A Screwtape File on Lystra and Our Idols

Idols. They rob us of joy, of peace, and — if I’m honest about the order — Jesus first, and everything else after.

We’ve been sitting with that in Acts 14 for a couple weeks now. The man in Lystra. The crowd losing its mind. The bulls dragged up to the gate. The idols that, left alone, end up costing us blood we didn’t know we were spending.

I want to come at the same text from a different angle tonight, because I think we’ve mined the straightforward reading about as far as it goes.

If you’ve been around Red River long enough, you already know this about me: I quote C. S. Lewis more than any writer who’s ever lived, probably more than is healthy. There’s a reason for it. He has this habit of peeling the paint off our religious words and showing you the bare wood underneath. Not prettier wood. Not stained and sealed and photographed-for-the-brochure wood. Just the actual grain, the knots, the stuff you could build something real on if you wanted to.

One of my favorites of his is The Screwtape Letters. If you’ve never read it, the setup is simple enough to explain in an elevator. A senior demon named Screwtape is writing letters to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior tempter who’s just been handed his first real assignment — a human, a young man going about his ordinary life. Screwtape is coaching him. Teaching him, letter by letter, how to keep this man from ever really following Jesus.

So the whole book is temptation heard from the other side of the radio dial. The enemy’s frequency, not ours. No pitchforks. No horror-movie fog machine. Just a seasoned, slightly bored tempter explaining — patiently, almost affectionately — how you nudge a man a few degrees off course so slowly he never once feels himself turning.

It’s satire. But it’s the kind that leaves a mark on you for years, which is probably why I still haven’t put it down. Lewis doesn’t invent new sins for the occasion. He just shows you how the ordinary, respectable stuff of a life — habits, opinions, even churchgoing itself — can get quietly recruited as tools that bend a heart away from God. Without raising its voice. Without you ever hearing a door close.

That’s why the book has stayed with me all these years, longer than I expected it to. It puts language on things most of us feel and can’t name. Things we sense happening somewhere under the floorboards of our own hearts but can never quite catch red-handed.

So here’s what I want to try tonight. We’re staying in Acts 14 — same text, same dirt street, same man who couldn’t walk. But as we move through it, I want you to imagine what it might sound like if Screwtape were writing Wormwood about that town, about that crowd at the gate, about our hearts specifically. I started to say “about our hearts generally,” but that’s not quite it — Screwtape doesn’t deal in generalities. He deals in you.

I’m not doing this to be clever, and I promise I’m not secretly writing fiction on you from the pulpit. I just want to let the mask slip for a minute, to hear how the other side might talk about panic, control, “worthless things,” and the God who bleeds for us instead of demanding that we bleed for Him.

Sanctified Imagination

Think of it as sanctified imagination — Lewis’s way of letting Scripture slip past our defenses and land in the gut instead of just the mind.

If Lewis is right, and most days I think he is, idolatry isn’t just bad theology sitting quietly on a shelf somewhere. It’s a strategy. It might be Hell’s favorite one, precisely because it doesn’t require much effort — it just cooperates with something that’s already in us. A willing heart. And someone out there is genuinely, patiently interested in keeping you paying at the wrong altars for as long as he can manage it.

That’s what Paul is describing in Romans 1, people “exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images,” and the dark powers riding that exchange all the way down to the basement, not because they built the trade but because they know exactly how to keep it running.

Panic In Zeus Country

Acts 14 drops us into a town that would have felt like home turf to Screwtape. No synagogue here. No background in Moses, no scroll gathering dust anywhere nearby. Just a small place where Zeus stories hang in the air the way humidity hangs in a Louisiana August, and fear has had generations to harden into reflex.

There’s a man in that town who has never walked. Luke doesn’t dress the story up or soften it for us.

“Lame from birth.” “Had never walked.” [Acts 14:8]

That’s the whole biography. No account of what went wrong at birth, no rehab plan, no “if he’d just tried harder.” This man’s entire life has been lived close to the ground, looking up at everyone else’s knees.

