The Search | Deflecting Us From Receiving Abundant Life - John 4:19 - 26 - Clint Leavitt

Sermon Resources: Scripture References - Amos 5:24, Jeremiah 7:1-11, John 14:6 1. “When the Patient goes inside the church building, he will see 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 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 he has previously avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors…Provided that any of them 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 on the disappointment or anti-climax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a church-going man.” -C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters" 2. “Make your patient a taster or connoisseur of churches. The perpetual search for a “suitable” church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil [remember, Enemy in the demon’s eyes is God]. So bestir yourself and send this fool around all the neighborhood churches as soon as possible…And then, if your patient can’t be kept out of the church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things–candles and clothes and what not–are an admirable ground for our activities.” -C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters" 3. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” -Henry David Thoreau, "Walden" 4. “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” -David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water" 5. “The world is not divided between people who worship and people who don’t. The world is divided into people who worship things that will distort their life, and people who worship the only object worthy of the adoration of our soul.” -Tim Keller 6. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery