Christianity Archives - Page 20 of 38

Flesh Versus Spirit

“Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Matthew 26:41

There is an idea propagated by some individuals that is fundamentally absurd. It is this: “You should want to do what is right”.

This idea is foolish and sets individuals up for failure. Even if you were to play along with this thought, you have to answer the question: “what do you mean by ‘You’? Consciousness? Bodily? Spiritually? What part of you should want to do what is right?” I guarantee you that the flesh does not want what is right. The flesh wants what is most likely to perpetuate survival (Food and sex). The conscious mind does not always want what is right, because when infiltrated by the physical need to survive, the conscious mind must make whatever decision is most likely to promote survival. It would be more convenient and conducive to survival for me to steal my neighbors food than for me to go hunt my own.This is the natural law of man.

The moral law of Christ commands that we wrestle against this nature and make decisions that may not benefit our survival.

In essence this means we are not always going to want to do what is right. In fact, it may be very rare for us to actually want to do the right thing, if we fully acknowledge our evil nature. This is a truth as old as the book of Genesis. In the time period before the flood, God examined His creation and saw that all the desires of their hearts were evil continually (Gen 6:5). This is the natural state of man if human nature is allowed to take its course. This is the nature we fight against using our spirit, because flesh and spirit are at war with each other, and that is how it is supposed to be.

The creation of man was two parts. First, God made man from the dust. He made the man of flesh to be temporal, and the body to be carnal and bound by biological drives. Secondly, God breathed life into man. With this breath came consciousness, rational thought and the soul. This is the first and primary distinction between animals who are completely fleshly, temporal and carnal and man who is all those things but additionally has a soul.

The soul is the command center for morality.

The flesh is filled with natural drives for food and sex, and these are taken to excess by human beings. This is interesting, that most animals do not take any pleasures to excess. They have sex in their predetermined times. They eat only what they need. The natural drives of an animal lead them to perfectly satiate themselves only with what is necessary. Man needs to experience more and more pleasure, and pleasure simply for pleasure’s sake, likely as a way to soothe away the sorrow of life.

Man is both flesh and spirit, and each wars with the other.

When someone tells you that you should want to do what is right, they stand in opposition to logic and biology. It would be too easy if we were pre-programmed to want to do what is right. No, God wants us to wage war and fight our natural tendencies tooth and nail and come out on top. He wants us to choose Him over the pleasures of the world. This was not meant to be easy. Choosing God was not supposed to be the most desirable choice from an earthly, fleshly perspective. Our flesh leads us towards sin, because sin is enjoyable and obedience is generally not. Anyone in the church who tells you that obedience is fun or easy is disobedient, endures no real temptation or is a liar.

Mantra

The flesh is evil yet the Spirit endures.

Application

Don’t guilt trip yourself when you desire evil, those days will come, and guilt is useless. All you need to do is successfully obey the Word. You don’t have to feel like it, you do not have to want to do it, you only need to obey.

Reject every individual who pushes some brand of emotionalism on you. You are rarely going to want to do the right thing naturally. You have to program your mind to win and prepare it to take the uncomfortable, undesirable action for the sake of righteousness.

Redirect your natural inclinations towards other disciplines.

Accept the evil of the flesh.

Embolden the righteousness of the soul.

Strengthen your mind to bring the body under subjection.

Discipline yourself.

Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Keep Reading! Next : “Challenge“.

Confession

Confession is a key to success.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
1 John 1:9

“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”
James 5:16

Repentance is built on confession. People in the church have this idea that confession is some big show where you go forward on Sunday, make some vague statement about your sin then everyone hugs you. It is a stretch to suggest that these people are actually repenting or confessing.

We are so weak that we cannot even explicitly say what we are repenting of.

“I want to be a better Christian”. “I have not been doing what is right”. These types of confession take no bravery and do no good. If you are going to make a public confession, you need to explicitly, directly and clearly confess what you have done. This is not the place for vague, ominous confessions. No one respects those confessions either.

If you are confessing publicly, it means your sin was of a public nature.

If you sin publicly and embarrass the church, you have to be willing to state exactly what you have done.

It is better to confess directly to God when you are by yourself if you have a problem with stating your sin in front of the church. In private, men tend to not fear confessing exactly how they have sinned. This is valuable insight into how we see God, and how distant He seems from our heart and from the universe. How is it that we fear what men will think of us but care less what God thinks of us?

Confession is a tool in our belt of improvement, because it forces us to materialize the evil within ourselves by saying exactly what that evil is.

Once materialized, our evil can be destroyed. The thought that we have problems with drinking and sex, or with gambling and cocaine, hyper-judgementality, gossip and poor stewardship of time already exist in our mind. They exist as thoughts alone, ethereal and intangible.

