1

Truths has no grey areas. Doctrines are true or false, not practical or contemporary.

“That inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against aberrations of mere logic”.

Don’t let “real life” distract you from things that are spiritual. It’s difficult to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before our eyes. Learn to look out of the ordinariness of things.

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2

Inspect what pictorials we have in our minds of the Church and of God. The hard transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. Once we get through the initial dryness, we become less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

“Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to do it on their own.”

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3

Our conversion is not just internal. Watch how we pray for other people. Are we like Pharisees?

Assumptions has immense improbability.

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4

Pray with ‘moving lips’ and ‘bended knees’. We are animals and whatever our bodies do affects our souls. We always think the Devil is trying to put things into our mind, but alot of times they are putting things out.

Praying is not about producing feelings but fixing our eyes on God. Praying for courage is not trying to feel brave, praying for forgiveness is not trying to feel forgiven. Don’t estimate the value of each prayer by the success in producing the desired feeling.

“Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be”.

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5

It’s crucial to realize how easy it is for us to die. We are not going to live forever.

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6

Uncertainty and contradictory pictures of the future arouses hope or fear. God wants us to be concerned with what we do, the Devil wants us to be thinking about what will happen to us. The present fear can be our appointed cross, not just something we’re afraid of.

“Accept with patience the tribulation which has been dealt out to him - the present anxiety and suspense’’

Our fears of a certain decision are incompatible and cannot all happen together at the same time.

Will, Intellect and Fantasy. Don’t keep all the godly virtues in the fantasy circle, act on them.

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7

The church shouldn’t feel like a secret society of a clique with defensive self righteousness. What role does the church serve? Do we believe that this is God’s family or we see it as just a ‘cause’, a part of the whole picture, a possible solution to the world?

The world shouldn’t be an end and faith shouldn’t be a mean.

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8

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits we belong to the eternal world, as animals we inhabit time. With time comes changes and thus Undulation - a series of troughs and peaks in all areas of life.

Dryness, is merely a natural phenomenon. Surprisingly, God relies on the troughs more than the peaks.

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God’s talk about His love for men is not merely propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really wants to fill the universe with little replicas of Himself - creatures, whose life on its miniature scale will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. The Devil wants cattle who can finally become food; God wants servants who can finally become sons. The Devil is empty and to be filled; God is full and flows over. God wants beings united to Him but still distinct.

 

God cannot ravish, He can only woo. He wants us to be one with Him but yet ourselves. He does a little overriding at the beginning, revealing His presence faintly, emotionally sweet and easy conquest over temptation. But sooner or later He withdraws from our conscious experience. He leaves us to stand up on our own legs, to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. He wants us to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand. As long as the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with our stumbles.

 

“When a human, no longer desiring, but intending to do God’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys”

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9

When feeling drab, cold and empty, we fall into sexual temptations easily. Drawn into perversions, not the ‘being in love’ kind. The same with other desires of the flesh such as drinking.

God created Pleasure, the Devil’s job is to make us take pleasures at time, in ways or in degrees that God has forbidden. The Devil wants to rise in us an ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure.

In troughs, remember that no matter how long it is not permanent. In troughs, we can be tempted to despair or assured that all is well. The Devil would lead us to try to recover our old feelings by sheer will power or gradually become content with the state we are in. The ‘moderation in all things’ mindset; a moderated religion is just as good as no religion. The devil can also convince us that this religious phase will die as all the other phases in our lives.  

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10

Be careful of how we compromise our beliefs and relate to toxic people (rich, smart, superficially intellectual, brightly sceptical about everything)

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“ He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his worlds, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But if you play him well, they may become his”

 

We tend to turn into the thing we are pretending to be.

 

Watch out for Worldly Vanities, Choice of Friends and Value of Time.

 

Do we only realise the character of the friends we make while they are absent and while they are present forget to guard ourselves in these? We will end up leading 2 parallel lives, a different man in each of the circles of friends. Even worse, we come to a point where we enjoy this inconsistency. Thinking that people in church don’t understand the outside world as you do and people out of church don’t get the deeper, spiritual world within us. Thinking that we are the complete balanced man who has the best of both worlds, leading to a undercurrent of self satisfaction.

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11

Laughter

 

Joy (eg. among friends and lovers reunited)

Fun (emotional froth from the play instinct. Promotes charity, courage, contentment. But can be use to divert humans from things that the Enemy would like us to be feeling or doing. )

Joke Proper (uses laughter as a pretext for unholy things. Like dirty jokes, mocking people. Eg. cruelty is shameful unless the cruel man can represent it as a joke)

Flippancy (when people think they found a ridiculous side to a serious virtue.  

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12

We don’t grow just by coming to church and making a few christian friends.

Pay attention to that vague, uneasy feeling that we haven’t been doing well lately. This dim uneasiness if allowed to live without flowering into something that leads to real repentance can make us reluctant to think about God.

Reluctance to think about God when thinking about Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague of half conscious guilt.

Signs: Every idea of God we detest. We increasingly dislike our religious duty, we can’t wait to get over them. We would do anything to distract ourselves. We no longer need pleasures to distract ourselves. We do nothing at all for long periods.

“It doesn't matter how spectacular the sin is. The only thing that matters is the extent in which it draws us away from God”

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13

Difference between real Pleasures and worldly Pleasures. Real pleasures allow for recovery, worldly pleasures detaches us from ourselves in a bad way. God wants us to detatch ourselves by abandoning the clamour of self will. Then he will give us back all our personality and we will be wholly His, more ourselves than we ever will be.