Environmental control is 75% of discipline. This is why it is critically important to learn to control your environment.
The majority of the actions you take are done for the sake of convenience. We will do what is easy, convenient, and right in front of us. In reality, we were designed to be this way, it does not have to be a negative fact.
We can use this facet of human nature to our advantage by structuring our environment in strategic ways.
By learning to control your environment and set it up to encourage the behaviors you want, you become powerful. You make it more likely that good behaviors will happen naturally, or at least with less effort than they required before.
Make it easy to do what you need to do and what is right and you will win. Make it easy to do what is wrong and you will always lose.
If you can control your environment, you can control your life.
You begin by identifying the behaviors you most want to engage in.
What is it you actually want to be doing? You need to write the answers to these questions on paper.
What is getting in the way of you doing what you want to do?
Answering these questions will give us the foundational blueprint for how you should control your environment.
If your desired behavior is to read the Bible, but the rest Bible is locked away in a drawer or somewhere out of sight, you are going to have a hard time reading it. And if your phone or computer is in plain sight, you are going to opt for what is right in front of you. Next thing you know, instead of participating in your desired behavior, you are wasting the time of your life.
All of this happens because the environment was not controlled and we did not set ourselves up for success.
You have to rearrange your environment to be congruent with the desired behavior. If you want to read the Bible, it must be in plain sight, where you can see it. Anything that would compete with that behavior must be relocated.
The simple act of rearranging your environment can do wonders for your behavior. Try it for yourself. Take advantage of those moments where you feel extremely motivated to change yourself and start new habits. Instead of starting the habit immediately, use that energy to rebuild your environment in a way that would best support that goal. Once you have that finished, then start your habit.
This ensures that by tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week when your inspiration fades, the environment is still set up in your favor. you have built it in such a way that your desired behavior is easier, so you do not need as much of the motivation to begin.
You must also control your environment in the opposite way.
You must put up all kinds of barricades and friction points against negative behaviors and competing interests. The more points of friction you can put between you and the behaviors you do not want to perform, the better off you will be.
This makes it so that it is automatically harder to complete the unwanted behavior.
If you are playing too many computer games, it could be that you uninstall the games or uninstall Steam after you are done playing. Or you take the batteries out of your TV remote and unplug the TV. Anything you can do to add more points of friction for negative behaviors, the better off you will be.
The upside is that in both cases, it is not hard to do. It is not hard to take the batteries out of the TV or uninstall Steam, especially if you finish a binge and are disgusted with your lack of drive to achieve in life. Use that energy to drive change.
Drive change by learning to control your environment.
Many of these ideas come from the excellent book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I would highly recommend reading that book.
In the book, the author also talks about the classic data from the Vietnam war. Many soldiers were addicted to heroin while they were overseas. This turned into a crisis in the minds of the American government. The leaders had no idea how they would be able to rehabilitate all these soldiers and send them back into the civilian world after the war.
What shocked the American government was the fact that after returning home, most soldiers were able to quit cold turkey, had no problems with withdrawal, and never went back to their old habits.
This is because the environment associated with the habit was completely gone. They were not overseas, around war, in the military, or around their friends who were users as well. The environment in America was nearly 100% different than the environment in Vietnam.
Because of this, there were no environmental triggers pushing the soldiers back into their negative drug-using behaviors. Without the trigger for the behavior, there was no more behavior.
This common drug habit that so many people struggle with for years upon years was gone in a matter of weeks for these soldiers. And this is a testimony to how powerful your immediate environment is to your habits. It also tells us how difficult it is to rse out of our old habits if we exist in the exact same environment with all the same environmental triggers.
You will continue to get squashed by your negative behaviors if you cannot control your environment.
This is the same for every person who has ever lived before.
To identify your desired behaviors and strategize about how you can make it easier to complete them. Think about how you can remove every single point of friction from those behaviors that you possibly can. you do not want anything getting in the way of what you want to do. The fewer “sticking points”, the better.
Additionally, you want to add as many friction points for negative behaviors as you can. If you can think of any possible way to make a negative behavior harder, then do it. It does not matter how small it is. Putting the unhealthy snacks in the back of the cupboard is a start.
Putting water closer to you and candy farther away is a start.
It does not matter how small it seems, you have to make those changes to the environment. This is the best way to ensure that you are consistent with your good behaviors and inconsistent with your negative behaviors.
Small changes maintained over time lead to massive results. Rearranging your environment is an investment that will pay you dividends in the long run.
Think long and hard about how you can make these changes. The next time you feel all fired up and motivated to make a change, start by making a change in your environment. then go from there.
The title is as close to hippie culture as I ever intend to get. But the truth is that if you want to start to control your anxiety, you have to live in the present.
The only place anxiety can live is in the past and future. It cannot survive in the present moment.
Think about it, when are you anxious? That anxiety generally comes from two main sources, no matter how many different variations on anxiety you can think of.
Anxiety can come from thinking about past mistakes.
More specifically, it comes from thinking about how past mistakes are going to damage our future selves. We ruminate on everything we have done in the past the catastrophize about how it will ruin our lives in the future. Perhaps we think we have already ruined our lives beyond repair.
In this way, anxiety lives in the past.
Anxiety also comes from thinking about future pain.
So in a way, ruminating on the past is actually a version of worrying about the future. Because we concern ourselves with how our past will create a more negative and painful future for us.
So we sit and look into the future and generate all the various events in our lives that will go wrong or cause us pain. This is anxiety in a nutshell.
You are likely familiar with the experience of sitting in one particular physical place, but your mind is a million miles away. Your mind is somewhere in the future, generating negative outcomes for your life. This is no way to live.
Anxiety robs you of the ability to live in the present and enjoy each present moment.
No negative future event is ever as evil as we make it in our minds. In our minds, we not only think of the worst-case scenario. We also think of every related worst-case scenario and combine them into one monster of negativity.
The way to combat this is to re-learn how to live in the present moment.
One of the best ways to do this is to begin the practice of meditation. Specifically, the mind-clearing form of meditation, which tends to be Eastern in origin.
Sit in a chair with good posture (back straight and eyes closed). Focus on your breathing. Breathe however you want. I personally just focus on making sure my exhale is shorter than m inhale.
Try to bring your mind to the present moment and visualize it being clear like water.
Observe thoughts as they come into your mind, but try to keep your mind in the present.
As your mind wanders into the future, gently pull it back to the present moment.
Continue for as long as you see fit.
This exercise helps you being to learn how to live in the present.
By staying in the present moment, you can better manage your life.
In the book Psycho-Cybernetics, you learn that problems may seem like they are all hitting you at once, but in reality, they are coming to you one at a time, in a single file line.
By thinking about them as being in a single file line, you can handle them better. By living in the moment and focusing on the problem right in front of you, you can succeed and resolve the problem. Do not worry about the line of problems behind the first problem, they will each get their time
How often do you hear people complain about having “so much work to do” or “so many problems to deal with“. These people have a hard time accomplishing anything. They become so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of problems that they cannot settle their mind and deal with the first problem in front of them. If they would just quiet their minds and focus on the first problem, they would soon find it solved. They would find that it was not nearly as difficult as they believed and that none of their problems are that tough in and of themselves.
Most problems are small. And the problems that seem to be big are just a collection of dozens of tiny problems. Each one can be solved if we can learn to live in the present and take them one at a time.
This practice requires effort and patience on your part. you have to be patient with yourself and realize you are not going to develop this discipline overnight. Most people quit any type of attempt to change themselves because they expect results far too quickly. Instead, just focus on your system. You are developing a system of thinking which will allow you to live in the present. So maintain your meditation discipline and try to apply it outside of meditation, in the real world. Do not worry if you hit roadblocks, just focus on developing the habit of living in the present.
Learn to have self-awareness in all the situtations you find yourself in. Maybe put something on your wrist or desk as a reminder to live in the rpesent and take one problem at a time.
We can generate all kinds of negativity in our minds if we forget to live in the present moment. There is no limit to the amount of negative possible scenarios that we can dream up if we allow our imagination to run wild. By learning to live in the present, we can begin to discipline that part of our minds that constantly generates monsters to fear. All of us could use some training in that kind of behavior.
Live in the present. Take on a brief meditation practice. Become self-aware by using a reminder and taking one problem at a time.
Do not try to accomplish all your tasks at once. Avoid trying to solve all your problem at once. Everything can be solved in due time if we will take them one step at a time.
