Meetings, Pamphlets and Policies are not the Gospel
Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE (Screwtape Letters– Letters from a Demon Uncle to his nephew)
I (Kathleen) have had several people come up to me in public and say you Whole House ladies do so much, like you are everywhere! We’re really not, that’s just technology and social media. The Whole House isn’t all about meetings, pamphlets or policies. If we were, we would be falling into Screwtape’s trap. By that I mean, we would be serving the cause and crusade instead of Christ. It’s important not to confuse those.
Divine Demands
“Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about ‘His glory’s diminution’? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ’, to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”
As Lewis suggests, God loves us far too much to leave us where we are. He has a great plan for us—greater than we can possibly imagine—and is persistently working for our good, even when we cannot see or understand it. Our part is to respond to God’s purifying love by opening our hearts to him in praise and worship, in the study of his word, and in obedience to his will. As we do these things, we will discover over time that we are growing to know God better; and as we know him better, we shall realize that we are coming to love him more; and as we love him more, we will find ourselves desiring to please and obey him in all things. By earnestly seeking God’s face in this way, we will find him progressively revealing himself to us, intensifying our hunger, and making us more like Jesus. – CSLewisinstitue.org
This is our goal here at The Whole House to respond to God’s purifying love by opening up our hearts. We share our stories, our time and our journey because Christ first loved us, not because we need another cause or meeting.
The Rescue
All praise to the God and Father of our Master, Jesus the Messiah! Father of all mercy! God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. We have plenty of hard times that come from following the Messiah, but no more so than the good times of his healing comfort—we get a full measure of that, too.- 2 Corinthians 1:4
We here at The Whole House want to come alongside you. We’ve had plenty of hard times in our journey. We get it. We’re here. We have had good times of healing too and we want that for all. Do you have a prayer request today?