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Christians Prefer Weakness over Strength

Something that turns off a lot of young men from Christianity is the fact that most Christians prefer weakness to strength. It is as if for some reason they actually prefer being weak. Whenever there is a choice between weakness and strength, they will choose weakness. Not only will they choose weakness, but they will think they are being righteous for being weak!

Just like many Christians have equated virtue with poverty and wealth with materialism, so also many Christians have equated weakness with righteousness. For some reason, it is righteous to suspend punishment, worship softness, and be emotional. Men default to weakness by choosing to wallow in emotionalism and vulnerability and call it “spirituality”. It is difficult to say where we have gone wrong, but it is easy to see we have a lot of work to do on this front.

Occasionally I mention what I call a “Viking Faith”. Vikings had gods and religious practices as most humans have had for thousands of years. They made sacrifices, had worship, and prayed to the gods. Yet for some reason, Vikings were able to be highly religious and still be considered masculine warriors and men to be held in high esteem. Yet Christians are often considered to be weak, soft, and powerless. What is the difference? I think there are many differences between the Viking faith and the Christian faith, of course, and that is a topic for another article. Some of them are requirements of scripture but other differences have come because men have chosen to be weak. Not only to be weak but to boast about weakness and glorify effeminacy.

Besides worshipping weakness, many Christians also prefer defensive versus offensive positions of war. They gravitate towards commands and scripture that tell us to give a defense or resist some power. Weak Christian men are always playing defense, never going on the offensive. It is a shame that so many men simply default to weakness and yet think they are doing something great.

When faced with a dichotomy both of spirituality, scripture, or masculinity, men will default to weakness. Christians prefer weakness. This must be corrected.

Here are a few of the instances in which men will choose what appears to be weaker.

I – Give Defense Vs. Cast Down Arguments
II – Lamb of God Vs. Lion of the Tribe of Judah
III – God of Love Vs. Man of War
IV – Forgiveness vs. Judgement
V – Mercy Vs. Punishment
VI – OT vs. NT

Let’s go through these one at a time.

Have your own ideas? Leave a comment below!

I – Giving a Defense Vs. Casing Down Arguments

Men in religion love to quote 1 Peter 3:15.

“But in your hearts revere Christ as LORD. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

It is a great passage, and I am not at all trying to pit Bible verses against each other in this article. However, when do you hear a verse explaining the other side of the story? One of my personal favorites is 2 Corinthians 10:5-6.

“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete.”

What is the difference between these two verses?

The first one puts Christians in a defensive position and the second puts them in an offensive position. I have mentioned before that it is extremely important for us to go on the offensive instead of constantly playing defense. When all we do is answer questions and defend ourselves, we make little progress in evangelism and we build little respect for our names. However, when we go on the offensive and attack another’s ideas, we put them on the defensive. The only way to cast down arguments is to attack. This is not a defensive maneuver it is an attacking maneuver. Though the best strategists can seamlessly blend offense and defense, we as Christian men need to work on being offensive.

I believe that men default to the 1 Peter passage because they twist it to give themselves license to be weak. I will remind you of our core statement of this section. When faced with a dichotomy of action, Christian men will almost always default to weakness. Christians prefer weakness.

Neither passage is weak nor is about weakness, but weak men have twisted 1 Peter to justify their cowardly behavior.

They are too scared to go on the attack, so they live their entire lives just defending themselves.

Correct this by forcing others to defend themselves. To crush an idea, you need to demonstrate that it is faulty. This cannot be done from a defensive position unless that defense has been carefully crafted to lead a voracious opponent into a trap. Tactfully use defense to lure out your enemy them ambush their philosophy from all sides. Make their defeat so devastating that they never challenge you again. If possible, you must crush them in front of as many witnesses as possible. Put them to shame.

1 Peter 3:16 ~ “Keeping a clear conscience, so that those who slander you may be put to shame by your good behavior in Christ.”

II – Lamb of God Vs. Lion of The Tribe of Judah

“The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
John 1:29

“Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed to open the scroll and its seven seals.”
Revelation 5:5

How many times have you heard the phrase “The Lamb of God”? Likely you have heard this quite often. Sure, it is important to hear this because it symbolizes the fact that Christ traded his life for our sin.

But how many times have you heard about “The Lion of The Tribe of Judah”.

I would venture to say that you hear about this far less than you hear about the lamb. Why? Because Christian men love when their Savior is soft and loving. If he is a lion, the deadly warrior animal, it does not give us the same “warm and fuzzies” that we got with the lamb analogy.

Weak men do not want our savior to be a lion, they would rather Him be a lamb. This is another instance where men default to weakness. And this does us no favors with the secular world. Can you imagine trying to share the gospel with someone and talking about the Lamb of God? It does not make our God sound very powerful.

I understand that the gospel is going to be “foolishness to the world” (1 Corinthians 1:18), but that does not mean we have to contribute to that perception by our actions. Christianity is a hard sell as it is, let us not make it harder for ourselves.

The perception of the lamb of God also makes us a laughingstock among masculine men.