Even being at war with temptation requires you to live in the moment. When do you give in to temptation? When you imagine some negative outcomes in the future that will come as a result of you resisting. Learn to live in the present and accept that small amount of discomfort that comes from resisting temptation Each temptation will come to you in single file, one at a time. You are never tempted by a thousand things. They have lined themselves up and will continue to drip on your face until you give in.
Train your mind to stay in the present through the meditation practice and you can decrease the discomfort that comes from having so many temptations.
One of the primary reasons that so many people avoid taking action towards their goals is because they have made their goals massive in their minds. And they believe that unless their actions are equally massive, then the action is worthless. But really, every small task completed is a step towards your goal.
And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.
The problem is that this paralyzes people and prevents them from taking any action at all. We forget that small action beats no action every day of the week. We forget that you can still get to a destination by taking a few small steps instead of sprinting several miles.
When we make tasks massive in our minds, we then require some massive amount of motivation to get us started. How could we ever imagine tackling some massive task if we aren’t extremely fired up to attack that task?
We are so accustomed to having the luxury of external pressure that we forget how to internally generate that same pressure. Without that ability to generate the pressure, we are never able to make any progress on our own individual goals.
We can perhaps make progress on the goals that others have for us. At work, we can generate results on a project or rise up to meet a deadline. In school, we can finish assignments and perform when it is required. But for some reason, we lose the ability to push ourselves for our own goals.
Part of this is the fact that we do not really want our goals.
In fact, we structure our goals based on what others think and based on arbitrary desires. But on the other hand, we do not take action because we think that only massive action is adequate. And by this thinking, we eliminate 100% of the benefit that would come from taking small actions.
While we won’t make massive progress with tiny action, we will still be making some progress. That small amount of progress is infinitely better than staying where we are.
Here is a protocol for simplifying action taking in life.
I – Identify your objective.
You would be shocked at how often you do not know what you really want. It doesn’t matter if it is work, relationships, personal life – most people have no idea what they want, myself included.
It would surprise you how unclear you are on your own life objectives. clarity of purpose and goals comes in part from taking time to think about what you truly value. You also need to think about the things you truly want. These are not the desires that come and go with the wind. Pay attention to the things you want and identify those desires that are consistently around week after week, month after month, and year after year. Even if the desire doesn’t feel powerful, the fact that it has lived so long makes it incredibly powerful.
II – Identify where you currently are in relation to what you want.
For a GPS system to work it needs two pieces of data. It needs to know where you are, and where you want to go. You just defined where you want to go, now you have to figure out where you are. How much progress have you made towards these goals of yours? Have you made any progress at all? If your goal is to read the Bible through and you are stuck in the book of Leviticus, that’s fine. At least you know where you are. Now you can develop a strategy to get to where you want to go.
III – Identify the major steps to get there.
To read through the Bible you need to read through each of the books. That breaks 1 massive goal into 66 medium-sized goals (66 books of the Bible). But that is not small enough. You still need to make your objectives smaller.
IV – Break each major step into the smallest workable unit.
Continue to reduce the goal until making your objective smaller would reduce its functionality. The smallest workable unit for reading the Bible is 1 sentence. Notice that the smallest unit is not just one word, because that would not be a workable unit. You need to have a task small enough that it can be accomplished, but just big enough so that it is a functional goal.
V – Once those incredibly small objectives have been identified, see if you can make the goal any smaller.
You want your daily objective to be so simple and small that it is almost impossible not to do it. It must be so small that it would be embarrassing to miss your habit.
VI – Once you separate the task into each of the parts, resist the urge to look at how many parts you need to accomplish to complete your goal.
All that work of fine slicing the task would be for nothing if you suddenly look up, realize you have tens of thousands of verses to read, get panicked, overwhelmed, and quit altogether. You have to focus only on the one block of work in front of you. Put a box around it in your mind. Separate each individual task out and keep them all separate from each other. Do not allow them to mix.
VII -Start right now and complete the smallest workable unit.
If the task is small enough, you should be able to accomplish it without issue.
You will also need to get rid of the objects of friction that are preventing you from achieving your goal. These types of things are often environmental in nature. If you control your environment you can control yourself.
These items are friction are most often external to your goal. Take for example your goal to read the Bible every day. One of the external friction points for that goal that might get in the way of your accomplishment is where the Bible is physically in your house. This seems silly, but it actually makes a huge difference.
Even though your goal of reading one verse per day is small, you can still have problems initiating if your Bible is located inconveniently. If you keep your bible in the closet, out of sight, you will have a problem reading. Because now you not only have to read one verse, but you have to go to where your Bible is stored, find it, get it out of your closet, then open it and start reading. That is several extra tasks that cause unnecessary friction that can keep you from achieving your goal.
If you are trying to read the Bible on your phone, you will have to resist the urge to do everything else you already do on your phone.
You carry a 10-ounce box of distraction with you at all times. If you try to read every day on your phone, you will have to deal with the competing interest of your phone. I would suggest a paper Bible, conveniently and strategically placed to maximize the likelihood of you reading it.
Look for any of these points of friction in your life and remove them. This is absolutely critical. Remove all points of friction for good behavior, and create as many points of friction for negative behavior as possible.
The main point is to make every task small so that you can achieve it without any problems.
If the task is small enough, you will be able to achieve it.
But be careful about tasks that seem small and simple but really have multiple hidden tasks inside them, such as reading the Bible when the Bible is in the closet. Simplify and reduce friction to succeed.
Organize your environment for success. Place the Bible in plain sight, where you will easily access it each day, and then follow through with reading the smallest workable, functional unit. If your task is small enough, you should have no problem with follow-through.
If you are still having a problem with follow-through, reexamine the behavior. Find out if you simplified and removed enough points of friction. Make sure there is nothing else pulling you away from the task at hand.
Every great task is just the accumulation of thousands of tiny tasks. Worry about each small, achievable discipline and it will add up to success.
We have written before about the practical consequences of sin. This is the idea that even though moral law exists in the Bible and there are spiritual consequences for disobedience, there are also palpable, understandable physical consequences of violating the moral law. Here we will discuss the practical consequences of adultery.
Proverbs chapter 5 keeps with the theme of the rest of the book, which is practical wisdom. In this chapter, the practical consequences of adultery are listed out for our understanding.
1 My son, pay attention to my wisdom; Lend your ear to my understanding,
2 That you may preserve discretion, And your lips may keep knowledge.
3 For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, And her mouth is smoother than oil;
4 But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death, Her steps lay hold of hell.
6 Lest you ponder her path of life— Her ways are unstable; You do not know them.
7 Therefore hear me now, my children, And do not depart from the words of my mouth.
8 Remove your way far from her, And do not go near the door of her house,
9 Lest you give your honor to others, And your years to the cruel one;
10 Lest aliens be filled with your wealth, And your labors go to the house of a foreigner;
11 And you mourn at last, When your flesh and your body are consumed,
12 And say: “How I have hated instruction, And my heart despised correction!
13 I have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, Nor inclined my ear to those who instructed me!
14 I was on the verge of total ruin, In the midst of the assembly and congregation.”
15 Drink water from your own cistern, And running water from your own well.
16 Should your fountains be dispersed abroad, Streams of water in the streets?
17 Let them be only your own, And not for strangers with you.
18 Let your fountain be blessed, And rejoice with the wife of your youth.
19 As a loving deer and a graceful doe, Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; And always be enraptured with her love.
20 For why should you, my son, be enraptured by an immoral woman, And be embraced in the arms of a seductress?
This verse embodies a practical exercise that we must perform as Christians – it is the ability to look past the immediate pleasure of sin and look to the end results. In the case of sin, it is often an evil, negative end result. This passage teaches that the end of the immoral woman is as bitter as wormwood. What looked so enticing in the beginning looks disgusting once you are finished with it.
You do not even have to commit adultery to understand this.
How do you feel about yourself the moment you orgasm after masturbating? Most men report feeling disgusted with themselves, making an oath never to commit that sin again. Yet it only takes a day (or even a few hours) for the craving to hit again. At that moment you forget your oath and go back to war with the craving itself.
You lose sight of how you felt in the end after the sin and can only think about satisfying the craving again. Of course, the war on lust and masturbation is not that simple and we have applied some reductionist thinking to it, but it serves to illustrate this point. We forget the long-term consequence and become overwhelmed by the short-term desire. It does not take adultery for this to happen.
