The world has been wrong about you. They've hated your glory—just as the Evil One hates the glory of God. But we need your gift. Come forth.

For the religious spirit is like the flu—it is constantly adapting to the environment.

Notice that the older brother can't receive the father's generosity; he's closed off, curtained off, by his attention to Self. This is the hidden danger I spoke of: the stubborn life of the Self. The Exalted Me, unsubmitted and unsurrendered to the rule of Christ in me.

Remember—the battle right now is for the narrative; who gets to frame the story for you? Either it will be God, or someone else. If you are "alarmed," something has drawn your attention away from the story of God. Let your fears, anxieties, anger, or rage alert you that you've been taken hostage; stop and get your bearings.

We're all living in the shadow of that infamous icon, "The Proverbs 31 Woman," whose life is so busy I wonder, when does she have time for friendships, for taking walks, or reading good books? Her light never goes out at night? When does she have sex? Somehow she has sanctified the shame most women live under, biblical proof that yet again we don't measure up. Is that supposed to be godly—that sense that you are a failure as a woman?

When we begin to offer not merely our gifts but our true selves, that is when we become powerful.

The enemy's whole plan is based on agreements. When we agree with the demonic forces suggesting things to us, we come under their influence.

The secret of Christianity is something else altogether—the life of Christ in you. Allowing his life to become your life. His revolution is not self-transformation, but his transformation of you, from the inside out, as you receive his life and allow him to live through you. Vine, branch. Anything else is madness.

The battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occult…the demonic…the satanic…the practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular books…the open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society.

Have we as a society become radically desensitized to the violence and depravity that is flooding from movie and television studios? It is not that we have become more broad-minded and intellectual; it is that we have adapted to the demonic and have become comfortable in the presence of evil.

The world then is the enemy of our souls; first, because, however innocent its pleasures, and praiseworthy its pursuits may be, they are likely to engross us, unless we are on our guard: and secondly, because in all its best pleasures, and noblest pursuits, the seeds of sin have been sown; an enemy hath done this; so that it is most difficult to enjoy the good without partaking of the evil also.

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity--he is continually in for--and filling some other Body--The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute--the poet has none; no identity--he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more?