Fear, loneliness, inferiority, humiliation, powerlessness, frustration and suffocation, hatred.  These are a few words that can turn you into your greatest enemy.

Martin Luther king jr. described it as  a civil war going within every one of us.

And in every one of us this morning, there’s a war going on. It’s a civil war. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life.

Every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It’s going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate.  Everytime you set out to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be jelous, envious and to spread evil and gossip about them - there’s a civil war going on.  Everytime you say I’m not gonna let this evil habbit destroy me, something keeps pulling on you, saying keep on doing it.  There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologist or the psychiatrist would call it, going on within all of us…

There’s a tension at the heart of human nature.  And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it.

Today I acknowledge that when you conquer yourself; when you conquer your temptations; when you conquer your thoughts and your mind, you have conquered the universe.