How can setting the right goals bring happiness?
Goals bring life into focus.
They give meaning and purpose to life. (Read More)
The Temptation of Self-Centeredness
It is important to accept responsibility for your life. However, once you do that, you will be tempted to backtrack, to lay the blame for your ups and downs, your troubles and defeats, at someone else’s door. But don’t become discouraged here–or misled. Temptation is something you hold in common with all people. And it, too, is something you must meet with whatever resources you have and be responsible for your response to it. (Read More)
Responsibility for Your Inner Life
To get out of the gloomy pit of despair, bitterness, hostility, jealousy, and the accompanying aches, pains, and misery, you must take personal responsibility for your own character, no matter what someone else does–or did. If a person is miserable, it is his or her choice. Our woe is not the result of our background, or the people around us, or our environment, but of a choice, either deliberate or vague, to continue in the direction that we have been heading.
Spiritual maturity brings peace, as the psalmist indicated: “Mark the blameless [mature] man, and observe the upright; for the future of that man is peace” (Psalm 37:37). (Read More)
The Benefit of Acknowledging Sin
There is a reason why so many people are unhappy, why there is so much conflict between individuals. Isaiah pinpointed the trouble long ago: “We have turned, everyone, to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6).
You like your own ideas, plans, aspirations, and longings. So does everyone else. Thus when a person encounters resistance to his wishes, or faces demands that are not to his or her liking, they tend to rebel, to attack, to run, or to defend themselves. Our natural reaction is to be resentful, bitter, stubborn and full of fight. It is easy for us to think that our own desires are the reasonable ones. We will find a way to make a selfish drive seem selfless, deceiving even ourselves. (Read More)
Emotions Affect the Body
There is a relationship that exists between the mental/emotional state of a person and the workings of his body. For a better understanding of how this relationship functions, we must turn to the physician. (Read More)
Patterns of Deception
Deception is so common and follows such well-defined patterns that the patterns can be described. Taken together they are called “mental mechanisms.”
One such pattern, rationalization, is a process whereby one justifies their conduct. By using it, a person gives themselves good reasons for doing bad things. (Read More)