Category: Christianity

It’s natural to move closer to God when times are bad. Every crisis pushes us back towards religion. What do you do when everything is going your way and you feel the urge to forget the God of the Earth? How do you keep your faith when times are good?

When times are good, we forget God.

“So it shall be, when the Lord your God brings you into the land of which He ^[a]swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you large and beautiful cities which you did not build, ¹¹ houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, hewn-out wells which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant—when you have eaten and are full— ¹² then beware, lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. ¹³ You shall fear the Lord your God and serve Him, and shall take oaths in His name. ¹⁴ You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are all around you ¹⁵ (for the Lord your God is a jealous God among you), lest the anger of the Lord your God be aroused against you and destroy you from the face of the earth.

Deuteronomy 6:10-15

God warned the children of Israel and told them that they would forget Him one day. It is natural for us to do this as humans. When times are good, we think we have everything under control. It is only once a crisis strikes that we remember how helpless we are to many of the circumstances of life.

As much as I advocate taking control of your situation and being in charge, there is still uncertainty in this world. We do not know how the world will be when we wake up tomorrow. And it is in the moments when the world acts contrary to how we think that we remember God.

So how do you have faith when times are good?

I – Get in the habit of remembering God every day.

Start your day by remembering who gave you all the advantages you have.

¹⁶ Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. ¹⁷ Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. 

James 1:16-17

If you have something good in this life, it came from God. You need to remember that you do not have any of your possessions or advantages solely because of your own merit. Now it is certainly true that we have to work for and earn things in this life. There is definitely a certain amount of responsibility that falls on us as men to get out in the world and pursue success. We need to work hard and focus on our goals. But all the while we must remember that God has the final say in this world. We can do nothing apart from Him.

It is our responsibility to work as hard as we can, but to also not forget that it is God who has allowed us to build an extreme work ethic.

II – Remember that at any moment, your fortune could turn against you.

There is nothing certain in this entire world. Do not put any trust in human beings or anything comprised of atoms.

Never become overly attached to any of the things that are in this world. Do not attach yourself to any of the material things you have.

There is a story of a man who had an immensely valuable teacup. However, as an exercise in stoicism, he behaved as if the teacup were already broken. Every day as he used it, he thought of it as already broken and destroyed. Then one day when it finally did break, he said “Ah, as it always was“. It was not a shock to him because he practiced detachment.

We must be the same way with our own material things. I remember when I purchased my first new vehicle. I engaged in this exercise so I would not become attached to it. Then, one week later when my wife was driving the car and someone ran into the rear bumper, I was not bothered at all. Because since the day I owned it I viewed it as totaled. So it was much easier to tolerate a small fender-bender since I did not overly value the vehicle.

You must get in the habit of viewing everything you have as already lost.

Act as if all your materials have been taken from you. Who are you without them? Only your character remains. And it is from that character that you can rebuild any of the wealth you have currently amassed.

III – Remember God early in your life, before you become successful.

⁶ Remember your Creator before the silver cord is ^[a]loosed,
Or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well.
⁷ Then the dust will return to the earth as it was,
And the spirit will return to God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12:6-8

It is much easier to remember God during your success and when times are good if you are already in the habit of remembering Him. The earlier you can start this the better. Although it is never too late to start this habit, it will pay better dividends if you can install it earlier.

It is simpler to live a life centered around God as you build success than it is to become successful and then try to build God into your life. You will have better luck by placing God as the priority first than you would in trying to make Him a priority later on.

The priority principle applies to many things in your life. That which is the priority will get the most results. This applies in the simple laboratory of the gym. The muscles you train at the beginning of the workout and at the beginning of the week will get the best focus. You will be fresh and energized, ready to train them. Those muscles placed at the end of the workout and the end of the week will not be the priority. While they still are addressed slightly, they do not get the same benefits that the prioritized muscles get.

Your life is the same way. What gets your best energies and your best focus will be the parts of your life that improve the most.

Do not focus on things that are irrelevant. You must be in the habit of teasing out the most important aspects of life and focusing on them.

