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Freedom and Restriction

“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”
Galatians 5:13

“Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.”
1 Peter 2:16

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”. – “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
John 8:32 & 36

“Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free.”
Psalm 118:5

Does faith limit our freedom? Most religious people will say “no”, because to say “yes” is to suggest that God is robbing them of something we need or deserve. This is where most religious people are wrong.

When a coach or nutritionist gives us a specific diet plan, is he taking away our freedom of eating choices? Yes he is.

We are no longer allowed to eat the things we enjoy, but we do this for the greater good of our health. We give up the foods that diminish our health and fitness but taste great in exchange for foods that do not taste as great, but provide longevity, health and the improvement of body and mind. Now e no longer have dietary freedom, we have given it up for the long-term rewards. We give up immediate gratification for delayed gratification.

When God gives us a plan of action directly from his mind which included rules and restrictions, did He limit our freedom of choice? Yes He did.

But this is the Key Point: We get to choose whether or not we give up our freedom.We as Christians choose to give up freedom, instead of having it taken from us by some third party individual such as a dictator.

This distinction is vital to our faith, and the confusion caused by the lack of properly defined terms damages faith and relationships. God does not take your freedom, you give it up of your own free will. You freely choose to give up pleasure now for a reward later. It is an investment. Just as an investment costs something and is painful in the present moment, it provides so a greater return in the future.

Relinquishing freedom is difficult because it is yet another one of those actions that causes immediate pain and delayed pleasure. These are the types of actions that are the least likely to be repeated. Actions that bring immediate gratification and delayed punishment are the actions most often taken. People enjoy the immediate pleasure of drinking sweet tea or eating cake, and they don’t “suffer” at all until a few weeks later when their clothes no longer fit. They will continue down this road of poor dieting nonetheless because the punishment for their actions is so greatly delayed. It is a long time before they have to suffer the consequences of their actions.

Eating healthy food is the exact opposite. Immediately it gives us punishment (or at least that is what we think) and it does not pay off for weeks or even months. If you are trying to lose weight and you change up your diet, you are not going to see results of your hard work for several weeks, this is the delayed reward and the reason why most people never get into physical shape.

Many Christians think that they need to defend the faith against people who speak against the semi-difficult lifestyle.

The Christian lifestyle does not need to be defended anymore than a nutrition and training plan needs to be defended.

Both require you to take certain beneficial actions and avoid other negative actions for the betterment of your life.

There is nothing wrong or immoral about the fact that we must give up our freedom in some areas of life. We have to give up having sex with multiple partners and simultaneously convince yourself that heaven will be better than sex (a feat that is extremely difficult even nearly impossible to do). Most Christians prove that they do not believe this based on their actions.

We have to give up drinking alcohol and taking drugs in order to be aware, sober and vigilant, even though those “pleasures” are extremely desirable, and any Christian who tells you otherwise should reconsider his pattern of thinking. We give up a thousand small things in life in exchange for the great heavenly reward. This is not easy, and it is not enjoyable.

Again, Christians think they need to defend the faith against those who say that Christianity is unenjoyable.

The Christian lifestyle does not need to be enjoyable just as an intense training and nutrition plan does not need to be enjoyable. Both include a decent dose of pain as a down payment for the infinitely greater benefits that are to come. Both limit freedom, but provide an even greater freedom in the future. There are certainly enjoyable parts of life, but the Christian life is not about earthly enjoyment.

Key Point: All of life is just one masive delayed gratification experience.

Mantra

Suffer today to enjoy tomorrow.

Application

Identify the two schools of thought concerning freedom and eliminate the one that you now know is false. Faith absolutely does limit our freedom. We give up our freedom through our own choice, it is not taken away from us by God. God wants us to decide to follow Him and do what He says, He never asks for us to enjoy it. Exchange your freedom for the delayed benefits of heaven. Exchange sex with many women for heaven. For many men, that is simply too much to ask, as nothing in the world is better to them than having sex with many women.

You must accept the reality of a limited and restricted life. Accept it and know that you are working towards a massive reward. That reward will definitely outweigh any of the so-called sufferings and difficulties we experience on the earth. So give up what you crave on earth. Reject your desires. Strengthen your mind and your resolve. Delay Gratification. Crush the enemy. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men

Enemies

“Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand delivers me.”
Psalm 138:7

“For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues. They encircle me with words of hate, and attack me without cause. In return for my love they accuse me, but I give myself to prayer. So they reward me evil for good, and hatred for my love.”
Psalm 109:2-5

“When a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.”
Proverbs 16:7

Not everyone is going to like you. This is an unavoidable fact of life. Some people will go so far as to hate you, and they are your enemies. They may not say outright that they are your enemies, most people never do. They allow their hate for you to lie dormant, waiting until they can spring up and destroy you in one maneuver. Or they think they can slowly destroy you over time, through minute attacks. These people must be avoided.

