You have not been able to control your mind or body because it has never been your mind or your body. From the beginning it was always, as the Scripture states, a slave of sin.

Your body belonged to the intelligence that shaped it into the form of the fallen Adam, at which point your own pride and arrogance made it into the miserable wretch you are now.

As you reach the age of grace, you come to know the penalty of death for striving pridefully and emotionally. Emotion has a direct bearing on all animal desires. Almost immediately, the provocation of stress produces a notable increase or decrease in appetites.

Without fail, the emotional response itself always produces guilt (in the mature adult). If you are inclined and still able, you will indulge and escape through that appetite the emotion produced, finding the appetite to be as normal as the emotion was.

Through one abandon after another you will become deathly sick and afraid as the idea of food, sex or whatever comes to mind as a need born from an emotional foundation. If you are sensitive, you do not have to travel far down the primrose path of “eat, drink and be merry” to experience sickness and revulsion against the things you need every time you are upset.

In all probability, you might become guilty and sick enough from the emotion alone. Always remember that one indulgence that is unquestioned will lead to another that is more bizarre.

People who have experienced great shock or grief are prone to escape to extremes—from a wild spree of pleasure and forgetfulness to a withering away, to become shadows of their former selves: afraid, sick unto death from the guilt, conflict and appetites that emotion stirs up.

In both extremes, the victim is seeking innocence by escape, and in the latter case, innocence by abstinence and doing nothing to avoid the guilt of doing anything.

Let the student be cautioned not to tamper with his appetite but to look to the villain that underlies it—an ego-need for emotional security—security through emotion.

Emotion is the life sap of our fleshly identity. While we are growing up, it is the nectar and the vitality we need for the development of the ego—the carnal mind and body.

But at that crucial moment when we reach a certain stage in our growth, small doses of emotion, instead of bringing security and growth in a proper order, make us feel insecure and guilty for growing according to a wrong order.

"We overcome evil by giving up our ego-longing for evil, and for emotion provided by temptation"

Emotion is the animal vitality for our temporary existence in flesh. It must gradually be superceded by God’s Grace. What I mean is that through repentance we change our dependency and the way we respond, and consequently the way in which we grow and are supported.

We overcome evil by giving up our ego-longing for evil, and for emotion provided by temptation. When we reach the threshold of consciousness (salvation), if we continue to live emotionally we shall change and start to grow in a wrong way.

We experience a sort of second fall; in falling we become compulsive and will make all kinds of excuses. From there we become confused, maybe insane; then we get sick, old, senile and we die.

Emotion sustains and makes animal flesh mature, and food goes to maintain that flesh in its present form. If God meant you to be an animal, you would experience no conflict. No question could arise from anything you felt or did. But as a human being, you have another potential and destiny.

At physical maturity you strive to make your food and emotions work for you as they did when you were a child. But all they do is make you hungrier, more lustful and more guilty. Being accepted by others for those emotions and “only human” hungers puts a stranglehold on your soul and keeps it earthbound from Heaven and hell bound to earth.

You use emotion to forget what emotion did; food to forget what food did; more sex to forget what sex did; and drink and drugs to forget all the others. Your latest problem is the last solution to a former problem. You grow fat, drunk, sick. . . .

When the sensual cycle is completed, you start being emotional all over again. You cannot successfully use emotion to provide the growth and security you knew as a child. Knowing no other way, you have had no other choice but to use excitement to get you up and going and give you that security.

But notice—all it does is to set the wheel of nature aflame in a satanic, malignant, devolutionary way.