Follow those three principles to remember God when times are good. It is easy to rely on God when the world is crashing around us. This is why every terrorist attack in the United States causes the people to band together and remember God. Even the most secular, worldly people in the world will call on the name of God when the situation is dire. We cannot be those people. We have to remember God and focus on Him now while times are good. Do not wait for a crisis to have the proper focus in life.

I – Positive emotions provide nothing.

For true, lasting fuel to motivate your endeavors, you need enemies. When you are knee-deep in the comforts of life and the world, you can forget what made you work hard in the beginning. Sometimes you will not be willing to work hard out of ambition or the desire for gain, sometimes you need more. You need the energy that comes from having an opponent.

Comfort provides no energy. But if you have an enemy, you have a wellspring of eternal energy. There is nothing more motivating than having someone who wants to go to war with you. At that moment you can channel your natural warlike nature and convert it into energy for success.

You do not have to go to war with people directly. That may bother the sensitive conscience of many Christian people. You can, however, use the emotional fuel from that enemy to motivate yourself to success.

Take advantage of the fact that people will inevitably want to go to war with you. If you do this, you will have limitless power. Having an enemy gives you purpose, direction, and a clear-cut destination. Every one of your actions begins to have real meaning. All of your work is energized. What once fatigued you is now nothing more than a bump in the road. Take advantage of the energy reservoir that comes when you are at war.

II – Having an enemy is a part of life.

Sometimes it is a consequence of our poor decisions, other times people just want to go to war with us. There is no need to complain about this because it is actually a useful tool. Use enemies to your advantage.

Look at the stories of David. This was a man at war for his entire life. This was a result of his own actions (2 Samuel 12:10). He wrote many psalms about his enemies. He would write about them surrounding him at all sides. And he would also write about crushing them in battle.

Make no mistake about it, those who hate God and hate our religion are our enemies. They hate the Bible and they hate everything that Christians stand for.

III – Do not make enemies directly unless absolutely necessary.

By biblical law, we need to be at peace with all men, as possible. However, if someone decides to make war with us, we should use that energy to our advantage.

“If possible, so far as it depends on you, live in peace with all people”

Romans 12:18

We should not go out of our way to start wars. But if wars are started against us, we have the right to defend ourselves.

There is this popular notion in Christianty that tries to paint Christians as pacifists. People think that Christians will do nothing as their families are tortured and killed by governments or other enemies. This is not true. Christians have the right to self-defense just as much as anyone else. We should not go out of our way to attack others directly, but we can retaliate to protect ourselves.

Some Christians twist “do not resist an evil person” (Matthew 5:39) to mean that we should never lift a single finger to protect ourselves or others from war. This is not true. We have the right to go to war. Humans will always go to war and we may have to be a part of it. There will be war from now until the end of time, it is in human nature. It is built into the very DNA of men.

You do not have to go to physical war yourself, but you must take advantage of this programming that you have. You need to learn to channel this natural warlike nature into productive pursuits. That Is how you begin using enemies to your advantage.

IV – Be at war with the devil

If it bothers your conscience to wage war with enemies who started a war with you, you have options. We are all at war with the devil and his angels. This is an inescapable part of life. He hates you and wants you to fall, and you are at war with him all the days of your life.

Activate your apparatus of hatred. You were given the emotion of hatred for a reason, for there is a proper use for it. While we should not hate our fellow men, we are to hate sin and the devil. That is the greatest possible outset for this emotion of pure hatred. It is one of the most valuable emotions we have.

Oftentimes the Bible gives parameters around hot emotions such as anger. For example:

“Be angry and do not sin” ~ Ephesians 4:26

We are allowed to experience these emotions, but they must be controlled. Using our hatred and directing it towards sin and the devil is the parameter that we must follow.

V – Recognize Camoflagued Emenies

We have more enemies than we think we do. This is a sad and unfortunate reality, but we need to be aware of it. Others hate us and we may never know it, but we should be on the lookout for it.

