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Peacemaker – Peace Made Through War

Summary: It has traditionally been assumed that there is one definition of a peacemaker: one who makes peace between warring parties. This may not be the complete story. There is more to making peace than simply breaking up a fight.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for the shall be called sons of God”
Matt 5:9

Some Men Make Peace Indirectly Through War

Peace does not exist if a war of some kind does not exist either. Just as there can be no concept of darkness without light. What is darkness but the absence of light? What is peace but the absence of war? While that is an oversimplification, the anaolgy still works to help us understand what we are talking about when ti comes to war.

If a man is going to make peace, there must be some sort of conflict that he aims to end. The peacemaker may aim to end a conflict that is already occurring between evil and innocent parties. This is the basis for America’s involvement in the Middle East. Radical, evil men systematically rape and abuse both women and men and have no desire for peace. These are men who must be destroyed because of their actions.

When they are destroyed, peace is made. When evil men are killed, peace fills the land.

Some peoples may be entirely unwilling to consider peaceful negotiation, therefore peace is made by the application of violence against those peoples.

Do you think that the doctrine of Islam that has one goal of world domination, do you think those men are interested in peace negotiation (Surah 9:12)

So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command]. And if Allah had willed, He could have taken vengeance upon them [Himself], but [He ordered armed struggle] to test some of you by means of others. And those who are killed in the cause of Allah – never will He waste their deeds.
Surah 47:4 (that is, to quote from the Quran):

This is the religion that the media wants you to believe is completely peaceful. In the old testament when men were instructed to kill the inhabitants of Canaan, it is because those inhabitants were evil. They offered their children as burnt sacrifices to pagan gods and had no moral code. However, when the Quran commands violence, all it takes is a disagreement. That seems like a rational way to deal with people who disagree with you, just kill them off.

Some Men Make Peace By Preventing War From Occurring

At times, a threatening presence is all that is necessary to deter evil. The best way to stop a criminal is through the perceived threat of violence or punishment. We deter ourselves from evil simply by thinking about the punishment that would result from taking those actions. Where there is no threat of punishment, crime increases.

Just as cars slow down when passing a police officer, evil is deterred by the highly apparent presence of imminent punishment. This is why we have the death penalty. It actually has very little to do with death, but rather the simple fear of death. We kill criminals so that other would-be criminals decide not to engage in criminal activity. When the rod is spared, crime soars. You can pretty much do anything in the modern world and you will not get the death penalty for it. If there was ever a time to be a criminal, it would be now.

A peacemaker holds the threat of violence in his coat and causes others to fear.

Without the possibility of punishment, there is no fear of consequence. When there is no fear of consequence, no one does what is right. This is true of everything. I will go far and make a very bold statement and say that religion cannot exist without hell. Without the possibility of punishment, there is no motivation to be righteous, at least for most people.

Some call this the wrong motivation. I say that motivation is entirely irrelevant. As you know as a reader of SC, emotions, motivations, and feelings are all irrelevant. It is only the action that matters.

To make peace is to end violence. Sometimes it takes violence to end violence. Consider that the next time you read the Sermon on the Mount.

Breaking the Horse of Emotion

Most people are carried around by their emotions. They are pulled by them as if the emotion is a horse that has not been broken. If you have seen footage of a herd of wild horses, you know they run free and relish that freedom. When men capture them and try to domesticate them there is a process where the animal is completely resistant to being controlled. It concentrates all of its power into ridding itself of the rider who would subjugate it.

But given enough time, the horse will surrender and learn to obey the commands of the rider. You can learn to do the same thing with your emotions. Even though your emotions currently run free and wild, you can learn to put bits in their mouths and turn them where you want. You can be the one in charge of your emotions rather than having your emotions be in charge of you.

Working to control your emotions is painful at first. It contains the risk of being thrown from the horse and injured.

Many riders cannot hold onto horses and are thrown off. They break arms or legs and sometimes sustain more serious injuries. There is a basic, inherent risk in attempting to break a horse. It is the simple risk of pain. Since we are humans are trained from an early age to avoid anything painful, we continue this trend by avoiding the pain of personal change. Rather than gritting our teeth, accepting that attempting to change ourselves will be painful, we instead sit content in our own mediocrity.

Instead of turning our focus inward, pursuing personal excellence, we say that where we are is “good enough”, though there is no such thing. One of our many responsibilities as men is to shoulder difficulty for some greater good. And I argue to you that outside of God the greatest good is the improvement of the self. Because without the improvement of the self, you cannot take care of your family, lead others or accomplish all the other tasks that society imposes upon you. While some people focus on their families and on everything but themselves, you must learn to focus on and improve yourself. By doing this you will bring much greater value to others than those who focus exclusively on others without ever bothering to improve themselves.

The man who focuses only on his family is limited in how well he can truly serve them. Your ability to serve others is limited by your skill level. Take some time and invest in yourself and alter you will be of greater value to others.

Improve yourself by taking a firm grasp on your emotions. You cannot be moved by external events. This is the state of mind you should be training to achieve. The man who is unmoved by external circumstances is like a mountain or the stony cliffs facing the ocean. People build homes and castles on mountains or even on the edges of these stony cliffs because they trust their strength. You need to be the type of man who is the stone, who is the unmovable rock face on the ocean’s edge. With that degree of self-control, you provide a sense of peace and security to everyone around you. They all begin to relax and feel calm because you, because of the man who is the leader, the man who is in complete control of his emotions and cannot be moved by circumstance.

Most men choose not to control their emotions. They are pulled around by them because it is easier to do so. As hard as life is when you are pulled by emotion, that period of time where you work to break the horse of emotion is even more difficult than that. But on the other side is absolute freedom. You have the power of the horse combined with the power of self-control. This makes you the free, independent man who has the strength to stand on his own.

With that newfound power, you can concentrate it into any facet of life that you want.

You have harnessed the horsepower of emotion, now all you have to do is decide what to do with that limitless energy. Will you continue to work on yourself or perhaps concentrate more on that career? Whatever you decide to do, you can do it with newfound energy and focus. You are no longer losing energy through the leak of emotion.

As a man in perfect control of yourself, your energy system is flawless and perfectly sustainable. You cannot be moved by external events and on top of that, you have massive personal power. The benefits that come from being able to control your emotions cannot be understated.

Also understand I do not mean that you should not feel emotions. I am not trying to rob you of your humanity. Again, you must learn not to divorce emotions completely, but rather to use them as fuel.

Embrace the pain of change.

All change is difficult because we are reconstructing who we are all the way down to our brain cells. When changing who we are, we literally change at the cellular level. We adjust the way our hormone and emergency systems respond to events. By being in control of our emotions we limit the time we spend being stressed or in fight-or-flight mode. That not only saves buckets of personal energy but is inherently masculine to the core. The ability to resist emotion, control it or be unmoved by external circumstance is a demonstration of strength.

Be disgusted by others who have no emotional self-control.

One of the ways to continue to be motivated on the path to any change is to be disgusted by others around you who show no regard for emotional control. You can apply this to any type of change you want. Before anyone misunderstands, I am not saying that you look down on others or hate them for their actions, but rather that you simply be disgusted by the action itself. Love the weak but hate weakness.

You can apply this to diet and training by being disgusted at what the majority of people in the world decide to do with their bodies. Rather than training them and taking care of them, they live sedentary lives and pack on enough fat to last them a year-long famine.

Learn to be disgusted by people who show a complete lack of emotional control. Recognize it is total weakness and effeminacy and promise yourself that you will never be like those weak men. This is critical: you need to have a goal to aim at combined with something you want to avoid if you want maximum motivation for change. Most people do not spend enough time developing the appropriate anger and disgust at particular actions, so they simply wallow in their lifestyle. Many men live in obesity, pornography addiction, and mediocrity because they do not have the proper amount of hatred for those things. Not that simply having hatred is a cure-all for conditions, but it is a very important piece of the recipe.

Hold on tight and be persistent during your change.

You may be thrown from the horse. That is okay, remount and work again. Breaking a horse is about breaking its will and making it willing to obey a master. You also have to break your need for comfort, and your desire to be mindlessly pulled by emotions and external circumstances. Take ownership of your emotions then dominate them.

No more are you content to live a life where you are not in complete control of everything. You are unwilling to live a life dominated by emotion. Understand though, that this change will take a great deal of time as any change does. It starts with awareness of emotionalism and finishes with the complete subjugation of emotion.

Maintain gains – the consolidation.

Whenever we learn something new, there is a period of time where we are consolidating the memory and organizing it so it can be retrieved later. There will be a moment when you break the resistance of your emotions and everything seems easier to control. It is critical that at this moment you do not let go of the control you have over your emotions. You have to consolidate that victory and cement it so that it becomes permanent.

Do not be the man who finally loses all that weight and then falls right back into his old habits of overeating and laziness. You have to maintain your gains; this is of critical importance. Everything in life has to be maintained simply to mitigate the effects of the law of entropy.

Feed and water the horse. Keep up with your victory over yourself and maintain the virtue of self-control.

Attack the Bottleneck

It has been said that it is a waste of time to work on your weaknesses. Because even if you manage to improve them, they will still never measure up to your strengths. So why waste your time? If improving every little flaw in your character will provide less of a return than concentrating on further improving what you already excel at, why bother? While that may be true, I offer an alternative. You should work on the bottleneck of character.

By that I mean you should attack the flaws that, if changed, will make the biggest difference in your life. These bottlenecks are what is really holding you back from being the person you need to be. Everyone has a basket full of flaws they could work on, but what are the biggest ones? What are the flaws you have that everyone else would notice and be able to identify? If you asked your family or friends about your biggest flaw, what would they say it is?

While you do not have to have that conversation since it can be extremely uncomfortable and unnecessary, you can still think about this question from your friend’s or family’s perspective. What could you improve about your character that would provide at least a 40% return on the investment of time?

Once this flaw is identified, you can get to work on fixing it. Do not stress yourself about your other flaws. There is no point trying to change a million things about yourself at once. Concentrate on the giant, then handle the small details.

Fixing a bottleneck will give you a massive confidence boost. You can maneuver that newfound confidence in a new direction, concentrating on other flaws until you have systematically eliminated every single one of them.

Continue Reading: Motivation

Help Comes From a Position of Strength

It does not matter what kind of help you are talking about. Whether physical, emotional, or financial, any help you give others can only come from a position of strength.

If someone is suffering financially, the only people who can help them are people who hold a position of financial strength. The financially weak cannot help other financially weak individuals. Yet those same people, the greedy poor, will disparage those who have wealth on this earth. They will talk trash about the only people who can help them fix their current situation.

Also, emotional help can only come from a position of emotional strength. You cannot help someone who is suffering emotionally if you are also an emotional wreck. Helping one another typically does not happen in a lateral fashion, with two people on an even playing field helping one another out. Help only comes from a position of strength.

Lastly, physical help can only come from a position of physical strength. If someone is hanging off of a ledge, you cannot help them if you are also hanging off the same ledge. The only people who can help them are people who are above the ledge, standing on solid ground.

If help can only come from a position of strength, why do we in religion disparage strength so much?

We glorify weakness and label strength as “arrogant”. Those who are strong enough to stand on their own two feet are ridiculed for their self-reliance.

The issue is that so many people who worship at the altar of weakness do not understand that it is our job as people to develop our own strength, as best we can. If we are to meet God halfway, it requires work on our part. We are charged with doing everything we can to the best of our ability and let God take care of the rest. But the weak want God to do everything for them. They do not want to do any work on themselves or their lives. They expect God to do everything while they sit back sipping mango juice on the beach. This lazy mental attitude is the reason that so few Christians hold positions of strength in their daily lives. Most are emotionally, physically, and financially destitute and proud to be so. This is not who we should model ourselves after.

If you want results in your life, you have to develop strength of your own.

You cannot always rely on others because they will not always be there to support you. You need to develop the internal strength to rely on yourself and no one else. Then once you have maximally developed your own strength, you allow God to handle the rest. But never expect God to lift your entire burden for you, He will not do it. That would rob you of the chance to develop your own strength. God will help you along the way, but it is your responsibility to develop your own strength to help yourself first, and others second. Because you cannot help others until you are in a position of strength.

