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The Odious Inner Radio
In 1958 a woman named Mary Willis Shelburne (the "lady" in Letters to an American Lady) was burdened with a sense of moral guilt. She wrote Lewis, who replied--
Dear Mary Willis,--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 962
(1) Remember what St John said 'If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.' The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn't, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can't help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ear or any other irrational nuisance.
(2) Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said 'If you knew that all was well, what wd. you, today, do, or stop doing?' When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. 'Details, please' is the answer.
How Jack Miller Came to Love Sonship
Jack Miller helped a generation recover the significance of what it means to be adopted into God's own family so that God is now our Father and we his sons and daughters. The curriculum that spun off of Jack's ministry in Philadelphia is itself entitled 'Sonship.'
In a 1982 letter to a wife of a pastor who had been asked to resign, Jack describes how the New Testament reality of sonship came home to him personally.
In a 1982 letter to a wife of a pastor who had been asked to resign, Jack describes how the New Testament reality of sonship came home to him personally.
My life's whole strength lies in that God has kindly imparted a confident knowledge of His Fatherhood.
I may have a better knowledge of the Father than do other people. But would you believe that this knowledge really began with the death of my own father? He was killed in a hunting accident when I was two years old. A senseless hunting accident. A piece of foolishness. Yet I am not bitter, and am grateful to God for the perfection of the plan.--The Heart of a Servant-Leader: Letters from Jack Miller (P&R, 2004), 276-77
The emptiness, the dark nights when I was afraid as a small child to go to bed for fear I too might disappear, led me By God's grace to seek God as Father, to know what Fatherhood meant, to give up self-pity and self-awareness and walk in the confident knowledge of my heavenly Father's love. . . . I love my Father in heaven and trust one day to see my earthly father and to join him in praising God for the marvel of a plan that is sound beyond ordinary human understanding.
A Double Misery
Luther:
Scripture represents man as one who is not only bound, wretched, captive, sick, and dead, but in addition to his other miseries is afflicted, through the agency of Satan his prince, with this misery of blindness, so that he believes himself to be free, happy, unfettered, able, well, and alive.--Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, in LW 33:130
How to Be Miserable
Jack Miller:
Human will-power always fails. It is a human attempt to do God's work with our own resources. But working out of self-dependence is guilt-inducing and exhausting. It impels the egoist to seek relief in pleasure and self-fulfillment, to use the good things of God as drugs to escape from reality. Self-fulfillment then takes over as the person's grand task in life leaving the person burdened with suppressed guilt and shame.--Jack Miller, 'Recovering the Grand Cause,' a paper written in 1993 to set the vision for a missionary training center to be launched in London
Unfortunately the person seeking self-fulfillment never finds happiness. Instead, his inner life shrivels and dries up. But let this person look away from self-interest, fight self-preoccupation, and set the affectional life on Christ and His cause. Christ is alive; He is the giant Son of God. He walks through the earth. Those who walk with Him know that Christ and the cause of the gospel really do introduce us to the deeply satisfying love of God.