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.

freedom of choice,” then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would’ve worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would’ve then better lead them on to happiness.

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.

Now they feel not only known and still loved, but also loved because they are known.

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don’t feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they’re stuck right...

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.

It fits my experience of Him.

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the...

God liking them.” That’s the God they’ve conjured for themselves.

It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise.

The trick here is, while the actual pleasure begins to recede and blur, we simultaneously bring the imagined pleasure more fully into focus. And when we do, even the memory of the pleasure becomes more...

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

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...

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

Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth.

And recently, we installed another word in its place which, to their minds, has a wholly positive connotation. We say ‘Gluttony’. They say ‘Consumerism’.

A man walks into a coffee shop. As the man talks across the counter, the coffee guy makes his coffee and sets the cup and saucer between them. But the man doesn’t drink it; he...

Faith is where they learn about their God; but Prayer is where they explore Him.

You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be ‘undemocratic’.

Make good and sure your clients all call themselves Americans —proudly so, defiantly, loudly— but without any more thought about it than wearing a hat.

When everything all in a moment comes together, surprisingly perfect, it doesn’t prove there’s a loving God; but if there is, isn’t it perfect when all in a moment, God proves how surprisingly He loves?

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop...

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...

They really do occupy a scrumptious little dark corner of my heart!

And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as...

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.

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...

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.

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...