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

For example, your man might think: I don’t steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose...

Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy.

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

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

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.

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn’t see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a...

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

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.

If God’s suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat’s sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things...

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.

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.

There will be a solidity to their faith which is very dangerous to our designs and difficult to dissolve. There is a luminosity to it. Just one Christian of that type can dispel years worth...

What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

The Adversary, of course, simply wants them to lay down their sins, guilt and all, and follow Him. But this type holds on to their sinfulness and their guilt for it, because otherwise, they’d have...

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...

So in a man’s mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don’t trust things you can...

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

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.

Trust is crazy. You are a risky, risky, God. I didn’t sign up to be Amazing Trust Boy, and I did not sign up for Danger God. You’re flatly not safe…

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...

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.

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

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...

Are You still there?” and suddenly all was made well between them.

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...

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside...

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,...

happiness” for themselves. They can’t and that’s precisely what we never want them to realize. Keep it a vague bright mist hovering about their heads. Locate it securely at the end of implausible rainbows. Hide...

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

The Bible is the one book we’ve most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.

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.

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...

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.

Faith is an act whereby they learn their God.

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip...

They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can’t look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf....

At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason...

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

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...

Trust becomes the only road home, back to love.

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...

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.

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...

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...

The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence.

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.

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

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.

Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.