I have seen a Viking-type shirt that says, “I would rather be a wolf of Odin than a Lamb of God”. If men were not busy floundering in their emotions and vulnerability, they would have presented the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. But because they prefer weakness, because they worship the feminine and praise it above all else, because any time they are faced with a dichotomy they default to weakness we now have negative PR from shirt companies.

https://myfrogtee.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/wolf-odin-v-neck-t-shirt.jpg

You can correct this by choosing to focus on the Lion that is God. For a period of time, remove from your mind the analogy of Christ as a lamb. Remember that is only meant to symbolize the sacrificial nature of His life. It is not meant to reflect who He is personally. This is the key point of these passages.

When John the Baptizer called Christ the Lamb of God it was because everyone knew what that meant. People were constantly sacrificing animals to cover their sins. It was the perfect analogy. There would not be one single soul confused and thinking, “Oh it is because he is weak or has the personality of a lamb”. Absolutely not! That type of modern thinking is disgraceful. While most Christian men prefer weakness, you must prefer strength.

Remember that you worship the Lion.

III – God of Love vs. Man of War

One of my favorite descriptors of God comes from the Old Testament. Right after the Red Sea collapses on the Egyptian army Moses and the people sing a song. In that song comes one of my favorite verses in all of scripture.

“The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name”.
Exodus 15:3

When was the last time you heard that one quoted from the pulpit? You may not have even known about the existence of that verse. Because it is a bit too aggressive for the hordes of feminized men that pack out the mega-churches week after week. It is a little bit on the aggressive side. You might expect to hear something like this in the lyrics of a heavy metal song, which as every good mother explains to her son, is “devil music”.

(Here is a good example of why that is bogus.)

However, you hear the contrasting statement nearly every time you talk to other Christians or attend church. “My God is a God of love”.

“And the God of love and peace will be with you.”
1 Corinthians 13:11

Again, this is completely true, God is a God of love. But we focus so intently on His love without first understanding what love truly is and also without understanding the necessity of His discipline.

If you had a decent father growing up, one of his tasks would have been to administer discipline to you. This was usually in the form of corporal punishment and was authorized by scripture.

“Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell.”
Proverbs 23:13-14

The fewer beatings you earned, the more feminized you likely became. And if you did not receive much discipline then you probably also do not view God as handing out much discipline. This is because our view of God is shaped by our view of our earthly father. If your father was a disciplinarian, this is how you view God. If your father was lax and let you get away with everything, this is how you view God.

What we can clearly see today is the result of the majority of fathers refusing to discipline their children.

Now, most Christian men do not see God in light of his requirement to discipline us. It is bound within His very nature to correct us and keep us focused. The Bible teaches that if we are not disciplined by God then we are illegitimate, bastards.

“But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.”
Hebrews 12:8

We have a generation of young men who view God as their buddy. They have no respect for Him just like they have no respect for their own father. This is what a lack of discipline leads to. Discipline leads to self-discipline which leads to success, both spiritually and physically.

Correct this weakness by viewing God as a man of war. Perhaps it is just my personality, but I would much rather follow a man of war into the battles of life than follow the false image of what Christians have made God into. He is not soft or weak, but many religious people have made Him that way to suit their personal tastes and needs.

Call out any who would reduce God and equate Him to the weak, pathetic men of today. This is another example where Christians prefer weakness over strength.

IV – Forgiveness Vs. Judgement

Another example of a modern weakness is displayed when we talk about forgiveness and punishment. Somewhat a continuation of the last point, Christians want to focus so much on forgiveness to the extent that they neglect God’s Judgement and Discipline.

They do this because they know they are making no attempt to truly live correctly. They need God to be a God of forgiveness so that they do not have to take His commands too seriously. I mean it is only our eternal destiny at stake, why take it too seriously anyway?

The forgiveness-focused attitude is a favorite among Catholics, who have no affiliation with the church of the Bible. If you have the resources, you can even pay for your sins with money. Or you can buy someone else out of purgatory – imagine that!

If God is nothing but forgiveness, then I have no need to put effort towards being disciplined. Because at the end of the day all my sins will be forgiven anyway. If this is true, why even try? Why work so hard to stay sexually disciplined or to avoid drugs if I can erase my criminal record through the forgiveness of God?

Again, I need to make the point that I am not minimizing the importance of forgiveness or trying to pit passages of Scripture against each other.

The purpose of this piece is to show how our standards have decayed because Christians prefer weakness. When Christians prefer weakness over strength, they fail. They contract the disease of socialism of the mind. By convincing themselves that they have to do no work but can still have a piece of the collective “salvation pie”, they become soft and entitled.

Correct this by embracing the judgmental side of God. This is not meant to be negative, but to be a reminder to hold yourself to a very high standard and actually work to do what is right. Do not have a lackadaisical attitude when it comes to your faith. There is no place for weakness in any part of your life. You must prefer strength and have that firmly in your mind. Attack any philosophy that promotes weakness over strength.

And you may say “But forgiveness is the true strength”. Very modern and progressive of you. But something can be “True strength” and feminine or weak at the same time. It depends on how you are contorting the scripture to suit your needs. Do not use forgiveness to cover up the weakness.

V – Mercy Vs. Punishment

Another permutation of the previous point but important enough to state. In the church, we have concentrated so much on the forgiveness and mercy of God that we have forgotten all the instances in which He punishes those who disobey Him. You need to never forget this. While modern religion paints God as 100% merciful, you know the truth. Hold yourself to a high standard. Limit your need for mercy. Of course, we all will still need mercy, but we should not use it as a credit card for sin.