Even inside religion, there are people who teach principles that oppose what we know to be true from the Bible. They teach that the Bible does not mean what it says. Or they teach that there is no need for you to behave with the extreme discipline that you do.

Either way, they are teaching contrary to what the Bible teaches. Paul writing to the church at Galatia has the following to say about the men who teach principles that oppose the Bible:

“As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!”

Galations 1:9

That sounds like a serious bit of phraseology. The Bible makes it clear that those who teach another gospel are cursed. They are our enemies, and there is no way around this.

Because of this, we should work hard to understand the true principles of God so we can crush these arguments. Notice I do not say we should crush the people making the arguments, but rather the arguments themselves.

Crushing others directly does nothing but give us a few seconds of satisfaction. But we set ourselves back by damaging the relationship and damaging rapport. When it comes to people who are already religious, we have to be more careful with how we handle them. They may not know that they are fighting for the enemy with the things they are teaching and preaching.

Take advantage of your enemies. You are going to have them all the days of your life. All you can do is make the best of it.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

If fun is the goal of your bible study, you will get nothing out of the study except fun. You will forget everything you “learned” and you will not benefit.

Nothing has to be fun in order to be productive.

I have been to a few bible studies where it became very apparent that the purpose of the “study” was socialization. We “studied” for about a half-hour and followed it up with two and a half hours of socializing. Now there is nothing wrong with socialization, but that is not the purpose of something called a study.

The goal and purpose of a bible study is to increase the knowledge of the Bible. Sometimes that is enjoyable and sometimes it is not. It does not matter either way. This is because study and training, even the study of biblical subjects, can be likened to your training in the gym. Sometimes it is fun to train and other times it is a drag. Sometimes you are motivated and the process is enjoyable, and other times training is simply focused work. At times you may have to spend most of your focus and energy just to maintain a moderate level of effort.

None of that matters. How you are feeling before, during, and after your study is irrelevant.

What matters is if you accomplished the goal you set or not. Did you complete the appropriate volume of work or not? Are you making progress towards your end-state goals or are you becoming stagnant?

The philosophy of liberalism teaches you that you are good just the way you are. The philosophy of the hardcore Christian should be one of constant improvement. Day in and day out you are taking steps towards your goal. No matter how small or insignificant those steps may seem, you are taking steps. That puts you miles ahead of the person who believes they are fine just the way they are. Those people have sat down and may never get back up to work towards their goals.

Productivity in the study of the Bible will never be limited based on the fun-ness of that specific activity.

You have to study hard enough to induce learning, and that is not always fun.

Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman talks about effort and learning in the podcast linked above. One of the most interesting things he notes is that when you are studying or trying to learn something new if you want to enter a period of time of aggressive, focused learning, you have to first walk through a barrier of mental discomfort. When you are first settling in to learn and are getting frustrated with the material, your brain releases epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline. This epinephrine release is what gives you that feeling of frustration and mental agitation.

But if you continue to press on and work through that feeling, you can enter a period of relative smoothness. It is not that your work suddenly becomes effortless, but you are no longer “out of the groove“, so to speak. You are in the groove and ready for efficient action.

Imagine that, in order to enter a state of hard focus, you must walk through that initial period of agitation and frustration.

And any human being who has attempted to learn something and has hit that wall of frustration knows that it is not fun.

But when it comes to our Bible study, we want everything to be all happy and fun and fine and dandy. But if our goal is results, mental improvement, and an increase of the knowledge of the Bible, we need to acknowledge that we will have to walk through those moments of frustration in order to get in the groove of working.

You have to train hard enough to induce muscle growth, and that is not always fun.

How does muscle growth relate to bible study? Here’s how:

Most people are familiar with the fact that if you want muscle growth in your body, you have to train hard enough to trigger the muscle growth process. In Exercise Physiology this is called the “stimulus threshold“. The basic idea is that you have to push to a certain level of effort in order to “flip on the light switch” of protein synthesis – otherwise known as muscle growth. And below this threshold, you will see very little, if any, muscle growth for your alleged “efforts“.

