This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’ Jeremiah 6:16
“The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”
C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (Samizdat University Press) 50.
Remember, God is “the Enemy” in the words of Screwtape to Wormwood. He desires that our lives have Rhythm. And notice where the Lenten discipline of fasting even comes into view.
God gives us these rhythms to enable us to center or remain focused in a world filled with change. The evil one knows this and does not want us to experience it.
So the reason we practice giving, prayer, and fasting in Lent is to make sure the constant change that happens in our lives does not cause us to get off track. They help us stay on track.
Someone asked me recently how I find rest when traveling, time to exercise when home, and manage to read, research, and write. The answer is, in a word, rhythm.
Join me. Discipline yourself in a world filled with chaos to nurture mere Christianity. The fast gives us more than food and the feast takes shape as a celebration of God’s gifts. Rhythm is a gift from God.
Someone else asked me if their could hear my sermon from this last Sunday. Find it here.