It's bitterness that drives you to alcohol or drugs or food or pornography or anything else as a method of coping with your season of suffering. When you've been consumed by bitterness, you develop a desire to consume anything that will get the taste out of your mouth—

Actually, isn't that what we want to know—our purpose? Then we can use the power to become who we really are. Life has chiseled many of us into mere fragments of who we were meant to be. To all who receive Him, Christ gives the power to slip out of who they were forced into being so they can transform into the individual they each were created to be.

You, His fruit, having descended into the depths like Christ after being crushed, experienced the Inner Court fermentation. Now, however, that grape no longer exists. Something else has taken its place. The grape is now wine, having risen with new life in a new form like Christ. As a result, the veil that has always stood between the Vintner and the grapes no longer exists between the King and His wine.

Are you prepared to brave the negative reactions, comments, criticisms, and complaints that may arise from owning your authentic self? Can you handle it? Some people can't. They live without expressing the authenticity of what abides deep within them because the approval of others is more important to them than self-approval.

Let no-one define how you see yourself...save God alone. See yourself through His eyes and His strength, and you'll see who you can be despite being who you are. But see yourself through your own eyes, and you'll be left to question, and to doubt, subject to the whims and wishes of others who will not have your best at heart.

Once born into childlike faith, brimming with belief, typical people begin to lose their faith. Society mocks them. Their friends smirk. They come to change the world, but over time the world changes them. Soon they forget who they were; they forget the faith they once had. Then one day someone tells them the truth, but they don't want to go back, because they're comfortable in their new skin. Being a stranger in this world is never easy.

You never read Spider-Man? Accepting your true identity means understanding that you are a stranger to this world. A freak, ostracized by the very people you want to help.

I had to learn - since I'm divorced now and everyone is like, 'Oh my God, you're single, what's going on?' - that if I don't like to spend time with myself, how can I ask someone else to enjoy spending time with me? I'm getting to learn how to enjoy my solitude and have a good time.

The absence of God in most spheres of life is perceived to be normal, and even Christians feel it as normal - which is why absorbing the culture all around us and its priorities is so dangerous.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.

The question isn't if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it's just who and what our spirits will be formed by.

Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit. And it's constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience.