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Accountability is Overrated – Develop Strength Alone

This section is meant to show you why accountability is overrated and why you should build strength alone. In a world where group effort and feeling good about yourself is praised, we are going to focus on developing our own strength. If we improve our personal strength, we increase the overall strength of the group if and when we return to them.

“Only in solitude can any great work be done”
Pablo Picasso

Always use your own mind. Do you think accountability is overrated? Why or why not? What are the pros and cons of accountability?

I – Religion overplays accountability because it is easier than personal responsibility.

When I am with the group, I feel better, have more focus and more motivation. When I am alone, I feel weak and have to rely on my own strength. Relying on my own strength is hard because it requires me to hold up all my own weight. I cannot go to a friend for help, I cannot lean on an ally. It is much harder for us to rely on our own strength, but it is much more beneficial as well. This is one of the reasons that religion places such a heavy emphasis on accountability and group strength.

It is easier to perform well when I have friends around me. If I am the average guy in the church, I do not want to contribute much effort to holding myself up. And if I have the group to support me, I do not have to! I do not have to worry about one single thing when I am with the group because I absorb their strength. This may feel good in the moment, but it is disastrous in the long-term.

It is easier to stay motivated when I have support.

When all my friends are training or “being spiritual”, it is easy for me to be motivated to do the same. At that point, being spiritual is equal to being part of the group. Best of both worlds in the minds of some.

But what do you do when are alone? Where do you go to gain strength when there is no one around you?

What are you capable of doing with your strength alone? Accountability gives the illusion of strength and comes at the expense of any kind of personal development.

When we are part of a group, the group’s strength masks our personal weaknesses. We never have to fix the chinks in our armor because our allies are covering those chinks for us. This is great for group warfare, but again it is dangerous for individual battles. As we will discuss later, we are almost never attacked when are with the group, we are almost always attacked when we are alone. And at that moment, we cannot rely on the group, can we? They are not with us and we are alone, so where do we go for strength? If we cannot rely on ourselves and on our own personal strength, we will be crushed.

When I am with the group, it is easier to delude myself into thinking I have strength when in reality I am feeding off the strength of my peers.

Just like a student can trick themselves into thinking they have mastery over a certain subject matter because they continue to read it and think “I understand this”. When in reality they have not been tested and therefore do not know their own level of knowledge. The same is true for the man who thinks he is strong because he spends much of his time around his friends. He does not know that he is simply leeching the strength from his peers and that he himself is actually quite weak.

These are a few reasons why accountability is overrated. And we are just getting started with this subject matter. Again, the religious world spends far too much time on accountability and group effort and far too little time on individual effort and personal strength.

II – I know what you will think, “Well how is being stronger as a group a bad thing? How do you know that accountability is overrated?”.

It is certainly not a bad thing to be stronger together. The problem is that is simply unreliable because you will not always be with your allies. Again, I am not saying to never use accountability, but I believe it should be used sparingly, at a rate of 20% of our training time. By that I mean when it comes to training, 80% of the time we should be working on building our individual strength. The other 20% of the time can be used for accountability. No more volume of accountability should be used because then we begin to develop the illusion of personal strength rather than genuine strength. We mistake the strength of the group for our personal strength.

It is not bad to use accountability, but it should only be a small percentage of our training.

The religious world has gone in the opposite direction. They spend 80% of the time talking about accountability and group strength and 20% of the time on developing personal strength. Then they follow that up with plenty of material about guilt and repentance. Usually because spending disproportionate amounts of time on accountability inevitably leads to failure. The reason this is unwise is because it does not reflect real-life combat scenarios, as we will discuss in the next section.

III – The Enemy Attacks When You Are Alone.

The reason it is inefficient to train as a group is that we are almost never attacked as a group. The enemy always attacks us when we are alone, isolated away from our fellow men. Let me ask you this, what good is group strength at this point? Is accountability going to help you when you are all by yourself?

You may say “Yes, because I know I would have to report back to my fellow men about if I failed or not”.

And that may be true, but that is assuming you both have a group of men holding you accountable, they are willing to actually hold you accountable and you are willing to tell them the truth about what happened. There are multiple ways to disable the effectiveness of the accountability group and lies are one of them.

Any time I attend some kind of church camp I always end up making the statement in some form or another that the camp is like an oasis from temptation. The levels of temptation you face at camp compared to the temptation you face in the waking world are like night and day. Of course, you will still have your bad apples who like to spoil the event for everyone else. But overall, there is almost a protective field around the event that keeps the adversary at bay.

This is excellent and a reprieve from the war of life. The problem is that it is not real life.

Camp demonstrates an important point, that we are almost never attacked as a group. We are always targeted as individuals when we are separated from the rest of the group. In those moments, what good is the strength of the group?

We come and train at these camps to improve, but we end up focusing on the development of group strength instead of individual strength. As a result, the gains we make do not carry over to our individual life. Sure, we learn a little more, perhaps we are “on fire” for a few weeks, but we come down. We have to go back to our individual lives and wage war all alone once again.

This is why there is the classic “repentance parade” on the last day of these camps.

On the last night, everyone and their grandma come forward to repent of some vague, unspecified wrongdoing like “being mean to their friends”. A few weeks after the repentance party these people are living exactly the same as they were before they came to camp. Because camp is not reflective of real life. That momentary motivation will not last, just like in every other facet of life. What these kids need to discipline, not to be fired up, highly emotional feeling they get from camp.

The question is, do we have the strength to fight this war while we are alone? Not is the only training we engage in is group strength training. There has to be a shift in focus from group strength to individual strength.

IV – 3 Quick Exercises for Personal Strength

A – Sitting with the adversary.

Simply sit and endure a wave of temptation. One of the reasons we fail is simply because we cannot sit still and handle a wave of temptation. It does not matter what the evil is, we fail to win because we feel the need to move or do something.

Think of being tempted as being shelled with mortar fire.

You simply have to sit there and wait it out. By developing the patience to just sit with temptation, you can defeat any temptation.

So, the next time you are alone and tempted, just sit with that temptation. Detach and consciously observe the feelings going through your body. What do you feel? Where are your thoughts going? Here is a checklist for you to observe your body during a battle of temptation:

What do I feel in my head? Is it hot? Throbbing? Tingling? What is the sensation?
What do I feel in my chest?
How fast am I breathing?
How deeply am I breathing?
What do I feel in my gut? Am I breathing into my gut?
What do I feel in my junk (penis/testicles)? What temperature are they?
How tight are my muscles? Am I tensing muscles anywhere from head to toe? Am I gritting my teeth?

Just by running through a short checklist like this, you not only sit with the temptation, but you detach from your body. This detachment allows you to distract yourself and ride the wave of temptation instead of being pummeled by it.

B – Detach from emotions.

If you run through the checklist above, you will be able to detach from your body. But what if you want to detach from your emotions? We fail because we get emotional. When we get emotional, we cannot see the long-term or even short term-consequences. This is a spiritual fog of war.

By detaching, taking a few deep breaths, slowing the heart rate we can elevate our perspective. When we elevate our perspective, we can see those future consequences and begin to weigh them rationally in our minds. Weighing the positive and negative consequences of any action is critical. But this evaluation cannot be done if we are waist-deep in our emotions. To detach, ask yourself the following questions:

How am I looking right now?
What are the emotions I am feeling right now? Are those emotions useful?
Am I being weak at this moment? Do I look like the hero I want to be?
Am I feeling “hot in the head”? What temperature is my body? Is it getting warm?
Am I maintaining perfect control over myself right now?
Where is the enemy? What is my position? What is the best decision to make?

Again, these questions are nothing special. But having a brief protocol that you can use will allow you to break the attack of the enemy and reestablish an advantageous battlefield position.

C – Affirmations.

We all talk to ourselves, so we might as well be intentional about what we are saying. Write some affirmations for yourself. I like mine to be in the present tense and describe what I want to be, instead of what I already am. So, If I get nervous and anxious about events, I could make my affirmation “I am calm and in control of my emotions”. It is as simple as that. These can seem silly, but they are very helpful especially over the long run.

Try the following:

I am stronger alone.
I can crush the enemy, bring him to me.
Now, I am in total control of my mind, body, and emotions.
I am unmoved as the waves of life crash upon me.
Today, I bring the purest elements of war to the spiritual battlefield.
I am the champion warrior of my own soul and cannot be moved.
No weapon on the earth can touch my skin, I defeat all who oppose me.
My strength and power allow me to withstand every enemy assault.

Again, reading, saying, or listening to affirmations is going to feel pretty silly for a while. But your subconscious mind is going to hear these statements and make you better for it. Try these three tips out for a week and see what you think about it. Do you think that accountability is overrated? What are the pros and cons of accountability that you think about? Leave your comment below.

Tips for Improving Bible Class

Here I will provide you with three critical tips for improving Bible class. When applied, your personal knowledge will skyrocket.

During the Corona Virus pandemic, many churches moved their services entirely online, at least for a few months. While everything was shut down, we all became accustomed to worshipping from home. As of this writing, many churches have opened back up, at least partially. Where I worship, we have not yet moved back to a full class schedule, instead, we simply have morning worship and Wednesday evening Bible study. There is no class period on Sunday morning and no Sunday evening worship period.

I believe this has been a good thing.

I have argued before that one of the purposes of the dual Sunday Bible class was simply so that people who were working the morning shift at the factory could worship in the evening and people with the evening shift could worship in the morning. It was simply a matter of allowing everyone the chance to worship during the Industrial Revolution when everyone, even children, had jobs every day of the week. But in the modern world, we have turned every small detail into a competition of righteousness.

“I’m better than you because I go to both Sunday morning and evening services”. And here I was thinking that righteousness is determined by behavior, not by how many times per day you can warm a pew.

Most people no longer work 12-hour shifts in factories, so they have the freedom to attend both services if they want. Then if they attend both, they are considered the “cream of the crop”. I always argue that if lifestyle does not match convictions, the number of boxes you check on the worship schedule means nothing.

Aside from all that, with churches opening back up, many are considering adding the Bible study and Sunday evening sessions back to the worship order.

This may sound strange, but I think this is actually a poor idea simply because it is done for the wrong reasons. Why do we want to add classes back to Sunday morning? Because that is the way it has always been done? That is never good logic. The problem is that most bible classes are producing zero results. The audience is learning nothing, and the teachers lecture on “milk of the word” topics.

Let me ask you this if you were working out for one hour per day and seeing no results, would you get excited and blindly add another hour of training to your schedule? Or do you think it might be better to address the hour you are training, improve it and increase the intensity of it so you actually begin to start seeing results? This is what we should do with our bible classes. Before we go from learning nothing for one hour to learning nothing for two hours, let’s correct that first hour and make it a time where we can actually learn something.

Churches are wanting to blindly add more volume of class without first improving the quality of the classes we already have.

This has been my primary problem which much of the modern church in recent months. So many teachers are so poorly prepared or have studied so little that Bible classes end up being a waste of time. If after ten years we are still learning the same basic, rudimentary concepts that we have been learning since grade school, there is a problem.

The class session of a Bible study should be an extremely high-level lecture tailored to the audience’s age. But I continue to find time and time again that while sitting in the adult class, I am embarrassed at what we are learning. The same basic concepts are rehashed over and over again without any form of progression. This is what Paul criticized the church for when he said, “By this time you should be teachers, but you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God and have come to need milk and not solid food” (Hebrew 5:12).

My point today is that before we mindlessly add more volume of lectureships, we should first increase the intensity of the lectures and classes that we do have. A greater volume of time spent studying is not useful if the quality and intensity of the study are low. 30 minutes of intensity will decimate 2 hours of passivity. So here I will give my tips for how to increase the intensity of classes in your church to make for a more efficient lecture period.

3 Tips for Improving Bible Class

I – Objectives

When you open any class syllabus, you will inevitably run into a list of class objectives. This is a bullet point list that lays out what you can expect to learn from the course. In addition, many college lectures have similar objectives that are given in a list before the lecture starts. Textbooks also have objectives at the beginning of each chapter; describing what you can expect to understand after reading the chapter.

Now, why are there objectives everywhere when it comes to learning? Because we must have a goal for which to aim. Without an objective, there is no way to tell if I am actually improving or not. Without an objective, I cannot measure my progress and course correct if I am failing to improve. Objectives are simple tools that allow us to ensure we are actually making progress instead of just walking on a treadmill.

So, the first tip I have is that every Bible class and every lecture should have a list of objectives so you can know what you are expected to learn.

This does not require much more work on the part of the lecturer. In fact, he can simply thumb through his class outline and pick out the most important bits of information that he wants to leave with the audience, and convert them into objectives. There should be small objectives for each individual lecture, and larger objectives for the entire 8-week or 16-week class (or however long the class lasts). It should look something like the following:

After hearing this lecture on the book of Genesis you will be able to do the following:

State the chapter and verse containing the promise of Christ’s coming.
Know how many years Noah Preached to the world while building the ark.
Discuss why Cain’s Sacrifice was inferior to Abel’s.

That is simple enough, right? You could have three objectives per lecture, and 48 objectives per 16-week class. Imagine if you could actually get people in the church to learn that much about the bible. They would be infinitely better off compared to what they are currently learning. The majority of them are not even bothering to read their Bibles on a daily basis. Objectives will give them some way to measure how much they are learning over time.

Objectives also allow for the application of active recall, which is critical when it comes to learning.

We commonly think of learning as something that happens when we put information into our minds, but this is not true. We actually learn most rapidly and effectively when we are pulling information out of our minds by recalling it. Recall is the secret to learning anything at least three times faster than usual. So, audience members can use the objectives given to quiz themselves on their knowledge of the lecture. They can do this daily or throughout the week and will see much greater results than the passive learning they are so used to.

So again, the first tip to improve any Bible lecture and long-term class is the use of objectives.

“Without an objective, the objective will not be reached”
Jocko Willink

II – Testing

I bash the education system for ineffective teaching and learning protocols, poor application of standardized tests, and for generally teaching a massive steaming pile of useless information. However, testing is still a decent measure of the level of understanding that someone has. If I want to know what you know about a subject, I ask you questions about it. That seems to be reasonable. What is a test but a collection of questions?

The utility of questioning is the reason why the second tip is to actually employ testing in your Bible classes.

Now sure, you do not have to force everyone to take a standardized test, there is no need for that. I am all for embarrassing myself and others in order to create the motivation to improve, but there would probably be a significant problem if you start handing out scantrons and multiple-choice exams in the middle of Bible class. This is mostly because we would be forced to realize we know almost nothing about the Bible (myself included) and we will find that to be extremely embarrassing. But hopefully, for many of us, that embarrassment would also be the impetus to change for the better.

Therefore, optional exams or even simple test questions should be provided to people before and after a lecture or long-term class in order to gauge learning. It would be useful to have a pre-test in order to assess current knowledge going into the class and then retake the same test at the end in order to assess improvement in knowledge.

This would also make use of the active recall principle. By forcing ourselves to try to remember, or recall, what we learned, we improve the chance of that information sticking in our long-term memory. Even testing ourselves before we even learn information or trying to remember something we do not already know increases the chance that the information will stick in our minds when we hear it.

So, the test is not a tool to embarrass anyone, even though a little embarrassment about poor levels of Bible knowledge would probably be good for all of us. But rather it is just a tool to improve learning.

Also, we can keep the test questions and study them later. By continuing to recall that information at lengthening intervals, we embed it even more deeply into our long-term memory.

One final tip, the exam questions should be short answer, not multiple choice. If the questions are multiple-choice, you do not really have to learn that much to perform well and trick yourself into thinking you are learning. The knowledge level of any college student is evidence of this.

This is because, on a multiple-choice test, all you need to be able to do is recognize the correct answer. That has a more limited carry over into regular life when comparing it to short-answer tests. If I ask you a question, you have to reach into your mind and pull out the answer. If someone asks you a question about God or the Bible you cannot say, “Wait, give me four choices and I will pick the right one”. You need to have the knowledge already in your mind so you can whip it out at any time. That will guarantee rapid improvement in your Biblical knowledge.

III – Accountability

Most of you already know what I think about accountability. I call it a crutch because most people rely on it far too much. They rely on it to the point where they cannot function without it then fail to develop their own strength.

That being said, most people still do need accountability. And I am not against accountability when it is used in the most efficient way – as a temporary tool to use while we gain personal strength. Once we develop the strength of will, we do not need accountability anymore.

When it comes to our classes, there does need to be some level of accountability. Because all the objectives and tests in the world will not do one drop of good if no one is actually using them or if they do not feel the pressure to improve and perform.

What we need is positive peer pressure to perform.

It is not enough to simply want knowledge; we must also want to avoid the shame and embarrassment of not having any idea of what we are talking about and/or having an embarrassingly small volume of knowledge of God.

There are multiple ways to generate accountability. The first is to simply assign accountability partners. Easy enough. Pair people up and have them quiz and check up on each other to see if they are learning and improving. This is that integrated side of Christianity that no one wants to talk about.

We all love having our little bible studies, social gatherings, and playdates together. But when we actually want to push each other to higher limits, it starts to get awkward. Everyone wants to talk about accountability, but no one wants real accountability because that will involve frequent embarrassment. But it is the only way to really take your knowledge to the next level if you do not have the ability to stand on your own two feet.

Another way to create accountability is through groups.

I would prefer to call them “Accountability Tribes/Units/Platoons/Phalanxes” because those sound cooler than “groups”. To do this you simply put a bunch of people in a group and have them hold one another accountable. It is quite simple. Perhaps they could get together once per month and quiz one another on their knowledge or on the topics they are learning in the lecture periods of class.

This is not a social gathering; it is a sparring session. Everyone in the group should be looking for weaknesses in both his own and his friend’s knowledge. Hold one another’s feet to the fire, that is how you are going to improve. Crush one another. Train how you intend to fight in the world: with focus and ferocity.

Of course, one of the big problems is actually getting people to push one another.

Most of the time we do not like doing this because we have to generate some form of stress or pressure on our friends. That is not exactly enjoyable and not something that the modern religious world would be interested in.

Most people do not want to get together and spar, they want to get together and do the spiritual equivalent of a prenatal spin-class. Most Bible studies and accountability groups lack the intensity to generate any kind of real results. In any endeavor in life, the level of intensity is going to be the determining factor. Maybe you have gone to church for 20 years, but if I handed you a comprehensive questionnaire about the bible, you would not be able to tell me the subject matter of 75% of the books of the Bible.

Gentlemen, we have been spending our entire lives in low-intensity mode, and this needs to change. We need to apply massive levels of intensity both to our individual Bible studies and also to the group learning we engage in on a weekly basis. Without this pressure, there can be no improvement.

So, take these three tips for improving Bible class I have given you today and see if you can work them into your local church.

Get them to apply objectives, testing, and accountability to class sessions and see what it does to the levels of learning. You do not even have to try it for that long. Do an 8-week test run, see what kind of results you get and then make the decision to continue or not.

If you are put in charge of teaching a class, you can always work these tips in. Just give your audience small sheets with objectives and test questions, then ask them to hold each other accountable, at least in the family unit. See if these principles do cause you to learn more about the Bible in 8 weeks than you have in the past 8 months.

Performance Aspects of Christianity

What is a performance aspect of something? It is the way you generally think you need to act in order to be considered part of the group. One of the easiest examples of this in the modern world is that of homosexuality. How do you know if a person is a homosexual without having them tell you directly? It is usually because they are acting in a specific way in order to fit into that group. A male homosexual will raise the pitch of his voice and take on some sort of twang that tends to sound like a southern black woman. He will use various phrases generally reserved for female use only so as to demonstrate that he is willing to act like a female. The male takes on alternative body language mannerisms, all effeminate of course.

Basically, a male homosexual will try to do everything a normal female does, and it is very easy to pick these people out. All these traits together are the performance aspect of homosexuality. If you want to prove that you are a homosexual, you have to “perform” in this clearly defined way.

Now let me ask you this, is a male homosexual forced to take on those performance aspects of homosexuality? Of course not. But all the other homos are acting the same way, so if he wants to be a part of the group, he has to act the part.

You can find the same thing among any group of people. In order to truly be a part of the group, you have to take on some distinct performance-based aspects that demonstrate to the outside world what group you belong to.

Let me tell you that this is not necessary or beneficial. It almost always does more harm than good. This is because the second you start acting like one of the gang, the outside world instantly places all their prejudices on you. You absorb everything the world thinks about your group, whether good or bad.

Even though taking on the performance aspects of a group is negative, we still do it, even with Christianity.

This is very common. What do performance aspects look like in Christianity? It usually includes the following:

Rigidity of lifestyle
Overuse of religious terminology in conversation (words like sin, morality, redemption, etc.)
Open statements of what actions are avoided (“I don’t do that because I’m a Christian” etc.)
Weakness
Glorification of weakness
Worship of the feminine
The need to talk about the rigid lifestyle as if to gain some sort of praise

You do not have to take on the performative aspects of Christianity. In fact, it is those performances that turn off others from our point of view. Think back to the homosexual example: is it their homosexuality that bothers us or rather their flamboyant display of performance-based homosexuality? Typically, most people are not even thinking about what homosexuals are doing behind closed doors. Rather it is their flagrant display of effeminacy and anti-nature behavior that usually triggers our gag reflex.

The actions we display to the people on the outside will be the only information they have to judge us by.

If we take on the aspects of all the other religious people they have encountered, they will not be interested in what we have to say. They already have one-thousand and one preconceived notions about what it means to be a religious person. Fulfilling their stereotyped ideas of Christianity is not helping our situation.

You do not have to take on the stereotypical performance aspects of Christianity. Realize that is not even how Christians acted over the centuries. Stereotypically approved behavior has changed over the years. The foundation of America, the Reformation, the First Century, and other ages of Christianity all had their distinct performance-based behavior. They all had their performance aspects. Which one of them is the correct one? There is no way to no. And there is no need to take on any of these aspects, it does more harm than good.

What is required of you then? To obey the commands of God. That is all. There is no need to draw attention to every move we make with various Shakespearean performances. That is nothing more than an attempt to impress those people on the outside who are looking in. Our performance does not make them want to be a part of Christianity, in fact, it drives them farther away. People believe that in order to be a Christian, they have to act like the weak, effeminate Christians they interact with. This is not true; you have the freedom to act like a masculine man. In fact, all behavior is appropriate as long as you are obeying the commands of God.

Read: 1 John

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.

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