A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook

1. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook A Lenten Bible Study Based on The Screwtape Letters By C. S. Lewis

2. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook Letter XIII “Real” Pleasures & “Real” Pains

3. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distress—you would try to protect him at all cost from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask you whole stratagem.”

4. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is, by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?”

5. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” Ephesians 2:1-3

6. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.  And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.” I John 2:15-17

7. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act…

8. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “No amount of piety in his imagination and affection will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

9. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him?  If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?  Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. James 2:14-17

10. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook Letter XIV Humility, Pride, Vainglory & False Modesty

11. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of “grace” for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation!”

12. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of “grace” for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation!” “This is very bad.”

13. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By Jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear.”

14. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of this attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please. Don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.”

15. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely a low opinion) of his own talents and character… The great thing is to make him value an opinion for come quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonest and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue”

16. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe in may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing in it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.”

17. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”

18. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents… when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.”

19. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient’s mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings—the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair…

20. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook “Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much; once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.”

21. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook Letter XV

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32. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook Letter XVI

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43. A Peek Inside the Devil’s Playbook Letter XVII

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