When we confess those sins, we force them into the more physical form of words. Even though words are still invisible and an energy source, they are more material than thoughts alone. Or maybe we write down our sin as part of a confession. Those sins have now materialized on paper, we can touch and feel them, we can see exactly what is wrong with our character in no uncertain terms. This is a massive advantage. We can wage war against the physical. We have the mental edge against the physical and we believe that we can win. This is one of the greatest values of confession.

Confession fails when you are just making some vague statement about your sin and your desire to do better. You have materialized nothing and cannot sense the sin or strategize to crush it. It remains in a ghostly form, unable to be touched. Your sin will continue to shatter you over and over. Materialize the evil and destroy it.

Mantra

Confess your evil, then eviscerate it.

Application

Confession is a tool, gentlemen. Just like all the other tools we have described before, it will do nothing for you if left by itself and if not acted upon. Confession is not salvation, it is a point in the journey to salvation, and it is a point that should repeat itself thousands of times over the course of your life. Confession must be combined with repentance to be valuable at all. Without changing your behavior, confessing your sins is meaningless.

Confession must be acted upon. Use confession to force your thoughts to become tangible, material objects that you can destroy. Confess to other men who will help you destroy them if you need accountability. However, you should be striving towards ownership. Confess. Put your foot to the throat of your sin. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Why Are Christians Miserable?

“Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him.”
Ecclesiastes 8:6

“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’”.
Ecclesiastes 12:1

“Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more”
Proverbs 31: 6,7

We attack popular and common dogma propagated by the traditionalists because it leads men to have false expectations about the Christian lifestyle.

People will try to tell you to ‘have joy’ or to ‘be happy in your faith and salvation’ when happiness has nothing to do with it.

God is much more concerned about our holiness than He is our happiness.

Happiness is a superficial emotion that can be replicated with heroin.

The exaggeration of happiness in the church leads some people to question the validity of their faith when they find themselves in a temporary state of total misery.

In those moments you say to yourself, “But I am a Christian! Shouldn’t I be happy? Look at my salvation!” But you know in your mind that those thoughts will not save you from misery.

You question your faith and you question the church as a result. You wonder how the life of a person of God could be so painful.

This is because you were not told the truth about the faith.

Jesus tells us to take up our cross and follow Him (Matthew 16:24-26).

Does that sound like a lot of fun to you?

Does suffering for the cause of Christ sound like a great party?

Men, we are confusing ourselves if we think in this manner.

It is noble to suffer for Christ, but that does not make it enjoyable.

It is fair to say that very few people in the modern Western world have truly suffered for their faith mentally, physically or emotionally.

Those few people who have suffered certainly did not enjoy suffering for the sake of suffering. No rational man enjoys that extreme discomfort for its own sake.

Christ is the only one who gives meaning to the pain we endure. It is the promise of salvation from hell and the reward of heaven that makes the suffering bearable, that is what minuscule amount of it we have today.

Men, we are weak and soft. We think that we are persecuted and that we suffer when we do not even know the meaning of the word.

The majority of our suffering is in our imagination.

This does not stop us from descending into absolute misery.

The Source

We detach from ourselves and look at our life and see all the pleasures we are missing out on for the sake of Christ. For everything we are giving up in this life, is heaven going to be worth it?

These deep questions send us spiraling into misery and depression, because we are not convinced that heaven will be worth the sacrifice, and all we know is that we are missing out on a ton of sex and other pleasures.

We are in a mental state of suffering that is the opposite of the constant happiness that the liberals promise. And we do not have any of the so-called joy that the conservatives suggest faith provides. “Is my faith even real?”, we ask as a result.

Yes it is, and being miserable is sometimes a part of it.

The misery of life, however, does not give us the right to make a big show out of it.

When Jesus instructed His disciples fasting, He told them to not disfigure their countenances like the Pharisees, but to wash their faces and go about their business normally as if they were not fasting at all (Matthew 6:16-34).

The purpose of doing good and going through discomfort for Christ is not so we can act like Pharisees and make a show out of it. We will never convert other people to Christ if our temporary misery is apparent to the whole world.

Misery and discomfort are parts of life and the Christian walk. You will not always be happy and joyous like the radical left and right wing Christians claim.

This is perfectly fine.

If you weren’t going through some kind of misery at least occasionally, you need to question if you really are a Christian. If you do not regularly wrestle with faith and doubt, what kind of faith do you have?

Answer: A blind faith.

Mantra

Misery is the proving ground of faith.