VI – Old Testament vs. New Testament

When was the last time you heard a lesson from the Old Testament not rooted in the Psalms or some positive prophetic verse taken completely out of context? I would venture to say almost never. Christians prefer the New Testament because it seems “more reasonable” than the OT. The OT has an “angry God” but the NT has Jesus who people love to latch on to. Not because they love all His words, but because they love the ones they choose to love and forget everything else.

In the OT there was a lot of war, conquering, violence, death, and punishment. We do not need to forget this. All of that was important. It laid the groundwork for the Christianity we have today and also gives us a portrait of God. Goes does not change, He is still that man of war that we read about in the OT. We do not need to forget this.

But because the NT has a lot more to say about love and other emotions, people prefer it over the OT. We, humans, love having warm and fuzzy feelings stirred up within us. But we do so at the expense of maintaining any semblance of strength and personal power. We have done the same in our preference of the NT over the OT though both are important.

Correct this by increasing your study and discussion of the OT. Do not let people marinate in the NT at the expense of gaining a complete view of the portrait of God.

Conclusion

All these points are meant to illustrate how we as Christians prefer weakness over strength. Perhaps not all of us, but many in the modern churches today. People want to make their church a social club and hang around doing nothing all day, learning nothing but still feeling good about themselves. No one wants to do work anymore.

You can be the first of a new generation if you want. You can strengthen your own mind, gain power, and become masculine. Even though most Christians prefer weakness, you must learn to prefer strength over weakness and you will be head and shoulders above everyone around you.

Make Marriage Safer

Marriage is dangerous for many Christian men for the reasons where will discuss here. By “dangerous” I mean that they risk losing half their net worth for life in the family meat grinder known as “divorce court“. After that, we will introduce a few ways that you can make marriage safer for yourself.

Have some ideas of why marriage is dangerous or what you can do to protect yourself? Leave them in the comments below.

I – They Think Being “Good Men” is Enough.

It is not enough to simply be a good man. For decades religion has trained men to believe if they are good providers, emotionally attentive, and supportive that they will inevitably attract women. We all know that is untrue.

Remember, while women might find that behavior attractive for a long-term mate, that behavior is not arousing in the short-term. Women are constantly looking for the optimal man. This man needs to have good genetics combined with good provider potential. The problem is that those two traits seldom exist in the same man. A further problem is that the church raises men to be good providers, but not good arousers.

If being a good man is not enough, what can you do to be more arousing? The second section will have more to say about this. For now, understand that there are plenty of “good men” out there. If you are trying to attract a mate by being a good man, you are in a super-saturated marketplace. You are opening a burger shop next to McDonald’s. There are more than enough “good men” to go around. And women do not even want these men, despite what they might say. However, if you work to become an arousing man, you will stand head and shoulders above the majority of men.

II – They are not physically fit.

Most men get physically soft. It does not matter if you are religious or secular, in the modern world there is a 70% chance that you are overweight, statistically speaking. If you are not overweight, good for you, you automatically put yourself in the top 30% of men just by being “average“. If you are overweight, do not beat yourself up or get emotional about it. There is an easy fix: nutrition and training.

Because religion places such great emphasis on being “good men”, most men never learn that they need to actually take care of their bodies to be sexually arousing. Some women will try to deny that a fit guy is more attractive, but you need to ignore their words. Never listen to the words of people, only watch their behavior. If women say your “dad bod” is cute but she fawns over the squared-off pecs of Brad Pitt, then you should get the message. Look at the actions, never at the words.

One problem I have encountered in the church is that leaders actually downplay the importance of physical training. Somehow, they manage to contort their religion or the scripture in a way that makes it selfish to train! Imagine that! According to these men, working out is selfish because it takes time away from more important tasks you could be doing.

“No point working out, you should be reading the Bible during that time! You should be out knocking on doors and having Bible studies instead of being selfish and taking care of your body”.
Fat Religious Person

These are the same teachers and leaders who have seen every episode of their favorite TV show and somehow manage to watch all the reruns when they come on. Ignore the words of these men, they have no true scriptural basis for telling you to neglect your body. They are simply trying to make themselves feel better for being fat and unattractive to their wives.

III – They do nothing masculine.

One of the modern pieces of garbage men have been sold is that women will find them more sexually attractive if they do chores around the house. “Chore-play”, they call it.

While your wife might appreciate it if you help out around the house, she will not be sexually aroused by that. It is nice of you to help out especially if she is overloaded with tasks, but you should never expect anything in return. “Nice” is not arousing. You cannot earn passionate sex by doing chores; you can only earn obligatory sex which is infinitely less passionate and only leads to resentment. So, set out with the intention of maintaining your own house or helping offload some of your wife’s tasks. You are not trying to earn anything from this, you are just doing some basic home maintenance.

Instead, what women find truly attractive is when men do the household tasks that are actually masculine. Chopping wood, mowing the lawn, fixing things, etc. Traditionally masculine tasks are the ones that your wife is going to find attractive. Ignore all modern relationship and marriage advice, especially the advice from women. You always have to watch their actions, never their words. By their actions, they show that they are attracted to masculine men, not nice little helpers.

“Then surely by their fruits you will recognize them”.
Matthew 7:20

IV – They Worship Their Wives.

