It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
–C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, Letter XII
An especially valid warning for those of us within the Church! Even without it being a [i]“Perseverance of the Saintsâ€[/i] issue, I have been part of one parish ripped apart by this gentle progression on the part of someone in leadership.
Mutual accountability, and the intimacy to keep things visible, is essential; in our so called ‘private’ lives, and in the church. Otherwise we, by dent of our fallen nature, drift silently and peacefully down that road, until, if rescue-able at all, it is only at a great price.
All of us need a “Nathan†in our life. Where would David have been without him?
Lewis was bang on. Because the devil uses temptation not to get us to do naughty things so much as to deflect us from our primary vocation to be God’s image-bearing creatures in the world.
Perhaps the most chilling description of the gradual anesthetization, indeed, the eternal death in eternal existence by lethal injection, of an immortal human spirit living in genteel rebellion against God.