C.S. Lewis writes a little book called Screwtape Letters. And if you’ve never read this little book, I highly recommend it. It’s not like a normal book because basically it’s a fiction book of a group of letters from a senior demon to a junior demon. And the senior demon is named Uncle Screwtape, and he is training the junior demon on how to destroy a Christian’s life. And so, it’s really creatively written to show us the things that our enemy does to take down Christians. In one of those letters, it really explains the mystery of why we have a hard time with letting God speak into our finances. So, this is Uncle Screwtape writing to the junior demon:
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so.
Why do we feel like we are owners when in actuality, we don’t own anything. It’s as if we were to go out and rent a car and then get a car wash, get it detailed, put new tires on it and upgrade the sound system. That makes absolutely no sense to do all that work for a car we don’t own and will have it only for a temporary amount of time. Or imagine if we stayed at a hotel, but during our stay, we decided to repaint the room, put hardwood floors in, remodeled the bathroom, and got a bigger TV. We would be treating the room as if we owned it. But those are silly extreme examples of what we do when we feel like we own what we have in our lives today. We don’t own anything. And the minute we think we do, we’ve lost our grip on reality.