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“Solitude is not a private therapeutic place.” Rather, “solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.”18
It matters because we become like our vision of God. The goal of reading Scripture is not information but spiritual formation.
everything we allow into our minds has an effect on our souls, for good or for evil.
what we give our attention to will shape the persons we become.
When you walk in the light, you need not fear the shadows.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
And, again, this is our responsibility: to turn our attention to God all through our days and weeks. To think of him. To think deeply of him. And rightly of him, in line with Jesus’s vision of God as the trinitarian community of self-giving, creative, generous, calm, loving joy and delight. To let Jesus’s incredibly compelling vision of who God is give shape to who we become. And this is not the drudgery of religion or onerous obligation; remember, we’re already filling our minds with inputs all day long, and many of those inputs are creating in us hearts that are fractured, anxious,
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Part 1 step sheet
defined the flesh as “the corruption that sin has introduced into our very appetites and instincts.”10
But the New Testament is incredibly open about the dark underbelly of the human heart, and we’re invited to explore it under the loving gaze of God’s compassion.
Pleasure is about want; happiness is about freedom from want.
happiness comes as the result of disciplined desire.
In the past, it was the responsibility of all people to restrain the desires of their flesh; today, it’s the right of all people to follow the desires of their authentic selves.22
Self is the new god, the new spiritual authority, the new morality.
our strongest desires are not actually our deepest desires.
our deepest desires—usually to become people of goodness and love—are often sabotaged by the stronger surface-level desires of our flesh. This is exacerbated by a culture where the widespread wisdom of the day is to follow our desires, not crucify them.
giving in to the desires of our flesh does not lead us to freedom and life, as many people assume, but instead to slavery and, in the worst-case scenario, addiction, which is a kind of prolonged suicide by pleasure.
agape love: A compassionate commitment to delight in the soul of another and to
will that person’s good ahead of your own, no matter the cost to yourself
Regardless of how a compulsion appears externally, underneath it is always robbing us of our freedom. We act not because we have chosen to, but because we have to. We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors not because we love them, but because we are terrified of losing them….
In a spiritual sense, the objects of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention whether we want to or not, even—and often especially—when we are struggling to rid ourselves of them. We want to be free, compassionate, and happy, but in the face of our attachments we are clinging, grasping, and fearfully self-absorbed.
freedom without self-mastery is a disaster waiting to happen.
If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you.”
Many people think that eternal life refers to a quantity of life after death, but for the New Testament writers it also meant a quality of life that starts now for the apprentice of Jesus, grows in scope over a lifetime of apprenticeship, and then continues into eternity.
“shackles of gratification.”9
This simple mechanism—of mind to thought to action to habit to character to either slavery or eternal life—is at the very heart of apprenticeship to Jesus.
The things we do, do something to us. They shape the people we become.
he came to the conclusion that no one starts out evil;12 instead, people become evil “slowly over time through a long series of choices.”13
The Heart of Man,
It’s our daily, seemingly insignificant decisions that eventually sculpt our characters and harden them into stone or free them to flourishing.
unhurried delight—will
“First they will not, in the end, they cannot.”
Free from the slavery of an emotional state that’s dependent on her circumstances. Free from the need to be young or beautiful or married or wealthy to enjoy her life in God’s world.
God described sin as a beast within,9 and that beast shrinks or grows depending on whether we starve or feed it.
The more people indulge their flesh, the more it takes over their whole beings and turns them into brutes, however socially sophisticated they may remain.
For Paul, the way we fight the flesh and win is not through willpower but through the Spirit’s power.
As long as a temptation is just interfacing with the prefrontal cortex, willpower is a great resource to draw on. But the moment we’re dealing with the amygdala, with the part of the brain or soul that is deeply wounded or hardwired in sinful ways of being, we are outmanned and outgunned by the flesh.
To win, we need access to a power that is beyond us. We need an ally in the fight to come alongside us and turn the tide. That power is the Spirit of Jesus.
Willpower is at its best when it does what it can (direct my body into spiritual practices) so the Spirit’s power can do what willpower can’t (overcome the three enemies of the soul).
The solution to our flesh’s control over us isn’t to buck up but to rely on the Spirit.
fasting is a practice by which you deny your body food in an attempt to starve your flesh.
In fasting we’re learning how to suffer with joy.
Life Together,
Because we find our deepest intimacies in our greatest vulnerabilities.
we can’t control our desires, we can influence them and come to the point where they no longer control us.
Does this sow to my flesh or my spirit? Will this make me more enslaved or more free? More beastly or more human?
Take the long view.
Part 2 step sheet
The world is Satan’s domain, where his authority and values reign—though his deception makes that hard to realize. If you are of the world, then it all seems right.
redefinition of good and evil.
