Kindle Notes & Highlights
The height of temptation corresponds to the height in you. The lower your center of gravity, the less power temptation will have over you. The power of temptation is directly relational to your stance in combat.
Cease to treat temptation as an ambush. Instead, learn to expect it, like the waves on the sea shore.
The warrior must not fear the constancy of temptation, but rather prepare for it. He must realize that the battle is to the death. As long as we live, we must fight on the seashore. “He that endureth until the end shall be saved” (Matthew 24:14).
In Christ, we may become like the massive Rock upon the seashore, unmoved by the fiercest beating the sea has to offer.
Thus, when blows of unkindness or unfair treatment come, the warrior is able to deflect them because he realizes the attack is really against Christ, not him. He will not take slights personally. He has decreased; Christ has increased.
Each Christian has a prison cell, a place where temptations that used to haunt them are now locked up, never to escape. The man who once struggled with cursing, but is now free, has “trapped” or locked that sin so that it no longer has any significant power over him. Of course, he may hear the faint echoes of this sin yelling from its cell, but it poses no major threat.
Time is the friend of temptation. Therefore, temptation must be disarmed quickly if it is to be overcome.
“One finds life through conquering the fear of death.” —Togo Shigekata
suffice. A dead man has nothing to fear from temptation, for temptation enslaves only the living and the near dead.
Only those who are willing to flatline, to die to self, can ever hope to experience victory. “For he that is dead is freed from sin” (Romans 6:7). In other words, he who is not fearful of death will fight like one who has nothing to lose. He who fights as though he has nothing to lose is a dangerous man to fight.
we were “subject to bondage” “through fear of death.” Conquer the fear of dying to self means deliverance from bondage.
Forgiveness is the first thing we receive from God; it must be the first thing we give for God.
When we awake in the morning, we should pray to be as humble as Christ the child was. We should pray to be as diligent as He was as a young boy and teenager working in His father’s carpentry shop. We should seek the baptism of the Holy Ghost as He experienced at the Jordan. We should brace ourselves for the assaults of the enemy as He did in the wilderness. It is then that we may “return in the power of the spirit” into our daily task, as Jesus “returned in the power of the Spirit” from His victory in the wilderness (see Luke 4:14). In the middle of the day, we may “come aside and rest awhile”
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“The most important thing is this: To sacrifice what we are for what we can become!” —Unknown