Many people outside the church will hate you because your righteousness is a spotlight on their immorality. Religion makes worldly people look bad and feel guilty or dirty about their own irreligious lifestyle. This causes them to badmouth you or attack your character. They will label your church as a cult and you as an extremist. This is to be expected. Also, do not make the mistake of thinking you are so great if worldly people hate and speak badly about you because our Christian forefathers had it much worse than we do.

Even worse than acquiring hatred from the outside world is the fact that many people in the church will hate us, even our own brethren.

We wear the name Christian, but that does not protect us from human nature. Not everyone is going to get along. People have egos. People have opinions and traditions that, if you speak against them, will cause that person to hate you. Human beings are still human beings even though they walk in a church building every Sunday in their best dress.

You must be an astute observer of human nature and the way in which humans behave. You must learn to read people and have an idea of what they may be thinking or planning. This requires vigilance. This requires awareness about the people around you. You must raise your resting level of consciousness and be aware of humans. There are multiple small wars going on at all times, many minuscule power struggles between people. These are the foundations of relationships and make up all of interpersonal communication. You must become proficient at communication and at reading these power struggles if you are to succeed in mitigating the amount of enemies you deal with.

Even if you can avoid human enemies, you will never be able to avoid spiritual enemies. Satan is the enemy. His angels are the enemy. Plan to crush them.

Mantra

Enemies are unavoidable, but loving action is a choice in my mind.

Application

We must love our enemies. Remember: Love has nothing to do with how you feel, and everything to do with how you act. You may dislike another person greatly, but you can still act lovingly towards that person. However, we must hate the devil and everything he stands for and tries to do. Satan worms his way into everything and he must be opposed at every front, he must be strategically defeated.

Be vigilant and aware of the human beings around you, be sensitive to their aura and the way they seem. As humans we have the ability to tell when other humans are “off”. Your instinct will be right more often than not. It is possible to tell most enemies simply from aura, other enemies who are skilled in acting and manipulation may be harder to detect. If you detect that someone may be vexed with you, you have a couple options.

1 – Approach the brother. Some personality types respond best to direct confrontation. You must go to them directly, clear the air and try to make it right. This must be done regardless of whether your own personality is comfortable with confrontation or not. Simply approach him and ask if you have offended them in any way. Press them until they tell you what is on their mind.

2 – Try to make it right through successive small actions. Other personality types are very uncomfortable with confrontation and will deny everything if you approach them about their feelings toward you.

(Remember: Others will operate on emotion, we ourselves must avoid this at all costs).

Take a few small, nice actions towards this person and see if this clears the air. If this fails, go to a close friend of your “enemy” and ask them if the individual has mentioned having problems with you. This person will know if their friend is truly your enemy, or if their displeasure is targeted at someone or something else. Non-confrontational individuals are very likely to confide in a close friend, but tell nothing to everyone else they know. You must be strategic in how you handle this individual.

3 – There are some enemies who are simply trying to damage the church. They sow division and engage in small interpersonal wars. To defeat these enemies, you need the masses on your side. You cannot defeat an enemy like this unless the church agrees that he is an enemy. You need evidence that he is sowing discord among the brethren or engaging in warfare. Take the evidence to the elders of the church. If the elders will not listen, slowly acquire support from the rest of the church until you can approach the elders again with the support of the people. A divisive enemy must be removed from the church or he will destroy it.

Enemies in the spiritual realm must be found and annihilated.

You cannot see these enemies, but you can feel their effects on your life (Ephesians 6:10-12). You must be aware of these effects if you are to detect the presence of evil. This philosophy borders on mysticism and speculates about the whereabouts and activities of the good and evil spiritual realms. If you believe in the presence of angels and demons, this is where they would be active. If not, then you almost certainly believe that the devil is responsible for all the evil in your life. You must be aware of him and keep him out of your home and mind. You are at war with the devil and his army, so gird your loins, fortify the fortress of your mind and be a man.

Eliminate every access point the devil has in your home. Barricade points where he can worm his way in. this means setting up filtering software on all computers, televisions and phones. Do not even allow the microscopic spores of evil to settle in your mind. By removing the enemy’s access points, you have taken the spiritual high ground and are well on your way to keeping the enemy at bay.

