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.

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...

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.

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....

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...

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

In Joy, to lose one’s life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other.

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...

No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.

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...

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased —facts the new trues.

Make them imagine repentance more like an appearance in court before a cranky old judge, less like a child knocking on his father’s study door to have a chat.

Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not...

In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.

pursuit”. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don’t do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a...

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

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...

Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry...

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,...

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

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.

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.

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.

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you’ll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to...

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

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.

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.

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.

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,...

Also, always encourage ‘being good’ over ‘doing good.’ Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. ‘Being good’ is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can...

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.

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.