We have covered this before, but many men worship their wives. We are raised from a young age to “check all the boxes” of life so we can eventually find a good girl and get married. It is as if everything men are required to do is just a preparation for marriage. This is not how God intended for it to be.

Remember, God first made man and gave him a purpose before anything else. Once that work was established, God gave the man a helper. The word “helper” implies that there is a task that a man is already doing with which he needs help!

The woman’s purpose is to help the man with his purpose. This is when women are most satisfied and fulfilled with their lives. They do not want to be the sole focus of a man’s life. If you make your wife your total focus, you will notice strange behaviors in her. She will start to nag or complain. She will appear restless and rebellious, and she does not know why she does this, especially when you give her so much. It is because you are not living your mission. Women do not nag the man who is constantly working to achieve his highest potential.

V – They Listen to Everything in Christian Marriage Books.

I say all this as a guy with a stack of over two dozen marriage books on my shelves. I have read about the love languages, the “needs” of women, and every other bit of marital minutia in the Christian world. So, allow me to tell you that these books are not designed for developing a safe, passionate marriage.

Do you want to know who those books are great for? For highly masculine men who are already having extremely passionate sex but simply do not know how the other, non-sexual parts of marriage work. Do you know how many Christian men that apply to? About 5% at the maximum and that is being generous.

Most Christian men have been educated from a very young age about the importance of taking care of the wife’s emotional needs, being a good provider or a good supporter. All the long-term beta characteristics that women want. And by “Beta” I mean non-sexually arousing, good provider-type men.

Modern feminized religion is a beta-male farm. The majority of men need what is in these marriage books far less than they need to know how to arouse their wives. Because the problem with these men is not that they have bad marriages or need to know how to communicate better, but that they need to know what really gets women’s engines going. Perhaps only 5% of men know what that is.

While it is important to read books on marriage, gain perspective and even (dare I say) take care of the emotions of your wife, it is far more important for you to focus on your work, be a man worthy of admiration, be desired by other women and engage in masculine hobbies, work or tasks.

Make Marriage Safer for yourself with the following tactics.

I – Focus on Yourself and your Mission.

You have to focus on yourself first before you can adequately take care of anyone else. This is not a selfish philosophy; it is the way God designed it thousands of years ago. Men are designed to work, and women are designed to help. Then at the end of the day men and women complement each other.

Start working on finding your life purpose or continue to work on it. Women are genuinely aroused when men are hard at work on their mission and being admired for it by other men. So, if you want your wife to genuinely want you, she needs to see that you are ascending the ladder of success, gaining the respect of men, and being wanted by other women. This will make marriage safer because it demonstrates you are a man of high value. Because not only do other men admire you, but other women want you. Those two are an irresistible combination for women.

You need to be so ambitious and financially successful that it would be stupid for any woman to leave you.

II – Train Your Physical body.

If you do not train your body, you will be fat and easy to control. Your wife knows she can control you because she knows you have no sexual options. So, what if she withholds sex for 3 weeks? It is not like you are going to be able to get it elsewhere, at least not while you are looking like that.

If it sounds superficial it is because it is. We are fleshly, temporal beings bound to this earth. We are going to act based on material possessions and pleasures. Let us not forget that we all approached our wives in the first place because they were sexually attractive.

If you read any marriage books you will inevitably run into the statement, “Women are not visual creatures”. I am not convinced that is true. Could it be women are “not visual” because the majority of men are simply unattractive? Not only unattractive, which is something they can only control to a certain extent, but also overweight! Weight and fitness are something that 99% of us have 100% control over. We can control every variable, every workout, every morsel of food that we eat. We are like scientists and the body is our lab where nothing is outside our power to control. Yet the majority of us still elect to do nothing, be overweight and still assert that women are not visual creatures. Maybe it would make a difference if we trained our bodies to provide something worth being visual for.

So, I will ask you again, is it that women are not visual creatures or is it possible that 70% of men being overweight has something to do with it?

Combat this by training your body. Make marriage safer for yourself by being in great shape. When you are physically fit, not only will your wife be attracted simply because fitness is attractive, but she will also be attracted because she knows you have options. Other women would want to be with you because you are fit and climbing the ladder to success. That fact is another log on the fire of her desire.

Are you noticing that the key to arousing genuine desire in women is actually by focusing on yourself? I know the “selflessness” crusaders of Christianity will be at my door with pitchforks for this, but it needs to be said.

III – Chop Wood, Build and Repair

Women are attracted to men who do masculine things. Helping around the house might earn you some appreciation, but at what cost? Do you want to be known as the good little teddy bear who mops the floors? No, you do not.

Every task you do around the house should be masculine, as much as you can control. Sure, sometimes life will be hectic, and you will need to wash some dishes or do the laundry, just do not expect anything in return for that. The sex you get for doing the laundry is nothing like the sex you get for pursuing excellence or chopping wood without a shirt on, flashing your glorious physique.

Limit yourself to repairing the house, tending to the yard, chopping wood, and building. These tasks might actually arouse your wife, believe it or not.

IV – Serve Yourself First

You must serve yourself before you serve anyone else. Take care of your own body, mind and pursue your own goals before you help anyone else. This puts you in a position of strength. And help can only be given from a position of strength. Without focusing on yourself, you will have no power, no ability. You must invest time in yourself, your body, your work, and your hobbies. By doing this you are actually better able to take care of your family.