Visualize what will happen in the days, weeks, and months following your action. Are those results positive or negative?
Verse 6 is a continuation of the exercise. You have to stop yourself from even thinking about engaging in adultery. Because if you start pondering it, it will not be long until you have rationalized it quite effectively. It is not hard for us to create a train of thought that is nonsensical when others examine it, but that makes complete and perfect sense to us in our own thinking.
Verse 8 teaches to remove your way far from the adulterous woman.
Why? Because you do not even need to be in an environment where you could be faced with that temptation. Solomon understands the powerful pull of a man’s sex drive. It would be extremely difficult for a man to resist an adulterous woman. So you need to control your environment.
75% of discipline is controlling your immediate environment. If you control your environment it will pay you dividends of discipline.
Verse 9 is where Solomon begins to list the practical consequences of the sin of adultery. It is quite the laundry list, and it could be expanded even further. Use your power of observation.
Look at the men in the world and in the church who have engaged in extramarital affairs. How has that turned out for them? If you find a man for whom it has turned out positively, he is the exception, not the rule. Practically speaking, it makes no sense to engage in adultery. It has only the short, fleeting excitement of one orgasm followed by hours of paranoia and secrecy. Do not waste your time in an affair when you could be spending your time creatively, productively, and profitably.
The first thing you lose as a consequence of adultery is your honor (v. 9).
And this makes rational sense. A man is dishonored when he is caught in an affair. His years are given to “the cruel one”, which in this case seems to be the adulterous woman. You can also observe this phenomenon as well – how quickly does a woman go from alluring and exciting to cruel and spiteful after an affair? They become so cruel that you can see them change. They no longer need to be exciting and alluring because they have already sunk their hook into the man who was not sexually disciplined. This leads us directly into verse 10.
The most practical and easily observable of all the consequences of this sin. You can see around you how many men lose their wealth and entire estates due to their sexual indiscretion. They lose it in the form of alimony, they lose the wealth of their time which is their most valuable depreciating asset. And they lose the wealth-building tool of their reputation. A woman has but to sink her hooks into you and will leech your finances for years.
Exercise II – Ask yourself, is one ten-second orgasm in a woman work thousands of your dollars and the freedom you have built through work?
Verse 11 is a possible allusion to the sexually transmitted diseases of the day. Your “flesh is consumed”. That does not sound like something any man would want to be a part of. And back in Solomon’s day, there was no protection from those pathologies.
You were risking disease every single time you engaged sexually with a female (or male). Even today people still risk their health by not wearing condoms during intercourse. And even if they wear condoms, there is still the possibility of contracting a disease due to incomplete coverage of the genitals or because some diseases can be spread through kissing alone.
Look up some pictures of what the various diseases do to the human body. It is not good. While I disprove fearmongering in the church and I do acknowledge that the only way most church people can motivate purity is through the threat of punishment and consequence, the physical consequences of STDs are readily apparent and a wonderful deterrent to sexual sin.
Sometimes you need a good reminder of all the consequences of adultery because motivating yourself only by looking to the positive can be ineffective. Remind yourself of the physical consequences of sexual sin in the form of an STD. If you are able to keep your lunch down, you will not forget those images for a long time. And you will be motivated beyond belief to keep your genitals to yourself.
The man who does not remain disciplined is found in the following verses.
After he suffers all the practical consequences of sin, he mourns. He wakes up from his delusion, perhaps enlightened by the post-orgasm clarity of mind, and realizes what he has done. He has wasted his wealth, his time, his career, his name, and his health and has nothing left. Do not let yourself be that man. Keep yourself under control if for nothing more than to avoid the negative consequences of adultery.
Verses 15-20 instruct you to stay with your own wife. Be committed to her and let your sexual satisfaction come only from her. Some in the church would like you to believe this is fulfilling or easy – it is not. The supposed allure and excitement of worldly women have pulled many Christian men away from the faith, from their marriage, and into immorality. It is not enough just to look to your wife for sexual satisfaction, but you must also meditate on the negative consequences of adultery.
Proverbs 5 is not the only place where adultery is warned against. Solomon mentions the practical consequences of adultery and its overarching disadvantage to the young man.
