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Text Box: would be if they made God the significant part of their life? Is there anything we can do to help them comprehend, realize, and experience the fact that good food tastes better when God is part of your life, than it tastes when God is not part of your life? Look to Jesus and the Apostles and Disciples for the answer and you will see that the answer is: we effect others by the living example of our own lives. Nothing we can say will, by just saying it, have an effect on others. But saying, explaining with brevity and clarity in a loving manner, what and why God wants us to be, and at the same time trying our best to be what God wants us to be for the reasons God wants us to be, with prayer, can be effective - always considering the free will of those whom we wish to effect. This method follows the method used by Christ Himself. There is no better method of teaching than the method of the Teacher Himself. Ref: 1 Cor. 10:6-13; Luke 19:41-47 +

Text Box: make confusion a noun in this instance? If we do, the concept works. But is each of us a confusion. Not really. We each have conflicting impulses and desires which bend us in different directions. This should be quite frustrating especially for those who desire to be good. It should be frustrating for those who desire even just a little, to be what God desires them to be. It is frustrating until we realize becoming what God desires to be entails overt, out and out, constant war The devil goes about seeking victims, never sleeping, constantly on the prowl. He has a ready ally in our camp, namely the physical aspects of our human nature. The spiritual aspect of our human nature may be attracted to God, but the physical aspect of our human nature definitely is attracted to those things which give even the slightest measure of physical comfort. The greater the measure, the greater the attraction, and the more difficult it is to abate or overcome the attraction. Considering the reality, that these attractions are often based in necessities of varying importance, we can understand why we appear to be in continual conflict. Understanding these things, or at least a little portion of them, may or may not assist us in attaining what God desires us to attain. But it definitely will assist us in avoiding an inflated sense of what ever it is the Pharisee had when he stood and prayed with himself, but not with God, saying: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess. And this will assist us to join the publican, too ashamed to lift our eyes to heaven, and to join with him in praying: O God, be merciful to me a sinner.

Text Box: To be able to avoid the one and to be able to embrace the other we must both realize and acknowledge: attaining holiness can only be accomplished by constant warfare with the devil and his allies, especially the allies he finds in our own human nature. One of the chief allies the devil has uncovered is despair and its minor aspects, particularly dejection, and any other negative which can be offset or made less intense through the distractions provided by physical, mental, or emotional “delights”; particularly those delights which are based in that which will detour us from the path to God. For those who are not severely troubled with the massive accumulation of these distractions from the road God has paved, their part in the battle is not over. For they are those from whom those in battle receive ammunition and supplies. They are the home front which sustains those in active spiritual warfare. They also are the home guard, who protect the warriors should they become severely injured and require extensive rehabilitation. But such situations and individuals are very rare. Many may believe they are not beset by temptations. Most of those who believe they are not beset by temptations are in error and have actually succumbed to those temptations which beset them. The most common of such temptations is complacency. It is most prevalent in those who have sufficient temporal means and no great ambition for additional temporal means. Such a situation gives the individual the opportunity to sacrifice, pray, and give guidance by example. But these and other opportunities are not taken and thus the individual misses the opportunity to achieve, to impart, to influence others, and to great good. Such complacency is the second great ally the devil has discovered. He makes great use of this ally just as he makes great use of the ally of despair and its minor aspects, particularly dejection.

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