He cannot walk. But he can listen. So he does.

Paul is preaching — Jesus, cross, resurrection, forgiveness, a King who didn’t stay in the ground. And this man isn’t just catching words the way you catch a breeze. He’s leaning in. Something is happening in him that nobody standing around him can see yet, and won’t see for another few minutes.

Luke tells us Paul was watching him closely. He “saw that he had faith to be healed.” [Acts 14:9] I don’t know exactly how you see a thing like faith. Something in a face, maybe. A posture. The difference between a man who’s merely listening and a man who’s actually receiving. But Paul saw it.

Paul raises his voice. “Stand up on your feet!”

And the man doesn’t ease into it the way you’d expect. He doesn’t test one ankle, then the other, doesn’t glance around first for permission or reassurance.

He jumps. [Acts 14:10]

Straight up, off the ground, for the first time in his entire life.

This is Isaiah, word for word almost. The prophet wrote that “the lame will leap like a deer” when God finally came to save. [Isaiah 35:3-6] That promise, centuries old by then, lands on a dirt street in Zeus country on an ordinary afternoon, and nobody in that town has the categories ready for what just happened in front of them.

Faith In The Ear, Idolatry In The Eye

Here’s where I want you to slow down with me, because two things are happening at once, and they run in exactly opposite directions.

The man hears the word. Believes it. Leaps. [Acts 14:8-10]

The crowd sees power and reaches immediately for the only categories they’ve ever owned. “The gods have come down to us in human form!” they shout. [Acts 14:11] Same miracle. Two completely different responses, happening in the same square, in the same five minutes.

Barnabas gets tagged as Zeus. Paul does the talking, so he gets Hermes, the messenger god. [Acts 14:12] And now there are two sermons running side by side in Lystra — one is faith, growing quietly in a man who heard the word and leapt without asking permission. The other is idolatry, growing loudly in a crowd that saw the power and folded it straight back into the only story they had on the shelf. A heart captured by the word. A town captured by what it saw with its eyes.

And then it gets worse. “The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the town, brought bulls and wreaths to the gates, because he intended, with the crowds, to offer sacrifice.” [Acts 14:13] Now fear is running the whole operation. They’re not worshiping so much as scrambling, trying not to anger gods they assume just dropped in unannounced and might be easily offended.

What Screwtape Loves About Panic

If Screwtape were writing Wormwood about this exact scene, here’s roughly how I imagine it landing on the page.

My dear Wormwood,

You are far too preoccupied with temples and statues. I’ve told you this before. Shrines have their uses, certainly, but most of the real work — the work that actually matters to us — happens long before a human ever lights a candle or drags a bull anywhere near a gate.

The real altar, my boy, is the knot in his stomach. That little sentence he whispers when he’s certain no one can hear him: “If this falls apart, I am done.”

Once you own that sentence, you can build a worship service anywhere you like. Hospital corridors. Living rooms at eleven at night. Church parking lots. School drop-off lines, of all places. No idol requires a building permit. It only requires panic, and panic is cheap, and panic is everywhere.

That’s really Lewis’s whole book in miniature, isn’t it. He takes what you and I would call ordinary fear — the kind that sits on your chest at 2 a.m. when sleep won’t come — and shows how Hell actually hears it. Not as a problem to be managed. As an opportunity. As a door somebody forgot to lock on their way out.

That’s Lystra exactly. Underneath the miracle, underneath all the shouting, there’s a town full of people who already know, in their bones, what it feels like to be small in front of powers they can’t see or reason with. They grew up on stories about gods who show up uninvited, take offense easily, and level entire towns over it. That was the air in their lungs before they ever heard Paul’s voice.