V – Do Not be a Teddy Bear – Be Powerful.

Women are not interested in soft men. Be a man with power. Physical, mental, and emotional power. You need to demonstrate that you have personal strength and cannot be moved by other men or by life events.

Women claim they want vulnerability in a man, but what they really want is a rock. For your own sake, you must be a fortress of mental and emotional control. Nothing can be allowed to shake you. Women want to see if they can get you to let your guard down but never do this. Maintain your strength and personal power at all times. You cannot make marriage safer for yourself by being a teddy bear. A grizzly bear, on the other hand, is a different story.

VI – Get a Prenuptial Agreement

Protect your assets. The state has incentivized divorce for women. It rewards them for leaving their husbands, even more so if they have some children to take with them. Many men’s rights groups would suggest that you should avoid any contract in which one party is rewarded for breaking it. There is no arguing with that logic. Get a prenuptial agreement and remove any incentive she might have for divorce down the road. While she may be all smiles and laughs now, you do not know what will happen when the hormones wear off. Protect yourself.

VII – Keep secrets

No good marriage is complete without secrets. Not major ones perse, but small ones. The darkness of your mind should almost always be concealed. She does not need to know what kind of dark man you are. The shadow portion of your personality that gives you power is a gift from God and should be kept between you and God. Make marriage safer by not giving her any reason to “cash in” on the cash cow of divorce.

VIII – Keep a Catastrophe Fund

You need funds that no one knows about but yourself. This idea is originated from Patrick Bet-David of Valuetainment. He is a business owner who was able to keep his business afloat during a crisis because he had stashed money for the business without letting anyone know. If everyone knows everything you have finically, personally, or otherwise, they will get too comfortable. Allow them to think the level of pressure is higher and they will perform better.

IX – Avoid Marriage until you have Vetted a woman for a long period of time.

Crack open any pathology textbook and you will find that the only way to really avoid HIV is through abstinence. The same goes for a marriage. The only way to truly guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will not be crushed by the damages of the divorce court is to avoid marriage.

If you are planning to marry one day, you need to have a plan to vet a woman like a professional. You are interviewing her for the lifelong position of being your helper. Therefore, you need to take this extremely seriously. You need to constantly vet her and observe her actions and behavior. Determine if you really want marriage or if you simply have a strong sexual urge. You would be surprised to hear how many men get married just to have a sexual outlet. That is not a good reason to bring a woman so close into her life that she can destroy your finances permanently if it suits her whim. You need to vet your women so you can avoid marrying one who would act that way.

These are a handful of ways to make marriage safer.

Have any of your own ideas? Leave a comment below?

Evaluate Yourself to Improve

One of the mistakes that we all make yet is easily correctable is that we never evaluate ourselves. We never analyze our performance, behavior, or thoughts and look at what we are doing well and what we need to improve. This is partly because it is painful to take a nice, long look at our flaws. No one wants to dissect all the ways they come up short. But this analysis can massively improve your rate of growth. Both of your character and of your mentality.

In the military, every individual is evaluated based on their performance. They go into the office of a ranking official to hear how they are performing. There are even written feedback forms where they can see exactly where their weak points are. They go over what they are doing well on and what they need to improve. These men then implement the notes from the officer and strengthen their weak points and double down on their strong points. If evaluations are good enough for the military, they are good enough for us.

Tracking and analyzing behavior is the only surefire way to know what you are currently doing and if it is working or not.

If you never track your workouts, how can you know if you are improving your strength or endurance? You may say “Well I know I can do 35 pushups now, and last week I could only do 30. So, I do know that I am improving”. Well, then you are tracking your ability in your mind. Less effective, but you are still tracking and analyzing your performance. You are evaluating your progress and continuing to work.

I suggest to you that every single behavior and habit should be evaluated on a semi-regular basis. This allows you to see your personal trajectory over time. You do not have to start analyzing every single step you take. You are not doing an internal review on yourself. All you are doing is observing and analyzing behavior. I would suggest starting with just one trait that you currently have or that you want to develop. What are your current habits? What are some behaviors that you like or dislike? Pick any one of those and commit to evaluating them on various occasions.

Take gratitude for example. Say that you have analyzed your behavior and determined that you spend too much time complaining. Or perhaps you just want to improve your current level of gratitude.

For most people, that is where they would stop. They would just say to themselves, “I want to develop more gratitude in my life” and then do nothing about it. It essentially becomes like a New Year’s resolution that is never completed. This happens because there is no accountability, no written commitment to the behavior, and no evaluation of performance.

Start with deciding what you want to improve, for us, it is gratitude.

I know that gratitude can sometimes come off as one of those “soft” Christian principles. But remember that gratitude is the cure for the negative behavior of complaining. Also, remember that God hates complaining so much that He has killed people for it (Numbers 11).

After you have decided what to work on, you need to hold yourself accountable for that behavior.

I do not believe that external accountability is a useful long-term solution. In fact, accountability does not work. It creates weak men who sit in a circle of chairs crying about their problems. They have no strength because they have no need to develop any. What need is there to develop strength when you can lean on all of your friends as a crutch? Crutches are useful for a few days or weeks after an injury or surgery. Use them too long, and your body will adapt to them and never improve its own strength. So as far as accountability goes, you must be accountable only to yourself.

Third, make a written commitment.

