Christianity Archives - Page 23 of 37

Sacrifice

“Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
Hebrews 13:15 & 16

We no longer know the meaning of the word “sacrifice”. Parents give their kids money to give on Sunday, as if that teaches them anything. It dissociates sacrifice with pain, which should not be done. If it does not hurt, then it is not a sacrifice, that is what the word means. Giving up money you earned is literally painful. Those kids didn’t earn that money. What they give didn’t come out of money they themselves worked for. How are they supposed to understand the significance of sacrificial giving if they are giving away someone else’s money?

A few years down the road and the parents of these kids are shocked when they discover little Johnny thinks socialism is a viable form of government.

In the Old Testament, men of faith would offer different kinds of sacrifices to God. These sacrifices were usually burnt offerings, where the man would take the best animal of a flock, kill it, and burn it. Do you think that was always a fun thing to do? It sounds expensive. We take for granted how difficult that killing your animals may have been because we merely read what happened, instead of experiencing it ourselves.

Sacrifice is a tool to understand God’s sacrifice for us. Sacrifice is a form of investing, where we trade what we think is valuable on earth for more valuable intangibles such as character, trust or generosity. God sacrificed a portion of Himself on the cross for us because He placed such a great value on mankind. Why this sacrifice was made is a great mystery. God’s sacrifice was not without great pain and sorrow. Our sacrifices are much smaller than that, but they still cause some pain. This is just in the nature of sacrifice. Science has shown that paying bills with cash is painful, activating the pain sensors in the brain.

Some people will reject the idea of a painful sacrifice, because we should be “happy” and feel good and all that nonsense. Those are not Biblical statements, happiness has nothing to do with sacrifice.

Even though our sacrifices are much simpler, they are still uncomfortable. We sacrifice sex with anyone we want in order to please God. Is this fun? No. Some Christian men will try to tell you it’s fulfilling to wait for sex and then have it with only one woman, but they are unconvincing at best. How would they know? They have not experienced both sexual lifestyles to be able to compare them. For this reason, saving oneself for marriage is a great sacrifice.

Giving money on Sunday is a sacrifice, especially if you are giving cash (see above). We can obey the Bible and be cheerful and ungrudging yet still experience the discomfort of giving the money. This is the same principle as enduring the pain of training, but smiling when you struggle because you know that discomfort is where all the change is.

Avoiding drugs is a sacrifice for many men. The weight of the world crushes man from all angles, yet he is charged by God to endure that pain while remaining sober. This is a tremendous difficulty in the life of man.

The Lord requires many sacrifices from his people. Embrace the pain of those sacrifices. Be a Man.

Mantra

All Sacrifice Requires Pain

Application

There are always opportunities to sacrifice money, time, resources and comfort. What you have to do is accept the fact that most of these sacrifices are painful. The Christian life is painful. The sacrifices required in the Christian life are also painful. Accept this pain. Become comfortable with the pain of sacrifice. Look for opportunities to sacrifice and embrace the pain involved.

Rid yourself of the idea that you have to enjoy sacrificing. That is unscriptural nonsense propagated by men who have sacrificed nothing in life.

Conduct Yourselves like Men.

Generosity

Generosity is not what many people in religion have made it out to be.

“In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
Acts 20:35

“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.”
Proverbs 11:24-25

“Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”
Luke 6:38

Generosity is a hard concept for many men. The idea of just giving away money to other people is difficult to understand. Why do we struggle with this? Usually because we think other people are unworthy of our help because they are lazy. We assume we are enabling a lazy attitude and lifestyle. Men don’t want to give away the money they worked incredibly hard to acquire to some bum who walks around asking for it. We justify our attitudes by assuming these individuals are manipulating people to fund their alcohol or heroin addiction. While speculatory, this is still a topic for debate. There certainly are “career beggars” and they can do very well for themselves financially.

Men should be generous, but they should also be wise.

We should help others, but we should also be good stewards of what we are in charge of while on earth. To do this we need strategic stewardship. We must maneuver ourselves and our resources so that others use our generosity in the way we want them to, rather than the way they want to.

We have to be realistic, many career beggars are manipulating people out of their money to buy alcohol and drugs. This is a fact of life. But there are also many people who are in legitimate need of help, and now doubt is cast on their sincerity because of manipulating career beggars. We must strategize. We must be generous and wise at the same time. This can easily be done by a Man who thinks.

We must also reject the notion of “Blind Generosity”, which suggests that we should just give money to anyone who asks because that is right. No, that is not right. Blind giving simply eliminates your responsibility to make a character judgement on another individual. The individual who blindly gives away money is mentally lazy, not morally superior.

Mantra

Good stewardship is using wisdom in generosity.

Application

How do we mitigate the risk of generosity? This is simple for our modern lives: make it impossible for people we help to use the resources we give them or anything other than what we want them to have.

Man asks for money for food in the parking lot? Don’t give him money and buy him food or give him a gift card for a restaurant. With a gift card, you have taken money that could be used for drugs or alcohol and made it so that only food can be purchased. This is most easily done by providing gift cards to fast food restaurants that do not serve alcohol.

Another option is to have premade care packages with food and toiletries already made in the car that you can hand out at any given time. This ensures that you are generous while at the same time being wise with your resources.

It really is that simple. Strategic generosity is the way to win. You are no longer a stingy curmudgeon, and you are wise and a good steward. Everyone wins. Be Generous. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Dogma – The Root Of Blind Faith

Dogma is the result of the inability to think rationally.

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world”.
1 John 4:1

The need to think has long been done away with, especially in religion. While liberalism lives through emotionalism, conservatism thrives on dogma. Blind acceptance of tradition and the rejection of all progressivism is the hallmark of radical conservatives. That is a weak mindset to have.

The weakness comes from the fact that these individuals are so set in their ways of tradition that they do not want to go through the mental labor of thinking and evaluating what they believe.

Do I believe in holding to and preserving what the Bible says? Yes.

Do I believe in glorifying the traditions of man to the point where they are deified? No I do not. That would be just as illogical as liberalism.

Traditional dogma is when conservatives force an overload of rules on you, demanding that they must be followed without question, and threatening punishment if they are not.

The problem is that most people in the Church have no idea what they are talking about, and you can prove this by asking the most simple question in the world: Why?

They say, “Don’t use drugs”. Why not? “Drugs” is too vague of a word? What exactly do you think that is in your coffee pot? Have you tried any to know why they are bad other than the fact that your parents told you they are bad? (I’m not advocating drugs here, I’m opposing dogmatic mindsets and blind faith).

“Save yourself for marriage”, they say. They really should be more specific, because without specific, clearly defined boundaries, kids will push the envelope. Is oral sex before marriage okay? Depends on if you ask a Church elder or Bill Clinton doesn’t it?

Why should we save ourselves for marriage anyways? It doesn’t look like it did your marriage much good. You look just as unhappy and unfulfilled as any worldly marriage. An extremely important question with regards to this is: “If you saved yourself for marriage, how exactly do you know it is more fulfilling than if you hadn’t saved yourself for marriage?” You have nothing to compare it to. So what most people will do here is pull out the few cases of people who have regrets later about not waiting for marriage to have sex.

An important thing to note is that these individuals with regret are only found in the Church.

Less than 1% of all American save themselves for marriage. Therefore, shouldn’t we see a corresponding 99% regret rate? We don’t. Because people are not regretting sex in the same way as the Church preaches. The majority of people who regret having sex outside of marriage are people whom the Church has instilled a perverted manner of guilt into though dogma. They regret having sex because they were told they would regret having sex. It is a “no-cebo” effect.

Dogma is to be utterly avoided, both in learning from others and in teaching others. It should be attacked every moment it presents itself in the Church. Teach and learn through rationality, because your faith is rational.

Mantra

All dogma is for the weak.

Application

Don’t accept what is told to you just because people in the Church say it’s right. You have to “test every spirit” (1 John 4:1). You have to think with your rational mind. Do not preach dogma, do not accept dogma. The Biblical faith is rational and has no need for man made dogmatic, perverted blithering and prevaricating. Be rational. Be a Man.

Write down everything you believe. Start with just one teaching you have heard in the Church, take drinking or premarital sex for starters. You must now “test the spirit” of what you have been taught by comparing it to the Bible.

Ask yourself the following questions about the teaching to weed out dogma in your mind.