I postulate to you that your Bible training must be the same way. It must be to a certain intensity so that an increase in Bible knowledge is stimulated. You must push yourself so you can “flip on the lightswitch” for learning any subject, most importantly the subject of the bible.

If you decide not to train hard in the gym or in your study, you simply will not improve, it is as simple as that.

And this is where those who subscribe to the philosophy of liberalism find themselves time and time again. Theirs is a philosophy of comfort and ease. “Why push yourself to improve when you were built to fail?” the liberal may rhetorically ask. The merits of that argument can be discussed on another day, but the results of that attitude are brazenly apparent.

When you approach your study with a lackadaisical attitude motivated by the hippie-like philosophy of liberalism, you will not make any improvements for years. You may “read your bible every day“, allegedly, but you will make no progress. Because you simply did not push yourself hard enough to give your mind the necessary stimulus for growth and improvement.

When fun is prioritized over faith, you have the dysfunctional youth group model where no one knows anything.

The priority in the Bible study training model should be the improvement of biblical knowledge. When fun is made the priority, no one improves. And people fail to improve for years at a time while being around others who fail to improve for years at a time.

We call this the “youth group” – where fun is prioritized over faith. Where parents believe that 2 youth activities per week will stop their kids from having sex before marriage. And it comes as a great shock to them when their kids leave the church because they had no substance or foundation for their faith. They had no intensity imposed on them by their teachers. There was no need for the improvement of the individual because there was no enforced accountability – as low-value as accountability is.

But what will always happen is people will resort to the type of “work” that provides them with the most comfort in their lives. They will never pursue what seems overtly difficult or what will require the most effortful work.

This is why people gravitate towards the philosophy of liberalism – because it is one of ease and comfort. It is a philosophy of social acceptance and personal acceptance. There is no need for you to work on yourself and improve in those groups. Everyone is just as broken as you are, why move on and improve yourself and your life?

Fun should never be prioritized over your faith. The priority should be discipline, personal obedience, and personal improvement. The priority should be on the systems that create results rather than on the social events that provide nothing.

Set rigorous standards for yourself. Push yourself to read and focus more.

I – Start with the reading – read a small volume of Bible each day.

A small amount of Bible reading is better than no Bible reading. Even better is a small amount of bible reading combined with intensity. Arnold Schwarzenegger has famously stated that he could do one set of one exercise for one muscle and have it be more productive than someone else’s entire workout. He attributed this to the focus and intensity with which he would approach that single set. Another bodybuilder, Mike Mentzer, popularized a training protocol of one set per muscle per workout, as few as 2 times per week. Each set consisted of an all-out, max intensity effort that pushed the muscles to absolute failure.

Your Bible study can be the same way – put massive effort into a smaller volume and you will make progress. An extremely intense reading of ten verses will be more effective than a cursory reading of 4 chapters.

II – Incorporte memory work – you need to be writting the commands of God in your mind.

Do this through the focused work of memorization. Start with the aggressive bible verse collection.

It is popular in Bible study to do these cross-reference exercises where you link various passages to other passages in the Bible. This is a good exercise. But even more valuable is the memorization of Bible passages. There is no faster way to cross-reference the Bible than to have the entire length of the passages in your mind.

III – Hold yourself to a higher standard of behavior. Do not associate with people who mock at the strenuous life.

Enjoy the strenuous life as a man. You need to dive into the work with focused intensity. Others may look at your effort and what you are doing and try to discourage you. Some people will always try to discourage you from training too hard, working too hard, or trying too hard to succeed. This is only because your work ethic makes the feebleness of their work ethic painfully obvious to them. They never want to work, so they do not want you to work either.

If you start working you call into question their lethargy. They are forced to acknowledge that they are either lazy or that you are crazy for your effort. And much of the time people will remain in their fixed mindsets and call you crazy for your effort.

You must reject these people. Split from the pack. Do not worry about being a part of the group, you do not need the group. Your main concern is with the improvement of the self. If the group comes into conflict with that goal, you need to separate yourself from the group. Invest in your effort and it will pay you dividends always.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.