You can do this in the same place where you will perform your evaluations. Get a notebook that you will use for your self-evaluations. At the top of the page put the trait you are working on. Then on the first line put the written commitment to develop it and give it a deadline.

“By August 25^th, 2021, I will have reduced my habit of complaining to no more than four times per week maximum and I will express gratitude for my possessions at least twice per day”.

With that line completed, you have done more than the majority of average people do in their lives. Perhaps only 10% of the world has written goals with deadlines to complete them. When you make this statement, you put yourself in that top 10%.

Now that you have your self-accountability, your goal, and your written commitment, now you can get ready to evaluate yourself.

You need to determine what behaviors will be acceptable and unacceptable. Then you need to assign values to various levels of performance. By that, I mean that just as you get certain grades in school based on how well you do, you must also give yourself a “grade” based on how well you perform your new behavior. You can give yourself letter grades (A, B, C, D, F), Number grades (0-5, 0-10, etc.), or come up with your own system. The point is that you have clear delimitation between grades so you can give yourself feedback on your performance.

Decide what each grade means:

A – Perfect performance. Zero complaints and three separate expression of gratitude.

B – Expressed gratitude once.

C – Did not express gratitude.

D – Did not express gratitude; complained once.

F – Complained all day.

Your list does not have to look anything like this. This is just to give you an idea. You can change the expectations and standards however you wish and grade yourself accordingly. The important part is that you are grading yourself and working to make improvements.

I would also suggest that you carry a small notebook with you, preferably one that can fit in your pocket. In this book, you can make notes about your performance throughout the day. It does not have to be drawn out; it could be simple bullet points. The point here is that you do not want to trust your memory when it comes to your performance.

Unless you are carrying around your evaluation notebook everywhere you go, you will need a book for field notes.

Then once you get home for the day, you can look at your performance, and jot more notes in the main notebook. You can look at what you did well and what you did poorly. When you perform poorly, try to determine what leads to that. Did you start complaining because you were hanging around negative people? Did you encounter stress in the day and that caused you to let down your guard? Try to determine what was the cause of the unsatisfactory performance.

Then do the same with your good days. On those days when you perform extremely well, look for the roots of success. Discover what thought patterns, behaviors lead to gratitude. What people were you around and what thoughts did you have that caused you to be thankful?

The point of looking at what influenced your behavior is so you can either modify or maintain those circumstances. If your environment influenced you negatively, you need to modify it. If you were inspired to be more positive by your surroundings, then try to replicate those situations again.

Then determine how often you are going to do your main evaluation.

This is where you sit down and go over in detail your performance over a period of time. Here you are really getting to the bottom of your behavior and looking at everything you are currently doing and how you can improve.

Repeat this evaluation process over the weeks and you have no choice but to see improvements. Most people refuse to evaluate their performance, so they stay in the same place you years. You can skyrocket past them with this simple exercise.

“If you Want to Know What God Thinks About Money…”

“If you want to know what God thinks about money…Just look at who He gives it to.”

Do you mean like Job (Job 1), Abraham (Genesis 13:2), Isaac (Genesis 26), Jabob (Genesis 30), and Solomon (1 Kings 10:23)?

This statement comes from yet another one of the misconceptions that religious people have about wealth and money in general. But this ignorance is not limited to the religious. In fact, if someone does not have a lot of money, you can expect them to make statements like this. It is usually a symptom of envy. These people have no wealth, so the best they can do is berate those who do.

We are already aware of the fact that many religious people will try to conflate virtue and poverty by suggesting that the reason they are poor and not rich is because they are “spiritually rich” and “not materialistic or greedy.

As has been previously stated, it is extremely judgmental to suggest that just because someone is wealthy, then they are automatically materialistic or greedy. Wealth is just a numerical representation of how much value one has provided to society. A specific level of wealth is not equal to greed; a person’s attitude about wealth is what determines greed. There are plenty of greedy poor people and generous, wealthy religious people.

Jesus clearly taught that it is easy for people to become materialistic (Matthew 19:24), but the reason we have the old testament examples of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job, and Solomon is to show that it is possible to be righteous and rich at the same time. That does not mean anyone is guaranteed wealth in life, but it is available for them if they are willing to work for it.

If you really want to know what God thinks about money, look at who He doesn’t give it to.

He does not give it those who whose faith would be damaged by it. This is the striking lesson of those old testament examples. These are men who not only were righteous, but who managed to be righteous while being incredibly wealthy. That is not the lesson you hear very often in the church.

“But I thought if you had any money it means you were focused on the things of this world. How is this possible?”

Abraham, the father of the faithful, was a man who had such great spiritual wealth that God deemed him worthy of managing great physical wealth. Many religious people have improper attitudes about money. the second they come into any kind of wealth they think improperly about it. If you are going to think right about God, it begins with thinking right about money. The two are not unrelated.

We need money to survive, but we are required to be separate from this world.

Developing a level of mental detachment from possessions is key. We have to be grateful for what we are given and yet be unattached to it. Even secular men like the stoics practiced similar mental exercises.

You must avoid the class warfare that the church has managed to drag itself into. Poor people despise the rich thinking they are worldly. Some of the rich look down on the poor for being lazy (which some of them are). What you must do is be completely unattached to these philosophies. Recognize money for what it is: a useful tool and a metric of value. Your worth to the marketplace is determined by your income. Not your value as a person or as a creation of God. But your value to society is what determines your income. If you do not like your income, you need to adjust how society values you.