Even after fortifying your home, you must be “on patrol”, constantly monitoring the fort for other ways the devil is attacking you. Applied knowledge is power, so always have intelligence on everything that goes on in your home.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Courage

“Be strong and of good courage. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.”
Deuteronomy 31:6

“For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.”
2 Timothy 1:7

Courage is deficient in the religious world today. Men are too scared to share the gospel, too scared to teach it to their kids and then they wonder why the church is shrinking in the United States. The church shrinks because no man possesses the testicles necessary to evangelize.

Courage comes from taking the actions most men are terrified of taking. Men do not have to stop being afraid, they just have to take action regardless of their fear. The problems arise when men use fear as an excuse to not do what they know they should.

You do not get a reward for being scared. No one pats the back of the fearful man, or looks at him with admiration and inspiration. No man is excused from acting righteously just because he is scared to do so. It is wrong to let fear keep men from being virtuous, but it is not wrong to be filled with fear. Fear is a tool.

All negative emotions should be transmuted into positive actions.

Men do not face many situations today that are as fear inspiring as what the Israelites encountered when they prepared to conquer Canaan. They were told to have no fear as they were heading to battle (Joshua 10:25). They had to fight hand-to-hand and eye-to-eye with their adversaries. Death by hand-held weapon would be most painful.

Men are commanded to stand face to face with what they fear, and attack it. They must charge at the source of their terror and cast it down at their feet, destroy it and replace it with strength and bravery. This is the goal. Even if the fear cannot be eliminated, men can become braver and stronger.

Courage is an action.

Men have no courage while they are sitting on the couch. Men have no bravery from thinking about what they should do. The courage only comes when you take action. Like anything else in your faith, you must take action for it to be effective. Faith is not possible without action, neither is salvation. If a man wants courage, he has to assault his fears and face them by his own free will. While courage is an action, fear is just an emotion.

Mantra

Courage is growing in my mind. Fear has no place here in my thoughts.

Application

Put yourself in the middle of what you fear. You must face your fear voluntarily, it cannot be forced upon you. You must choose of your own free will to have courage and experience what you fear, this is how courage is built. Do not expect overnight results in anything you try to do. Sure, some people can radically change themselves overnight whilst embodying pure motivation, but that is usually not the common man. Get to work today. Slowly build your courage over successive days of efficient action. This is the only way to build anything: one brick before the next until you have a house. Grow your courage. Expand your possibilities. Improve and sharpen your mind. Eviscerate your fear. Strengthen your will. Be a man.

“The way to make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things they are afraid of and that make them uncomfortable”. ~ Jordan Peterson.

Identify Fear (Fear of talking to others)
Identify the smallest action you can take in facing that fear (Looking at pictures or reading actricles about talking to others.
Plan the action (Write down a few things to say to someone else)
Take Action (Talk to the other person. Go over your lines and work from there).

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Contempt

Contempt it another word for resentment that is usually birthed by an inconvenience of some kind.

“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.”
Ephesians 4:31

Some men resent the birth of their children, as it reduces the amount of sex they get in marriage. Some men resent their families, since they are the reason he has to grind away at the 9-5 that is eating his soul. Many men resent the church, more than they would care to admit. Worship is an inconvenience to them. It takes away their Sunday, one of their only off-days from work and forces them to exist around people that annoy them more than any other people.

Contempt is a deadly disease closely related to holding a grudge for an extended period of time. Because both exist within the individual and can live for years without him even knowing they are there. You might feel the slight gnawing feeling every time your alarm clock goes off on a Sunday and you have to get dressed to be around people who claim to wear the name of Christ but in reality take no action for their faith.

Chronic contempt eventually leads man to forsake the church.

Eventually, the weight of the monotony, boredom and restriction disintegrates the mind until man can take no more. He resents the church for robbing him of his freedom. Everything they want to do in life has been taken away by God with the promise of something better, some future reward, if only they can learn to wait and restrain themselves.

This restriction is the breeding ground for contempt. The feeling that we are missing out on the few things in life that are actually enjoyable: Sex, alcohol, drugs, freedom are what the God appears to take away from man. Man believes he has a hope for salvation, but in his heart of hearts he knows that he has no idea what will happen on judgement day. He knows the God who destroys without mercy, and assumes that he himself will also be destroyed without mercy. Man rejects the church because of these thoughts. He rejects the church because of contempt.

Men don’t just get up and leave the church because of some huge argument, a church split or personal problem. They leave because of the slow decay of contempt that has been rotting their faith for years. The resentment for the church and its people grows daily, until one day the man can take no more and he leaves the church. This was not an overnight transformation. Very few great trees fall because they are split by a lightning strike, most fall because of the slow decay of insects feeding on them until one day they no longer have the structural support to stand. Such is the way of the contemptful man and his faith. We must avoid this poison of contemptuousness at all costs.

