The truth is that no spiritual experience however revolutionary, can exempt us from temptation; and what is temptation but the effect of the wilderness to encroach upon hour new-cleared field? The purified heart is obnoxious to the devil and to all the force of the lost world. They will not rest until they have won back what they have lost. The jungle will creep in and seek to swallow up the tiny areas that have been made free by the power of the Holy Ghost. Only watchfulness and constant prayer can preserve those moral gains won for us through the operations of God’s grace.

The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts; the neglected life will soon become a moral chaos; the church that is not jealously protected by mighty intercession and sacrificial labors will before long become the abode of every evil bird and the hiding place of unsuspected corruption. The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray. ~A. W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, 116