God thinks that money is a tool and a part of life.

There is no way around this fact. The Bible teaches more lessons about money than about any other subject matter. So if you want to know what God thinks about something, you might want to see what He has said. If His Word is gospel, you might consider listening to it.

If you want to know what God thinks about money, read the Bible.

But that is something that many Christians, including many of the poor are not doing. Most of their time is occupied with keeping up with the secular interests of this world. Many Christians simply lack the basic Biblical knowledge necessary to allow them to think right about money. If you are in this habit, you need to break free of it.

If you wanted a masterclass on money management, look to the Proverbs. These passages contain so many timeless truths that even secular people use them. This may be the most marketable book of the Bible, because there are so many simple, easily applicable and non-ethereal teachings in it.

If you want to know what God thinks about money, then learn about money.

Too many Christians lack not only biblical knowledge but also financial knowledge. The financial education of the majority of people in the world is dismal. It is even worse than their biblical education. To better understand what God thinks about money you need to increase your financial education. you also need multiple sources of this.

If you typically listen to hyper-conservative thinkers (monetarily speaking) like Dave Ramsey, then expand your information intake slightly. You do not have to change your actions, just increase your knowledge. Ty Ramit Sethi who wrote the book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich“. Also, there is Tony Robbins who wrote “Money: Master the Game“. And any of the Rich Dad Poor Dad series of books are fantastic. Each of these will expand your thinking.

Never allow yourself to be limited or bogged down by one single philosophy. You need to be able to shift between ideas. If you are too rigid in any endeavor in life, you risk being shattered.

Give these ideas a thought.

Make Everything an Exercise

Whatever you have to do, you have a choice. You can see it as a task that detracts from your life, or you can see it as a way to level up your stats in life

I – You have the choice to complain about each situation or make it into an exercise.

What you choose will determine your strength of character.

Everything tests you in some way. Learn how to develop skills from that test instead of being crushed by them.

From the small, petty annoyances of life to the massive, earth-shattering crises, everything in life gives you the opportunity to become more of a man.

A man is able to demonstrate strength by resisting the force of outside events and people.

He gives no foothold to any adversary.

But many life circumstances offer you the chance to not only resist but learn to use the power of those circumstances against them.

By making every life situation an exercise of some virtue, you can rapidly improve yourself.

And you go on the offensive.

You are hitting life instead of letting it hit you, and that offensive mentality gives you strength of mind.

Strength of mind leads to greater willpower and the ability to handle greater life responsibility.

Learn to use the power of life against it by making everything into an exercise. This simple shift in attitude will revolutionize your personal development.

II – Make It An Exercise

The first step is to simply decide to make your situation into an exercise.

It sounds overly simple, but simply deciding to improve yourself creates the level of awareness and concentration necessary to actually make improvements.

Sometimes a single decision is enough to create change.

It may not create the level of change that you want, but it will give you some degree of results instantly.

Let’s look at the overview of how you will change your life situations into exercises, then we will look at some basic examples.

Reframe It.
Be grateful for it.
Endure the discomfort of it.
Improve resilience.
Make it a Habit.
Reinvest the dividends.

1 – Reframe It

First, you need to shift from thinking negative to thinking positive.

If you are mentally framing a situation negatively, it will continue to be an annoyance to you forever. You will never be able to improve your ability to tolerate it and you will not increase the strength of your character.

You must first shift your thinking so that it promotes growth and improvement rather than stagnation or degradation.

Short circuit your thinking.

The instant you catch yourself complaining about something, reframe it.

Instead of thinking “I hate when this happens, this is the worst!”, think “This is an opportunity for me to train my patience”.

Whatever bit of your character you are trying to train at the moment [Patience, calmness etc.], reframing the situation in your mind will improve it.

This shift in attitude is foundational. It will provide you with at least 50% of the improvement that you will get.

The key to making something into an exercise is to think of it positively.

People can sometimes exercise with a negative mindset, but they will never get the results they truly wanted. They will always be substandard, mediocre, instead of making incremental progress towards the desirable character they want.

2 – Be Grateful for It

Learn to be thankful for every situation in life.

Every instance you encounter is an opportunity to train some ability.

Whether it be patience, strategy, or general emotional control, you have the opportunity to improve.

Gratitude will also help to tone down unproductive negative emotions.

As you know, I am all about harnessing the power of negative emotions. But if we are not harnessing that power and actually channeling towards some goal, then those negative emotions are wasteful.

And the negative nature of those emotions will cause us more harm than good.

So, learn how to tone down those emotions until you can take action and simply be grateful for the opportunity to train your character.

3 – Endure the Discomfort

No matter how much gratitude and reframing you do, you are still going to have to tolerate a certain degree of discomfort.

We understand this perfectly in physical exercise. If you want to make progress, you have to endure a certain amount of pain.

But by understanding that the discomfort leads to growth, we can endure the discomfort and even learn to enjoy it.

Marinade in the discomfort of certain situations.

Enjoy the exercise of your will and mind. You are building an unbeatable character.

Exercising your willpower this way will positively impact many other areas of your life. This conscious practice will produce non-conscious results in your normal life.

