Maintaining joy in God takes 'work'; that is, it's a fight against every impulse for alien joys and every obstacle in the way to seeing and savoring Christ.

To kill sin is the work of living men; where men are dead (as all unbelievers, the best of them, are dead), sin is alive, and will live.

Sin affects us in six basic ways.

Brian and Kara look a lot like us. Like them, we forget that it is in the little moments that spiritual battles are lost and won.

Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

I can resist anything but temptation

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

Bodily habits are the primary form in which human evil exists in practical life.

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as "normal" because "everyone is like that" and it is "only human.

But reliance upon what the Spirit does to us or in us, as indispensable as it truly is, will not by itself transform character in its depths. The action of the Spirit must be accompanied by our response, which, as we have seen, cannot be carried out by anyone other than ourselves.

This "world" is marked by three spiritual dynamics that John identifies as "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life" (1 John 2:16).

The desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life.