Application

Accept misery as a part of life, a temporary inconvenience on our journey to heaven.

Life is uncomfortable, especially for the modern Christian who is accustomed to constant comfort. “Pain” is why we seek refuge in our mindless habits.

We watch television, play video games, and roam on social media for hours because these things allow us to immerse ourselves in them, and in doing so we forget about reality, even if only for a moment.

These are drugs that we have learned to justify in our lives. Some of the negative aspects of drugs and drinking can be found in social media and television watching (Poor time stewardship, lack of vigilance etc.).

We cannot constantly use these medications as crutches to avoid the sorrow of life.

Why God chose to create a world consisting primarily of suffering is a question that currently does not have a good answer. Many males in the church try to answer it with “True Fulfillment” and other nonsense, but to our heart of hearts those answers never satisfy.

We know there must be more to the story of suffering that we do not yet understand.

After accepting misery, we must learn not to judge the quality of our faith based on our emotional feelings at the time.

People are afraid to accept the sorrow of life because they think they are being irreverent or insulting God by not enjoying the life He gave them.

This could not be farther from the truth.

Your emotions mean nothing. You need to focus your mind on doing what is right and taking the correct actions, rather than worrying about how you are feeling at any given time.

What God requires from us is our obedience and trust, these attributes can be taken without emotion. So whatever miserable feeling you experience, learn to ignore it.

Get a grip. Ignore your emotions. Take action. Be focused. Stay goal oriented. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Repentance – Change of Action, not Emotion

“Bear fruit in keeping with repentance”
Matthew 3:8

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent”
Acts 17:30

Repentance is all about action. No one cares about your feelings, what you are experiencing emotionally or what chemical reaction is going on in your brain. When it comes to repentance, and when it comes to Christianity as a whole, what matters is your actions. Feel however you want, if you do not act, your feelings means nothing.

Repentance is a change of action. Beta males use the cliche “Repentance is a change in heart that results in a change in action”. Wrong. The “heart” is not necessary. Only the change in action is necessary. By saying that repentance is a “change in heart”, it is implied that some emotions should be involved. This is common propaganda that has no basis in reality whatsoever. Feelings are absolutely meaningless when it comes to repentance. If you “feel really bad” about all your sins, but do nothing to change, then you have nothing. Will feelings alone save you? No. Why? Because feelings mean nothing without action.

Repentance is not possible without stopping the sin.

Stopping an evil action is an action in itself. The best part about repentance: you do not have to feel a single thing. Just as feeling bad without taking action is meaningless, if you take action yet feel nothing, that is okay because you repented, i.e. you change your actions.

All you have to do is stop whatever sin you are in the habit of committing. And I have a surprise for you: you are not going to enjoy stopping the sin. Do you think any man wants to stop going out and having sex with different women every weekend? No. In order to repent of that, he is going to have to make a major sacrifice in giving up that sex. That is not fun. Repenting is not a fun thing. It’s not an emotional experience, even though you might mistakenly think it is after attending a youth rally or a liberal church.

Repentance for men should be a stoic experience, in which a man takes seriously his commitment to change himself.

He isn’t signing up for a fun time or an emotional experience. He is not changing with a romanticized delusion of what change is. Many men attempt to change while inspired by their emotions and they fail and fall back into their sin mere weeks later. The same beta males make New Year’s resolutions and fail.

Now all of this is not to say that all emotions are completely useless. They can be used as a catalyst for change, but I advise against this. Because the zeal and fervent desire to change that you feel at the moment will fade away quickly. That inspiration will not last. The motivation will fade into nothing. What will you use to drive your change then? When the alcohol withdrawals kick in and you want nothing more than a drink to take the edge off, where are your emotions then? Where are your motivations then? Are you having the same “moving emotional experience” you had when you first decided to change? No. You have no internal motivating factors and will thus fail in your goal of changing. You will make the same New Year’s resolutions next year, and you will fail them again. Do not base a change in behavior on a temporary feeling. You wouldn’t commit to marriage based on emotion alone (unless you are an irrational male), so do not commit to a major lifestyle change based on emotion.

Mantra

Action dominates over emotion.

Application

Cast aside the emotions and take up the strength of discipline. Acquire internal motivating factors when it comes to behavior change. It is not enough to be motivated or inspired to change. You must have internal, mental motivating factors.

Ignore how you feel at all times and set your focus on changing the behavior. You must have clear long term goals for who you want to be as an individual. You must imagine yourself as the ideal man. Picture in your mind who you want to be, then imitate that individual. Copy how he interacts with others, his work ethic, his character, his strength of mind and his discipline. When you have a clear vision for who you want to be, you have internal motivating factors.