If you practice patience and emotional control consciously, you will reap the benefits in later situations without even thinking about it.

4 – Improve Resilience

Just as with physical exercise the tolerance for certain weights, reps or pain is increased. So also, your mental pain threshold is increased with training.

This allows you to tolerate more discomfort and recover even faster.

This resilience will be encouraging and will push you to develop even more strength o character and will.

It is a never-ending positive cycle of personal development.

5 – Make it a Habit

This exercise cannot work if you only do it once. You need to make mental exercising a habit.

You cannot go to the gym once and make progress, you need a degree of consistency.

So, you need to increase the odds that you will remember to make everything into an exercise so you can actually reap the benefits of it.

Put a notecard in your car or in a place you will see it regularly. On that notecard write “Everything is an Exercise”. Read that card whenever you are about to go into a situation that involves people.

It can be work, school, going to the store, dealing with your kids, or taking out the trash.

Any and every situation has the opportunity to be a character-building exercise if you have the openness of mind and willingness of attitude to make it happen.

6 – Reinvest the Dividends

You will want the results you gain in the exercises to spill over into the rest of your life without even thinking about it.

That is the whole point of this exercise.

Good character is the passive income of the mind.

By following the above steps, you will find that this one comes automatically. By intentionally training your patience, you become a more patient man.

And by concentrating on increasing your emotional control, you become a more stoic man.

Every exercise builds the mental muscle that will be usable in other situations. All you have to do is front-load the work.

And is that not the best type of work? The kind where you can invest time and energy upfront and reap the benefits for the rest of your life?

All you have to do is make everything into an exercise and invest a small amount of energy into maintaining the character you build.

III – Examples of annoyances to tolerate

Kids crying in the church.
Waiting in line
Dealing with people

Kids crying in the church

This is something that annoys me more than anything else.

It angers me beyond belief. Not that a baby would cry, but that the parents of the child are so stupid that they cannot realize their child is literally drowning out the speaker.

And they just sit there and let the baby scream for years.

This has been an annoyance for me for many years, but recently I have been able to turn even crying babies into exercises of patience and emotional control.

First, I become aware of my normal response when this situation would unfold. I noticed that when a baby started screaming and the parent did not take it out, my head instantly become hot and my heart rate increased.

I realized I wanted to limit these physical reactions and I could do so by controlling my mind. So now each Sunday I walk into the church and remember that there will likely be a screaming baby somewhere in the church today.

By simply being aware and preparing in advance for this situation I know angers me, I give myself the advantage.

Now all I have to do is control my response.

So, whenever the baby inevitably begins to fill the church with high frequency wailing, I take deep, diaphragmatic breaths, center my thoughts on peace and slowly turn my attention away from the situation.

This took some serious practice and still takes a lot of work, as it is very difficult to ignore something that literally causes ear pain.

And I do not always succeed with this exercise, I am still learning how to control my anger at parents who possess no self-awareness whatsoever.

But I have turned this annoyance into an exercise, a chance to build character and improve myself, and that makes it valuable.

Waiting in line

Waiting in line is another typical annoyance for many people. You have the option to pull out your phone, get angry, or you can turn this into a patience exercise.

Center your thoughts on the present moment. Control your emotions and breathe deeply to slow your heart rate and lower your blood pressure.

Once calm, sit back and just do some people watching.

See how other human beings behave and interact instead of being absorbed in your own world.

If you are waiting in line at the grocery store and are holding groceries by hand, use this as an opportunity to build some mental toughness. See how long you can hold your groceries without switching hands.

Everyone who has stood in line with a gallon of milk knows it gets heavy after a few minutes. Build the strength of mind by refusing to let go of the milk.

Seems silly, but you create a small win for the mentally tough person you are one day going to become.

Dealing with people

Nowhere in the world is there a better exercise than this one. And you have the opportunity to perform this exercise nearly every day.

Go into every social situation with the preparation of the mind. Expect people to behave poorly and plan to react intelligently.

Human beings are always going to act like human beings, so you need to prepare yourself for this.

I stopped getting angry at the behavior of others by adopting this simple mantra:

“I do not get angry at people for acting stupid. I get angry at myself for being stupid enough to expect people to act intelligently”.

By simply lowering your expectations of the behavior of others, you will increase your mental control exponentially.

Let go of always trying to control people.

You will make yourself miserable anytime you attempt to worry about things outside of your control. Control everything you can and worry about nothing else.

Observe people as if they were plants or animals. You do not get mad at a cactus for being a cactus or an armadillo for being an armadillo.

Those things simply are, and nothing can be done about it.

Instead, learn how to maneuver around people. Work the social setting to your favor by detaching from yourself and then interacting with others with an elevated mind. There is no need to stoop to their emotional level.

Maintain your calm and collected nature – this is a strength of men.

Watch people, learn their mannerisms and behaviors.

Figure out how you can manage them better or interact with them in a way that is productive and beneficial to all parties.

Never get angry at people for being people. Use everything as an exercise to strengthen your own will and power.

There is no limit to what can be turned into an exercise of the mind if you are willing to change your attitude about it.

This is how you make every negative into a positive.

By doing this you ensure that you can turn any situation into an opportunity to improve yourself.

If you do this for even one-tenth of your life situations, you will be ten times ahead of the average person.

Apply this technique today and improve yourself.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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