16 To deliver you from the immoral woman, From the seductress who flatters with her words,
17 Who forsakes the companion of her youth, And forgets the covenant of her God.
18 For her house leads down to death, And her paths to the dead;
19 None who go to her return, Nor do they regain the paths of life.
This passage briefly touches on a few of the main points mentioned before. The way of the adulterous leads to the destruction of a man’s honor, health, wealth, and life. This passage teaches that they do not regain the paths of life. After adultery, most men do not recover in life.
You might say “Well I can list plenty of instances where man engaged in adultery and went on to be successful”.
Well, imagine how much more successful he would be if he did not lose portions of his wealth and time to an immoral woman.
24 To keep you from the evil woman, From the flattering tongue of a seductress.
25 Do not lust after her beauty in your heart, Nor let her allure you with her eyelids.
26 For by means of a harlot A man is reduced to a crust of bread; And an adulteress will prey upon his precious life.
27 Can a man take fire to his bosom, And his clothes not be burned?
28 Can one walk on hot coals, And his feet not be seared?
29 So is he who goes in to his neighbor’s wife;Whoever touches her shall not be innocent.
The seductress is alluring. You are going to want to be involved with her. She is a siren from the tale of Odysseus, and it is your responsibility to tie yourself to the mast of the ship of your life and avoid any interactions with these women.
She will attempt to pull you in and destroy you in the end.
The Bible says a man is reduced to a crust of bread. He is reduced to nothingness. Again, his name and wealth are destroyed. If a man does not have his reputation, wealth, and health, what exactly does he have? An adulterous woman can take all of these things away from him.
32 Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding; He who does so destroys his own soul.
33 Wounds and dishonor he will get, And his reproach will not be wiped away.
34 For jealousy is a husband’s fury; Therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance.
35 He will accept no recompense, Nor will he be appeased though you give many gifts.
This is the culmination of what we have learned – “he who commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding”. He quite literally lacks knowledge. The Bible also teaches that departing from evil equals understanding (Job 28:28). The adulterous woman robs a man of everything valuable he has. Again, If a man does not have his reputation, his health, or his wealth, what does he have? These are all of the possessions that an adulterous woman leeches away from a man.
Losing these is a practical consequence of adultery.
The adulterous man “destroys his own soul”. Perhaps he is ridden with guilt (though not always – as I mentioned, guilt is largely unnecessary and poorly defined in religion). Or his mind is never at rest because of his need to maintain secrecy about his affairs and his paranoia in thinking that all of these things will come to the light of the all-seeing public eye.
Then lastly in this passage, we see what happens when a man commits adultery with a married woman. He quite literally puts his life in danger. The husband cannot be appeased. He will only accept payment in the form of violence. This is one of the most natural reactions a human being can have. The man who commits adultery will have the raw, unbridled anger of the husband to deal with, and that will not end well for anyone.
Some men will take it so far as to murder the adulterous man who engaged sexually with his wife. A brief orgasm is not worth that risk.
6 For at the window of my house I looked through my lattice,
7 And saw among the simple, I perceived among the youths, A young man devoid of understanding,
8 Passing along the street near her corner; And he took the path to her house
9 In the twilight, in the evening, In the black and dark night.
10 And there a woman met him, With the attire of a harlot, and a crafty heart.
11 She was loud and rebellious, Her feet would not stay at home.
12 At times she was outside, at times in the open square, Lurking at every corner.
13 So she caught him and kissed him; With an impudent face she said to him:
14 “I have peace offerings with me; Today I have paid my vows.
15 So I came out to meet you, Diligently to seek your face, And I have found you.
16 I have spread my bed with tapestry, Colored coverings of Egyptian linen.
17 I have perfumed my bed With myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
18 Come, let us take our fill of love until morning; Let us delight ourselves with love.
19 For my husband is not at home; He has gone on a long journey;
20 He has taken a bag of money with him, And will come home on the appointed day.”
21 With her enticing speech she caused him to yield, With her flattering lips she seduced him.
22 Immediately he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks,
23 Till an arrow struck his liver. As a bird hastens to the snare, He did not know it would cost his life.
24 Now therefore, listen to me, my children; Pay attention to the words of my mouth:
25 Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways, Do not stray into her paths;
26 For she has cast down many wounded, And all who were slain by her were strong men.
27 Her house is the way to hell, Descending to the chambers of death.
Solomon first perceived a young man lacking understanding (v. 7), which means that he would not depart from evil. He was already in the wrong part of town.