Mantra

Contempt is a slow death that must be eliminated.

Application

Take a good look in the mirror, into your soul and search out the contempt you may have within yourself. If you are not self-aware, you may not notice the damage that contempt is doing to you over time. Awareness, again, is key. Vigilance is the only way to take note of the disease of contempt and attempt to purge it from the soul.

In many cases, the awareness alone will cure the contempt, in other cases you must trace your resentment to the root.

Why are you resentful? Possibly because God has placed massive regulation on the way you can live, and it seems like your freedom is taken from you. This is a source of contempt for many a man. But remember, anything worth gaining requires restriction. A tremendous physiques requires dietary restriction. To become a doctor requires restrictions on time and enjoyable activities to make time for work. Nothing great is ever built without restrictions in other areas of life.

You must master this and rearrange the thoughts in your mind. Change the routine of thought into something else. Hotwire those thoughts before they follow their set pattern into death. Be a Man.

Identify the source of your personal contempt (Having to go to church/restrictions on sex etc.).
Trace the source of contempt to the root by asking and answering questions in your mind (why do these restrictions make me feel contemptful? Am I mad about the restrictions on sex or am I simply embarrassed because of my chastity? Maybe the problem is my embarrassment).
Begin undoing these thoughts in your mind. Cut them off from the source and do not allow the thoughts to even start. If they do start, short circuit them by running through your questions from #2 and recognizing the irrationality of those thoughts.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Unwillingness To Learn From The World

Too many men are unwilling to learn from the world. They avoid reading secular texts or digesting worldly philosophy. They do so at their own peril and only reduce the growth of their minds.

You have probably heard statements made in the church like “Why remember song lyrics? If you can remember those then you should be able to remember plenty of Bible verses”. This is a real statement a minister said to me when I was young. While that is true, the implication is that you should not be learning anything from the world.

Church members will do the same thing if you start reading secular philosophy. Heaven forbid that you should read Nietzsche or Neil DeGrasse Tyson since they do not agree exactly with everything we say. By that logic, these same people should discourage American Generals from studying Asian battle tactics or some other enemies strategies. You cannot defeat the opposition if you know nothing about them.

This type of mentality in the church has retarded the mental and argumentative growth of its members.

They no longer know how to rationally argue their points and attack the views of the world, and their knowledge is limited to that which they may acquire in the church (which isn’t much, as scientists tend not to be Christians).

We have a great deal of knowledge about the world available to us. It would be asinine to try to confine everything we need to learn to what we can glean in the church. There is no way for us to live and survive in the world if we only relied on other Christians for knowledge. They don’t know everything. This is not irreverent or disrespectful, it is true.

Legendary Japanese Swordsman Miyamoto Musashi wrote “If you know the Way well, you will see it in all things”.

Not only is this a quote that most Christians don’t know because of their unwillingness to read secular texts, it is also a great insight to Christianity itself. While Musashi was writing about the Way of war or swordplay, it can easily apply to the Way of Christianity. If you know the Way of Christianity well, you will see it in all things. You will see Christian principles in all the secular texts you read and in the worldly philosophy you encounter. Unfortunately, most Christians do not know the way well, so they see it in nothing.

There are a plethora of secular men who conduct themselves in a moral manner that are good role models for the Christian. This is because God has instilled a natural morality in man even if he does not follow the Way. Some individuals in the church would fear if you were being inspired by the “heathen”, which only reveals their ignorance of reality. In a church where there are no longer masculine role models, no longer any real men, no longer any free thinking individuals, you must be inspired by men of the world. Combine their admirable traits with your faith to be the man that the church needs, and repopulate the church with men, and purge it of the effeminate, corpulent eunuchs who wrongfully refer to themselves as servants of God.

Mantra

To grow in knowledge is to destroy the enemy.

Application

Know the way. You must first know what you believe and why you believe it before you can learn from all possible sources in the world. Do this, and you are ahead of 99% of modern day so-called Christians.

Start reading secular works of philosophy, there are plenty to choose from, and they are packed with wisdom that you otherwise never would have known about by simply listening to mindless religious men. This knowledge will make you more capable in argument and in cultivating your own philosophy. You must discover what it is that you believe to be true, otherwise you will be destroyed. Learn your philosophy. Gain Knowledge. Be a Man. Learn from the world

Pick up any book by Friedrich Nietzche/Ayn Rand/Stephen Hawking and start reading it. Learn to reason through their works with your own mind and discover your own counterarguments.
Absorb power through secular philosophy. You will always be limited in your growth if you are limited to religious writers.
Combine secular knowledge with your faith. Combine elements that you read with principles in scripture to create a hybrid philosophy as strong as titanium.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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