So when the true God finally keeps His ancient promise — when He makes a lame man leap on a dirt street in their unremarkable little town — the reflex isn’t worship. It’s survival. “We are in trouble. Do not make them angry. Get the bull. Now.” Not a hymn. An emergency drill.

A Screwtape Note On What We See

My dear Wormwood,

You must understand something I fear you still haven’t grasped. We care very little what the human sees. Almost nothing at all. What matters entirely to us is what he does with it afterward.

Let him see a healing. Let him see an answered prayer, a hundred small kindnesses arriving from the Enemy’s hand on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday. We are not threatened in the least by sight. Sight has never cost us anything.

Our danger begins the moment his eyes drive him toward the Enemy’s words — the moment he stops in the hallway of his own life and asks the terrible question, “Who is this Person who keeps showing up?”

Your task, then, is simple. When he sees power, steer him back toward the stories he already loves. In Lystra it was Zeus and Hermes. In your man it might be money, or safety, or romance, or reputation — the label hardly matters to us. Just be sure he files the Enemy’s work under something familiar and small. “I caught a break.” “I finally got my act together.” “The timing worked out.” Anything. Anything at all besides Him.

Do your job well, nephew, and he will see miracles his whole life through and never once meet the Miracle-Worker.

That’s the actual move happening in Lystra, and it’s quieter than we usually give it credit for. The town doesn’t deny what happened — they can’t. There’s a healed man hopping around right in front of them, evidence loud enough to wake the dead. [Acts 14:10-11] But they do something more dangerous than denial. They baptize it into their old story instead.

“The gods have come down to us in human form.” [Acts 14:11] Plural. Gods. Same facts on the ground, wrong frame stapled over the top of them, wrong name painted on the building. They’d grown up on legends about gods who visit and take offense and burn things to the ground — not Scripture, just the wallpaper of their whole world, the only explanation anyone had ever handed them. So when real power finally shows up, they reach for the one story that feels safe to reach for.

They do what Screwtape loves best of all. They rename grace.

Survival Logic Now

Most of us aren’t remotely tempted to bow down to a stone statue this week. I know that. Nobody’s dragging a bull up your driveway.

But the old logic didn’t die out — it just moved indoors. It runs quietly under church clothes now. Under mortgage payments. Under career goals, under the way we parent, under the way we scroll at midnight and plan out our weeks on Sunday afternoon like we’re building something that will hold.

We still work. We should — we’re called to it. [Colossians 3:23-24] We still keep relationships close. We should — love was never optional. [Colossians 3:18-21] Idolatry was never about having those things in the first place.

Idolatry is what you ask them to be.

It’s the weight you hang on a gift that was never built to hold you up. It’s the hidden claim you quietly attach to something God gave you freely, and then, almost without noticing, you start expecting that thing to do what only God can do. You start building your identity on it. Pouring the foundation of your worth into it, one bag of concrete at a time, and it was never poured to bear that kind of load — not once, not for anyone.

You know you’ve crossed the line when sentences start forming way down deep, in that place where you don’t let other people hear you think. “If this person walks away, God has nothing left for me.” “If this job goes, my identity goes with it.” “If I lose this, whatever it is for you tonight, I am nobody.”

That’s worship language. And most of us say it in our sleep without ever hearing ourselves pray it.

The job was never the idol. The hidden sentence underneath the job is. Same with family. Same with ministry — yes, even ministry, maybe especially ministry. Same with health, and same with that better version of yourself you keep almost becoming.

Good gifts. Terrible gods.

Jonah calls them “worthless idols” and says the ones who cling to them “abandon their faithful love.” [Jonah 2:8] Sit with that phrase for a second before you move on. You cannot cling to an idol and cling to grace with the same hand. One grip has to loosen eventually. And most of the time, if we’re honest, we don’t even notice which hand let go first.

