Beware of any belief that makes you self-indulgent; it came from the pit, no matter how beautiful it sounds.

Yet 1 John 3:9 does not mean that we cannot sin—it simply means that if we will obey the life of God in us, that we do not have to sin.

If we do not sacrifice the natural to the spiritual, the natural life will resist and defy the life of the Son of God in us and will produce continual turmoil. This is always the result of an undisciplined spiritual nature. We go wrong because we stubbornly refuse to discipline ourselves physically, morally, or mentally.

Come unto Me." When you hear those words you will know that something must happen in you before you can come. The Holy Spirit will show you what you have to do, anything at all that will put the axe at the root of the thing which is preventing you from getting through. You will never get further until you are willing to do that one thing. The Holy Spirit will locate the one impregnable thing in you, but He cannot budge it unless you are willing to let Him.

At first, Jesus Christ through His Spirit has to restrain you from doing a great many things that may be perfectly right for everyone else but not right for you. Yet, see that you don't use your restrictions to criticize someone else.

True earnestness is found in obeying God, not in the inclination to serve Him that is born of undisciplined human nature. It is inconceivable, but true nevertheless, that saints are not bringing every project into captivity, but are doing work for God at the instigation of their own human nature which has not been spiritualised by determined discipline.

if sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed.

Could it be that desire for a good thing has become a bad thing because that desire has become a ruling thing?

The blinding ability of sin is so powerful and persuasive that you and I literally need daily intervention.

What do I really want in life: the success of God's agenda of grace or the fulfillment of my catalog of desires?

Sin causes us to want our own way, to want sovereignty over things we weren't designed to control, and to want to coerce others into the service of our agenda.

You and I must live temptation-aware; to fail to do so is to fail to recognize the fallenness of the world that happens to be the address where we live.