Personality leaks out but is not a constant. Most everyone I've ever known is in bondage to shame and emotional pain. And we never get to know the authentic self, the personality, because of it. And therefore, a relationship is rarely established with the person. This happens to most people we know. They go to the grave having no idea who they are. How sad!

Personality is God's gift to you, says Berdyav. He tells us that “personality is self-constructive, is the ideal of a man, is your soul.”

The Principalities, Powers, and Rulers

Yeshua reminded us in the gospel of John, Chapter 10, what these combatants are really up to. They have a simple agenda: to steal, kill and destroy us, our families, our country our planet in the name of rebellion against Jehova. And in the same breath, Yeshua tells us he had come to offer life, abundant life!

Messiah and Savior

Illusion…everything is a lie. And it began in the garden. A lie was offered to Eve that God was lying to her, and she chose to believe the serpent (father of lies) and disobeyed God anyway. Here were the first humans walking with God in the garden, and they fell for the serpent's lie!

The Genesis

We must understand that "Jehovah of the Elohim" wanted to have a relationship with us. He created us "a little higher than the angels." He created us "in His image and likeness." And His glory is bestowed on us because of His love for us. He loves, and He loves us. Take a moment with that statement.

Journey to an early time in your life. Revisit your childhood past self. Pull out a photo of your kindergarten or 1st-grade self. See if you know that person in the photograph. What did you discover? Who is that person? Do you have memories of them?

A new report made following an armed attack by an enemy combatant on a Christian school in Nashville, Tennesee

Fromm is telling us that as most of us are offspring of character-disordered parents, we are statistically likely to have our self defined by our upbringing by these people. Merton's use of this phrase speaks to the development of our false selves in our postmodern culture. Merton takes it a bit deeper and tells us about the spiritual nature of our development and spends much of the book A New Man leading us back to our first love to find out that our true self will be found in Christ, our Messiah, our Savior, our Truth, not via the Vox Populi of the post-modern culture of the Western world.

Excerpts and notes from The New Man by Thomas Merton. Chapter 1, pages 3 to 15.

I work out my worldview. I work out ideas and things I read. I write about things I know. About things going on with the culture, things in my life, and relationships.