When it comes to repentance, imagine yourself as the man who has already defeated your evil. Imagine yourself as a man who doesn’t drink alcohol and who isn’t even tempted to do so. Picture yourself as the man who doesn’t use drugs or who has complete control over his words. Visualize yourself as a man who dominates the sin of lust and has his penis under complete control. When you put these images in your mind, eventually they become reality.

Thoughts become things.

Dominate each day. Do not worry about the long term, only worry about today. Only examine the long term goal after you have progressed a great distance, then look at how far you have come to motivate yourself to go even farther. Repentance equals change. Change is action. Action must be consistent day after day after day. Commit to the change for the long run.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Profanity – Idle Words – Mindless Talk

“But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.”
Colossians 3:8

“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”
Ephesians 4:29

“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”
Matthew 12:36, 37

“but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”
James 3:8

The problem of profanity has nothing to do with the words themselves, and everything to do with what the words mean. The church has a bad habit of focusing completely on what the “bad words” are and ignoring the root problem behind the words. Syllables, sounds and words are not sinful in and of themselves. It is what they mean that is sinful.

If we curse at someone, we are verbalizing hatred towards that person. This is the sin. Not physically saying the “bad word”, but devaluing a human being with curse words is the evil.

A person only has to cut you off on the road for you to hate him.

Someone takes too long in an aisle of a store and you are up in arms.

We manifest this anger by the use of our language. The hatred, the undisciplined tongue, and the thought behind those words make them sinful.

Profanity is also not a great choice because it aligns us with the world.

When Peter was accused of being a disciple of Christ, he tried to prove he was of the world by cursing. What better way to instantly show that you have nothing to do with any religion or Christianity other than by cursing? It is a quick and easy way to show that you are a person of the world, not a person of God. This is the only decent argument against using profanity out of mere frustration, and not out of hate for another human being.

Profanity accomplishes nothing. Scripture would classify it “idle words” (Matthew 12:36-37), or mindlessly spoken words. Mindlessly spoken words reflect a lack of vigilance in the mind. That is as far as the logic behind profanity can be stretched.

Men do not need profanity. Many use it, but they don’t need to.

There is also a large group of Christians who seem to be okay with profanity because “words are just words”. I can’t say they are wrong. They argue from this basic idea: “What makes one word worse than another?” Societal implication? Who gets to choose which words are bad and which ones are not? The inability of Christians to answer questions like these is the reason why the profanity-sympathizers exist.

Christians try to argue back and say that some words started out good and then were perverted and turned evil by the way that men were using them. This is more evidence for the idea that the problem is not the words themselves, but the meaning behind the words. Based on this argument, any word we use to degrade another person is profane. Any way we manifest hate towards a fellow human is an instance of profanity. So we must stop pointing at specific words as the problem and start focusing on the hearts of men. Stop demonizing the words that men use and instead condemn the attitudes that are the basis of those words. Words are words. Reject aligning yourself with the world.

Mantra

Words are not evil, verbal manifestation of hate towards a brother is profane and evil.

Application

Nothing good comes from profanity, so you might as well stop using those words. But remember that the problem is the heart of man, the evil of the mind and the hatred of our fellow man. Dig up the weed by the root or it will just grow back. Fix the problem at the heart or the profanity will persist for your entire life.

Cursing is difficult to stop because it becomes a mindless habit.

You get used to uttering words without thought. So awareness is going to be your best tool. Again, you must have vigilance. This cannot be overstated, because no improvement is possible without awareness, without vigilance. Get a grip on your words by thinking and be cognizant of what you say.

Once you are aware of the way you use your words, you must identify the situations when you use those words.

Do you use profanity out of frustration while driving or working?
Are you mindlessly using profanity in conversation in order to build rapport?
Are you trying to accentuate a point?

As soon as you identify the environments in which you use the most profanity, you must learn to stop yourself.

If you are mindlessly using profanity out of frustration, you lack self-control. Why are you allowing minor events like driving to make you that angry? In this case the profanity is just a symptom of your overall lack of self control. Work on controlling yourself and your profanity problem may resolve itself.
If you are using profanity in conversation, you have to realize there are better ways to build rapport with individuals. You also do not know the person you are talking to. They may be instantly turned off by your use of profanity. Using language in regular conversation is simply unsavory. It makes you look less intelligent than you are. Very few men in the world can be highly intelligent and continue to sound intelligent in conversation while using non-stop profanity.
There are better ways to add emphasis to an idea than by using profanity. Try expanding your vocabulary. If you cannot accentuate your point without profanity, you simply do not know enough words.

Men need no profanity. Discipline your tongue. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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