A Screwtape Memo On “Good Things”

My dear Wormwood,

You keep asking me whether work, or family, or church itself is “dangerous” to our purposes. You are still thinking in terms of objects. How very human of you, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

The Enemy invented work. He invented marriage. He even — and I say this through gritted teeth, believe me — invented the Church. We cannot destroy those things outright without drawing far too much attention to ourselves. And frankly, my boy, we don’t need to.

Our method is simpler than destruction. We do not remove the good things. We lean on them. Gently. Over weeks, then months, then years, until a job quietly slides from gift into god and the man never notices the exact week it happened.

Take your patient’s job. We don’t need him to quit it. We only need him to believe, somewhere below the level of speech, that his name lives or dies with that company. Take his marriage. We don’t need him to hate his wife. We only need him to decide, quietly, that if she ever left, the Enemy would have nothing else left to offer him.

Do you see it now? We are not after his calendar. We are after his sentence — the one he has never once said out loud but believes with everything in him: “If this falls apart, I am done.”

Own that sentence, and you may leave every other appointment on his calendar exactly as it stands. He will be a very busy idolater. Respectable. Exhausted. Surrounded by good things on every side. And thoroughly useful to us.

That’s the whole trap, really, and the reason it works as well as it does is that it never once looks like a trap. It looks like a full life. A productive one. The kind of life other people admire from a safe distance, maybe even envy a little, never guessing what it’s actually carrying.

“Worthless Things” And The Living God

Eventually Barnabas and Paul have seen enough standing at that gate. They watch the bulls arrive, the wreaths, the priest of Zeus walking toward them with sacrifice already in tow, and something in both of them breaks open at once.

“The apostles Barnabas and Paul tore their robes when they heard this and rushed into the crowd, shouting…” [Acts 14:14-15] Tearing your robes isn’t a calm, measured pastoral gesture you’d find in a leadership manual. That’s grief. That’s something closer to horror. They are watching an entire town worship the wrong god in real time, right in front of them, and neither man can hold it in for another second.

“People, why are you doing these things? We are people also, just like you, and we are proclaiming good news to you, that you turn from these worthless things to the living God.” [Acts 14:14-15]

Worthless things. Not harmless things. Not neutral things, not “things that might be nice but aren’t quite right for you.” Worthless — meaning they cannot save you, cannot hold you, and will take everything you pour into them while handing you back nothing but exhaustion for your trouble.

And then Paul does the one thing Screwtape cannot stand, cannot work around, cannot spin. He names the living God out loud, in public, by name.

“The living God who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and everything in them… He did not leave Himself without a witness, since He did what is good by giving you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.” [Acts 14:15-17]

Do you hear how different that script is from the one the town already had memorized? Zeus waits for you to feed him. The living God has been feeding you the entire time, whether you noticed or not. Rain falling on ground that never earned a drop of it. [Matthew 5:45] Food showing up on tables you weren’t sure how you’d cover that month. Small, unscheduled moments of joy you know good and well you didn’t manufacture — you couldn’t have, not on your best day — they just arrived, like something left on the porch by someone who never bothered to knock. [James 1:16-17]

And then, later, at a table on the night He was betrayed, Jesus takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and says, “This is My body.” [Matthew 26:26] He doesn’t only give things anymore at that point. He gives Himself.

That is not Zeus. That’s not any god you could ever build out of stone, or career, or romance, or reputation, no matter how carefully you built it. That’s a God who bleeds for you and then, somehow, still pulls out a chair and says sit down, eat, this is for you.

Idolatry lies to you about where your life actually came from. It whispers that you built this, that you earned this, that the whole thing depends on you holding it together. Repentance — and by that I just mean turning, facing back in the right direction after you’ve drifted — repentance starts by telling the truth instead. “This was You. And this. And this too.” [Isaiah 55:1-3; Ephesians 2:8-9]

My dear Wormwood,

When they start saying “This was You,” we are in genuine danger, more than you seem to realize. The more a human connects rain to the Enemy, connects meals to the Enemy, connects small unearned joys and even his own next breath to the Enemy, the harder it becomes for either of us to sell him our worthless things at any price.