Solomon then gives some key characteristics of this immoral woman – she is loud, rebellious, and would not stay at home (v. 11). This is the opposite of how the ideal woman should have behaved – to be quiet, submissive, and stay at home.
She lurked, looking for an opportunity to ensnare a man. The bible also describes her as “impudent”, or “sexually forward” (v. 13) and tempted him with sex. Like most men, he gave in and the bible says it cost him his life (v. 23). We do not fully understand what it means that “an arrow struck his liver”, but it does not seem rational to test the waters of adultery in order to find out.
This passage is one of the principles stories about avoiding adultery as well as the consequences of adultery.
Women will constantly be looking for ways to ensnare men, especially if those men have a high value. You need to guard yourself against these kinds of women. Protect your reputation, health, and wealth by maintaining sexual discipline. Keep yourself away from these women. Spend time investing in yourself.
Men and women cannot be friends. Do not waste your time with women, especially if you find yourself physically attracted to them. It will be a complete waste of your time, money, and life.
These are the practical consequences of adultery. Think about them, meditate on them and plan in advance how you will deal with these women.
You need to have a battle plan ready for every possible scenario. Be ready to go to war and be alert at all times.
It is not natural to take responsibility for our actions. Look at the first man and the first woman who ever existed in the world. When they inevitably failed and were not obedient to the rules that God had set, what did they do? They shifted blame away from themselves (Genesis 3).
What this means is that is natural to shift blame to someone else and it is unnatural to take responsibility for our actions. But as we so often note, the right thing is seldom the natural thing. Christianity itself involves many unnatural behaviors. From avoiding pre-marital/extra-marital sex to loving our enemies, many of the commands of God require us to put aside our humanity for the betterment of humankind. Literally, we reject our physical nature and transcend to the divine by behaving unnaturally – or perhaps it would be better said that we act supernaturally. Not ghostly, but literally “above nature”, and the word itself is defined.
That said, taking responsibility for our actions is not natural.
It is easy to understand this because it is painful to take responsibility. And the greatest motivation for all human beings is the dualistic power of the pain and pleasure principles. We are constantly looking to either gain pleasure or avoid pain. And I argue that the urge to avoid pain is much greater than the desire to gain pleasure. Mediocrity is pleasant enough, why should I work to gain something better? But if the pain will reach me if I do not act and the only way to avoid that pain is to act, then somehow I can find the energy and motivation to take action.
Therefore, the push to avoid responsibility might be so strong because responsibility can be painful. It would be much easier to shift that pain onto someone else and have them take it for us. But this is not the masculine way to behave.
Being a man involves taking responsibility especially during the moments when it is neither fun nor enjoyable to do so.
That is one of the critical pieces of manhood – you take on the pain of life for the betterment of others. Usually, this is for the benefit of your immediate family. But you also think about how each act of taking responsibility will better your own life.
The next time you find yourself wanting to shift blame or make an error someone else’s fault, take a look at yourself. Examine your own contribution to the situation and think about what you could have done differently. Or think about what you still have the power to affect. It is a bad habit to constantly be looking at others and blaming them. It robs us of the power to direct our own lives because we suggest that “If this guy had just done XYZ then this wouldn’t have happened!”. That is not masculine. By definition, if we blame or shift responsibility we are behaving in effeminate ways.
A simple way to be more masculine is to take personal responsibility for everything in this life. If you are not happy with something in your life, take a look in the mirror at the creator of that situation. Become aware of your habit of pointing fingers at others. It is not their responsibility why your life turned out the way it has.
Stop blaming everyone. No longer can you blame:
Your parents
The economy
Your environment
Your friends
Your lack of resources (money/time/connections/skill)
If it is in your life or a part of who you are, it is your responsibility. You have to take charge of your life if you ever want to be free. No longer are you content to sit around pointing fingers at everyone else. The moment you begin to take responsibility, you begin to be free. And you find satisfaction with your life, no matter what state it is in. Because even if it is the worst life ever created, it’s still yours, you made it, your name is attached to it, and that has to mean something to you. So take responsibility and find the freedom and masculinity therein.
