Top 90 Geoffrey Wood Quotes
#1. There will be a solidity to their faith which is very dangerous to our designs and difficult to dissolve. There is a luminosity to it. Just one Christian of that type can dispel years worth of diabolical delusion.
Geoffrey Wood
#2. Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don't feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they're stuck right where they started: Guilty.
Geoffrey Wood
#3. They view repentance as the thing they have to do in order to earn forgiveness, therefore the more difficult they make it, the more credit they tally up.
Geoffrey Wood
#4. True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about "knowing God," they mean more than, "I understand what you're saying about God," but also, "It fits my experience of Him.
Geoffrey Wood
#5. There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.
Geoffrey Wood
#6. I say "illusion" of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.
Geoffrey Wood
#7. I've seen a disobedient client simply turn his attention toward The Adversary and ask "Are You still there?" and suddenly all was made well between them.
Geoffrey Wood
#8. They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.
Geoffrey Wood
#9. Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.
Geoffrey Wood
#10. With addiction, a client's fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana - the fear of Fear itself.
Geoffrey Wood
#11. Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional - the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.
Geoffrey Wood
#12. If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they've been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we're headed right back toward The Virtues.
Geoffrey Wood
#13. They prefer a God of an altogether softer flavor. Nothing too extreme. Complaisance, not magnanimity. They do not think upon the "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God." They prefer to think in terms of "God liking them." That's the God they've conjured for themselves.
Geoffrey Wood
#14. Now they feel not only known and still loved, but also loved because they are known.
Geoffrey Wood
#15. God didn't give Moses ten fortune cookies in a to-go box. God didn't lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a neon all-you-can-eat sign. And God doesn't speak to people in bathrooms, public or otherwise.
Geoffrey Wood
#16. When everything all in a moment comes together, surprisingly perfect, it doesn't prove there's a loving God; but if there is, isn't it perfect when all in a moment, God proves how surprisingly He loves?
Geoffrey Wood
#17. In general, it's not too hard to corrupt an American, mostly a matter of supply to their demand. Supply should be variegated to encourage the Illusion of Choice. Other than that they're looking for numbness, so be ready to sedate. Drugs, booze, television, shopping, etc ...
Geoffrey Wood
#18. Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.
Geoffrey Wood
#19. Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it's just better form.
Geoffrey Wood
#21. And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they've lost, forever.
Geoffrey Wood
#22. Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself.
Geoffrey Wood
#23. Make them imagine repentance more like an appearance in court before a cranky old judge, less like a child knocking on his father's study door to have a chat.
Geoffrey Wood
#24. They really do occupy a scrumptious little dark corner of my heart!
Geoffrey Wood
#25. As a rule, Americans are big on that word "choice" and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.
Geoffrey Wood
#26. We've spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that's precisely how we did it - by making it lower case.
Geoffrey Wood
#27. When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.
Geoffrey Wood
#28. No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.
Geoffrey Wood
#29. And I'm glad to see that all three clients are male. Not that the females can't be corrupted, I've just always found the males more amenable to temptation. The males have always had all the power, so that does much to explain it. As they say: Easy pickings.
Geoffrey Wood
#30. Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy.
Geoffrey Wood
#31. Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth.
Geoffrey Wood
#33. Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that's the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn't change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.
Geoffrey Wood
#34. You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be 'undemocratic'.
Geoffrey Wood
#35. The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.
Geoffrey Wood
#36. Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it - His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.
Geoffrey Wood
#37. Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.
Geoffrey Wood
#38. With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook - that prissy little virtue, Temperance - for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.
Geoffrey Wood
#39. I have witnessed the pleasant result of producing a human who faithfully claims to be a Christian, but who on some fundamental level does not think Christianity actually works. And just one Christian of this type turns off dozens from trying out Christianity for themselves.
Geoffrey Wood
#40. Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.
Geoffrey Wood
#41. A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.
