Free Gas for Your Think Tank — Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement

Unrestrained desire can dominate and defeat you.  Cravings can capture and control your life.

Yet our society teaches us to surrender to desires, cravings, compulsions, and whims:  “If you feel like doing something, go for it, and don’t listen to anybody’s concerns but your own.”  “If it feels good, do it.”

This advice (and/or brainwashing), however, is a trap that gets millions of people caught in the cage of obsession — stuck in the sink of self.

There is a better way to live than the way of wimping out to the control of our cravings.  This better way has been ignored, forgotten, and/or disdained by our present day culture — the way of personal restraint, self-control, and victory over the domination of desire.

Here are some quotes to help answer this question:  Are you an inner wimp or an inner winner?

“Self-control is not for the timid.  The only successful attitude toward out-of-control desire is a declaration of all-out war.”  –Ed Welch

“A man who governs his passions is master of the world.  We must either command them or be enslaved to them.”  –Dominic

“Self-will leads so many people to self-destruction.”  –Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt

“There was never a man so empty as the one who is full of himself.”  –T.J. Bach

“Do not let your body do exactly what it wants, or your brain either.  Assert your power of command over body and mind.  This discipline will grow to be a habit.”  –White Eagle

“There is a violent streak in the true Christian life!  It is a violence against all the impulses in our own selves that would make peace with our own sin and settle in with a peacetime mentality.  It is a violence against all lust in ourselves and all enslaving desires.”  –John Piper

“Multitudes think they like to do evil, yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.”  –John Ruskin