Progression – Why Improvement is Vital to Men

“Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress.”
1 Timothy 4:15

“And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great.”
Job 8:7

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! I hope you will find out that we have not failed the test. But we pray to God that you may not do wrong—not that we may appear to have met the test, but that you may do what is right, though we may seem to have failed.”
2 Corinthians 13:5-7

“Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance”
Proverbs 1:5

When God initially created man, He placed him in a garden. I believe that this is God’s favorite place in His creation. God loves things that grow, which means He loves when His people grow.

Progression is important for a man. Without it, he will become depressed.

Look at any older person who has given up on life or who is stuck in their routines and not improving as an individual. They are depressed, sad, and constantly thinking about death. Now contrast that with an older person you know who lives life to the fullest despite their age and grows and improves their ability and character constantly. They are rare, but they do exist, and they are our examples.

To remain the same is to die. However, the majority of men get off track by having overly ambitious expectations for themselves. They attempt too much growth at once, and as a result, they do not grow at all. The example of living, growing trees is useful because it outlines the fact that growth is not expected to happen overnight. There are multiple recorded instances of faith being compared to some kind of tree, as in the parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32; Mark 4:30-32).

We make the mistake of focusing on the facts of the story: that the mustard tree was first just a seed, and then a giant tree. We forget all the intermediate steps that got the tree to that point of being massive. That tree first is a seed, then tiny shoots of green leaves start to appear. Then it becomes a sapling followed by an adolescent. After a few more years it becomes very tall and finally massive. It reaches these milestones through slow progression, one inch at a time and over a very long period of time. You are to grow as well. Either improve or die.

Affirmation

I Improve, or I Die.

Application

Mindsets – Do not expect your growth to be overnight. Be aware of the fact that you will need long periods of time to make substantial progress on your currently puny character. Do not abandon growth when you have weeks or months where you do not improve at all. Do not abandon growth just because you do not see progress. Just because a tree did not gain visible height does not mean it did not grow. Sometimes there is no growth in height that we can see, only a deepening of the roots.

A key to growth is to take the simplest yet most practical step towards improvement and to do so in a way that is measurable. This includes checking your ego and taking microscopically small steps.

So many people try to take up reading their Bibles each day. They find one of those “Read your Bible in a year” plans and get excited, not realizing they will have to cover at least 4 chapters a day to read the Bible in one year. They are attempting to go from not reading Scripture at all to reading hundreds of verses per day. This would be like never exercising your body then saying, “I think I’ll start a professional bodybuilding workout program where I train twice a day for three hours”.

Maybe they maintain motivation for a few weeks, at least until they get to Leviticus, then they quit.

I would be shocked if those people even made it that far. They failed to check their ego, took on more than their frail constitutions could handle, and burned themselves out. Now they are right back where they were: sitting on the couch, doing nothing, and making no spiritual progress.

The real goal should be sustained long term progress. The only real improvement comes from consistent, steady progression. So instead of trying to read the Bible in a year, the goal should be to read the Bible every day. The amount of Bible you read will not matter if you quit in 12 days. Check your ego and be willing to read one chapter per day, or half of a chapter, or ten verses, or even five verses until you become the person who reads the Bible every day. That is the true goal, not to read the Bible in the year, but to become the type of person who reads the Bible every day without fail.

You might think, “Five verses each day is not a lot of reading”, well it is five more verses than you are reading currently, and five more verses than the majority of so-called “Christians” are reading each day.

Commit to extremely small-scale changes that are sustainable. Do not try to build the Sistine Chapel of habits in a single week. Save yourself the burnout and commit to progress.

Commit to being the type of person who is improving every day. Do not worry your mind about what others are doing (or rather, what they are claiming to do) or how fast you are improving. Focus on your personal progress and be able to measure it. You will never know if you have grown if you do not know where you are or what you are trying to improve. Keep a habit journal or get a paper calendar and check off each day that you read your Bible, even if it is only for five minutes. Doing this will give you visual feedback on your progress, and that will be the positive reinforcement that helps you maintain the habit.

Harden your mind through practice and continual progression.

Do not give in to weakness like the boys around you.

Be strong and powerful and improve yourself.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

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