Geoffrey Wood
#42. Remember, philosophically speaking, Americans are mongrels - practical materialists but with a dreamy streak of divine approval.
Geoffrey Wood
#43. I don't even like the phrase 'opportunity to sin' because it implies the opportunity to obey.
Geoffrey Wood
#44. Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.
Geoffrey Wood
#45. They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself.
Geoffrey Wood
#46. The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence.
Geoffrey Wood
#47. Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.
Geoffrey Wood
#48. Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you'll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped.
Geoffrey Wood
#49. Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: "What-Would-Jesus-Buy" - well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.
Geoffrey Wood
#50. It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn't mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.
Geoffrey Wood
#51. Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased - facts the new trues.
Geoffrey Wood
#52. I shouldn't need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn't think to stop it?
Geoffrey Wood
#53. In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they'd prefer.
Geoffrey Wood
#54. Most of them don't mind too much the idea of a God existing somewhere, just so long as He's indulgent.
Geoffrey Wood
#55. That dusty hill we can scarcely look upon and then only with pain, The Adversary, also with pain, does and must ever witness The Crucifixion.
Geoffrey Wood
#56. The Adversary, of course, simply wants them to lay down their sins, guilt and all, and follow Him. But this type holds on to their sinfulness and their guilt for it, because otherwise, they'd have no relationship with Him at all. And, of course, no relationship can be based on guilt and survive.
Geoffrey Wood
#57. When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy.
Geoffrey Wood
#58. If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.
Geoffrey Wood
#59. It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise.
Geoffrey Wood
#60. When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.
Geoffrey Wood
#61. Why not have a God in your back pocket for when you need Him? That's all most of them mean by 'Christian.
Geoffrey Wood
#62. They want explanation, not faith; God gives them faith as the explanation.
Geoffrey Wood
#63. Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.
Geoffrey Wood
#64. But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you'll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There's more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up.
Geoffrey Wood
#65. In Joy, to lose one's life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other.
Geoffrey Wood
#66. Remember, this type doesn't really believe He'll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay.
Geoffrey Wood
#67. In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.
Geoffrey Wood
#68. If we blind them to The Adversary - decrease their desire for The Desire - while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing "freedom of choice," then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.
Geoffrey Wood
#69. The Bible is the one book we've most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.
Geoffrey Wood
#70. Chant to him: "An individual thinks for himself." Then roll that around in his head till it means: "If I didn't think of it, it has no bearing on my life.
Geoffrey Wood
#71. You don't change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person's place for a while, one suffering person at a time.
Geoffrey Wood
#72. The Americans' great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.
Geoffrey Wood
#73. As a motivation - for humans, but Christians especially - guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that.
Geoffrey Wood
#74. They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief.
Geoffrey Wood
#75. That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary's greatest curatives - gratitude.
Geoffrey Wood
#76. Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.
Geoffrey Wood
#77. Make good and sure your clients all call themselves Americans - proudly so, defiantly, loudly - but without any more thought about it than wearing a hat.
Geoffrey Wood
#78. Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.
Geoffrey Wood
#79. Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.
Geoffrey Wood
#80. Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.
Geoffrey Wood
#81. Trust becomes the only road home, back to love.
Geoffrey Wood
#82. They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.
Geoffrey Wood
#83. Faith is where they learn about their God; but Prayer is where they explore Him.
Geoffrey Wood
#84. And recently, we installed another word in its place which, to their minds, has a wholly positive connotation. We say 'Gluttony'. They say 'Consumerism'.
Geoffrey Wood
#85. Teach them the shame that tells the lie, "I am unforgivable," when the truth is, "I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control." Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.
Geoffrey Wood
#86. We have deficited upon their attention in the most disorderly fashion.
Geoffrey Wood
#87. If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He's going to ask you what you bought.
Geoffrey Wood
#88. Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.
Geoffrey Wood
#89. Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.
Geoffrey Wood
#90. Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would've worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would've then better lead them on to happiness.
Geoffrey Wood
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