When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy.

In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they’d prefer.

An imagined pleasure is never really the pleasure, but an imagined pain, in a very real sense, is the pain, because so much of pain is the consciousness of it. It makes itself objective. Whereas to think about pleasure is to step outside of it; to think about a presently felt pain is to step...

They want explanation, not faith; God gives them faith as the explanation.

It fits my experience of Him.

When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such...

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it —His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.

They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief.

Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional —the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?

That’s where thinking started, where thinking stopped, where all her prayers so long ago had dried up. She no longer prayed, nor even dreamed of changing her father. Her dreams now played variations on the theme of escape. And they were nothing more than that —just dreams, just play. She’d been alone at the end...

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.

Consumerism, the new black. I want my burger my way. Shaken not stirred. Sauce on the side and rare but not rare rare. Venti, two-pump, sugar-free vanilla, non-fat, two Splenda, extra-hot, extra-whip, extra-mocha Mocha and can you put the Splenda in before you pour the milk? (See, this is where it gets positively delicious!) Under...

Remember, this type doesn’t really believe He’ll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay.

I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.

But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.

illusion” of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc… That way they never get anywhere; they’re always either standing next to a...

I have witnessed the pleasant result of producing a human who faithfully claims to be a Christian, but who on some fundamental level does not think Christianity actually works. And just one Christian of this type turns off dozens from trying out Christianity for themselves.

They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself.

If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they’ve been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we’re headed right back toward The Virtues.

Once a man discovers that his obedience is primarily for others’ sake, that every miracle that ever amazed happened because of someone’s obedience somewhere, that properly understood, his obedience prepares the way for His visitation, well, then we run up against the appalling result of attentive servants gladly going about His bidding without the slightest...

If I didn’t think of it, it has no bearing on my life.

They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.

And I’m glad to see that all three clients are male. Not that the females can’t be corrupted, I’ve just always found the males more amenable to temptation. The males have always had all the power, so that does much to explain it. As they say: Easy pickings.

But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you’ll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There’s more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up.

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.

Everyone needs to calm down! Okay, you got a weird cookie. So what? I don’t mean to swat your ego here, buddy, but this smacks a little narcissistic for me. God is not trying to communicate to you through a cookie. It doesn’t work that way. God’s not all Jack-and-the-magic-beans and tooth-beneath-the pillow voodoo. You...

Trust becomes the only road home, back to love.

When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.

Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.

We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.

That dusty hill we can scarcely look upon and then only with pain, The Adversary, also with pain, does and must ever witness The Crucifixion.

We have deficited upon their attention in the most disorderly fashion.

Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself.

Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.

I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control.” Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.

For a week the sun had been nothing but a puffy, seamless sheet of white, and this Tuesday had begun the same. But as the day progressed, the grayness receded like a mist, the sky’s white became more illumined from behind, then occasionally a patch of blue would open. Then another here and there, until...

As a motivation —for humans, but Christians especially— guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that.

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

Faith is an act whereby they learn their God.

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

They view repentance as the thing they have to do in order to earn forgiveness, therefore the more difficult they make it, the more credit they tally up.

And keep them thinking in terms of ‘being good’ as this is not an end so much as a means to something else —happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc… And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.