Do not, under any circumstances, let your man linger over gratitude. Push him toward comparison instead. Toward worry. Toward his phone, toward the news, toward anything at all. Anything but quiet thanks. Quiet thanks is where we lose them.

That’s the turn the whole passage has been building toward — from worthless things to a living God who was already in the room the entire time, already feeding you, already sending rain, already filling your heart with a joy you never earned and couldn’t fully explain even if someone asked you to.

And in Acts 14, that living God finally has a face and a name. Jesus. The One who bleeds for idol-makers and then walks back into their cities anyway, carrying resurrection life with Him. Not to punish them for the bulls and the wreaths. Not to demand a sacrifice to make up for it. But to sit down at the table with them and say — this is My body, broken for you. Sit down. Eat.

Coming Back Around

I want to walk through this whole thing one more time, slower, because I don’t think we’re finished with it yet.

Idols rob us of joy, of peace, and most of all, of Jesus. We’ve been sitting with that all through Acts 14 — the man in Lystra who couldn’t walk, the crowd that lost its head, the bulls dragged up to the gate, the idols that, given enough time, will make us bleed for them instead of the other way around.

If you’ve been around Red River long enough, you already know I quote Lewis more than any writer who’s ever lived, more than is probably good for a sermon rotation. There’s a reason for it. He has a way of stripping the paint off our religious words and showing you the bare wood, the grain, underneath.

One of my favorites of his is The Screwtape Letters — a series of fictional letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, who’s been assigned to “the patient,” a young man living an entirely ordinary life. Screwtape is coaching him on how to keep this man from ever really following Jesus. So the whole book is temptation heard from the other side of the radio, the enemy’s frequency and not ours. No pitchforks, no fog machines. Just a tempter, patient and a little bored, explaining how you nudge a man a few degrees at a time until he’s drifted off course without ever feeling the turn.

It’s satire, but it’s sharp enough to leave marks. Lewis doesn’t invent new sins for the occasion — he shows how ordinary, respectable things, habits, opinions, even church attendance itself, can become tools that slowly bend a heart away from God. That’s why it’s stayed with me. It gives language to things most of us feel and can’t name.

So here’s what I want to try one more time: stay in Acts 14, same text, but imagine what it would sound like if Screwtape were advising Wormwood about that town, about that crowd, about our hearts specifically. Not to be cute about it. Just to let the mask slip for a second and hear how the other side might talk about panic, and control, and worthless things, and the God who bleeds for us instead of making us bleed for Him.

Think of it as sanctified imagination — Lewis’s phrase, more or less — a way of letting Scripture slip past our defenses and land somewhere in the gut instead of stopping politely at the mind.

If Lewis is right, idolatry isn’t just bad theology. It’s a strategy, maybe Hell’s favorite one, because it cooperates so easily with something already inside us. A willing heart. And someone out there is very invested in keeping you paying at the wrong altars for as long as he possibly can.

That’s what Paul names in Romans 1 — people “exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images,” while the dark powers ride that exchange all the way down into the basement, content to let us do the actual trading ourselves.

We already walked the street together. The lame man leaping. The crowd reaching for Zeus and Hermes because that was the only shelf they had anything on. The priest showing up with bulls because fear runs faster than worship ever does. Paul tearing his robe because he could not stand and watch it happen quietly. And underneath every layer of it, the same old lie doing the same old work: that the weight of your life has to rest somewhere, and it might as well rest on whatever’s standing closest to you.

It doesn’t. It never had to. The living God was already in the room, sending rain nobody asked for, filling tables nobody could quite explain, and eventually sending His own Son to bleed for the very idol-makers standing at that gate with a knife in hand.

That’s the whole argument, really, dressed up in a demon’s letterhead so it might land somewhere new. Worthless things cannot hold you. Only He can. And He already has.