when he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round 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. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. You patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous . . . Work hard, then, on the disappointment and anticlimax which certainly coming to the patient during his few weeks as a churchman.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape”
—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
“Humility and love are precisely the graces which the men of the world can understand, if they do not comprehend doctrines. They are the graces about which there is no mystery, and they are within reach of all classes… The poorest Christian can every day find occasion for practicing love and humility.” —J. C. Ryle
“If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth); if I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness, then I know nothing of Calvary love.”—Amy Carmichael
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