Is the teaching I heard in the Church actually found in the Bible (you would be shocked at how much dogma fails this simple test).
If the teaching is in the Bible, is the teaching being used rationally? (Some traditions people in the Church try to force on you based on the Bible simply do not make any sense logically. You believe in an intelligent God who makes intelligent rules. Therefore, there should be logic behind every commandment).
Is this teaching biased? (Could be due to the teachers personal upbringing, opinion or agenda).
What is the teacher trying to get me to do? (Obey God or obey his traditionalist teaching?)
What are the biases of the teacher (Could be political or racial if the teacher is vile enough to pollute the Word of God with them. It could be a personal bias)

You can ask yourself more questions, but this should be enough to clear out most dogma from your mind. Never accept something as true just because someone in the Church said so. Always check them and cross reference what they say. Find out if they are being truthful or if they have an agenda. Then remove as much blind dogma from yourself as you can. You will be a better man as a result of being a rational man.

Conduct Yourselves like men.

Control

“A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls”.
Proverbs 25:28

“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger”.
James 1:19

You have seen men who cannot control themselves. They lose their temper like children; they are a disgrace to what we call masculine. There is no honor in losing control of anything, much less our own selves. All we can truly control is ourselves. We control the way we respond to the way others act.

There is plenty in life that we can control, and there is plenty that we cannot. Of those things that are under our control, we have an obligation to be masters of them. Our emotions don’t rule us, we rule our emotions. Boys are carried away by emotion. Men command themselves at all times.

To control oneself is to have mastery over the body and the mind. To relinquish control of all outside events, recognizing that they are beyond our ability to affect, is the mark of a man. There is a stoic principle that states one should not worry about anything that one is not directly controlling. If you are not controlling it, why worry about it?

Mantra

If I can’t control it, I don’t stress about it.

Application

Dozens of events happen everyday that are outside of our ability to command. How coworkers act, how people will drive, what the law of entropy will bring about.

Practice not worrying about the smallest things first. If you can master controlling stress, controlling yourself in small endeavors, you can command yourself in large ones. If bad drivers really get under your skin, practice being aware that you are not in control of the situation.

Road rage is an opportunity for personal improvement. When you feel yourself getting angry when driving, become aware of it. Then just build on that awareness. Say to yourself, “Men do not lose command of themselves because of small annoyances”. Do not expect overnight results. You have spent years being angry on the road, you are not going to improve yourself in one day of effort.

If you are not in command of an event, do not let it bother you. Tell yourself that it is not bothering you. Thoughts eventually become reality. Action becomes habit. Build your character and strength through thought.

Conduct Yourselves like Men.

Commitment

Commitment is a decaying attribute of men of the world.

“Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.”
Psalm 37:5

Very few people are truly committed to the Church. Most are just there because it is tradition passed down from generation to generation. The tradition is maintained because it is easy. There are no real trials, no pressing threats, nothing that makes it difficult to be “Christians”.

Because of this, there is very little real commitment in the Church. People are committed to the Church in the same way that people are committed to spin class. They come into worship and “do it” because it makes them feel good, but if they had to face a real struggle for one second on account of their faith, they would leave.

Men are barely committed to their wives. They are more committed to watching football on Saturday than they are to building their marriage. These men are more committed to their morning television than to relationships.

They are more intimate with sports than with their wives. This is a disgrace.

The ease of life in the modern world has made it so that commitment is not necessary anymore. No one has to make a long-term commitment to anything. Every problem can be fixed quickly with a few “easy” payments of $19.95.

Men commit for good while the beta commits based on his emotional feelings at the time. As soon as the task becomes difficult, the beta quits. As soon as true challenge presents itself to the masses, the betas are purged.

The man commits for the long term. Man commits to action every day without fail. The man commits to work every day on a goal worth achieving, and in doing so he sets an example for men to come. The man who commits is a man among betas.

Mantra

Men never fail their commitments.

Application

The action does not have to be huge, it just requires commitment. Getting to the gym and doing just three sets of an exercise every day is more than you have been doing before. Commit to keep your habits every day, without fail, and then over time build on them and make them longer. Consistency is more important than being a flash in the pan.

Write down the habits you want to build. After this, look at your habits and pick the easiest one to start. Look at that habit and figure out what action you could take right now towards that goal and start doing it. If you want to start reading your Bible, read small sections instead of jumping immediately into one of those “read your Bible in a year” programs. As great as those are, right now you may not have the discipline or commitment necessary to to maintain that much reading. Focus on small blocks of reading instead. If your Bible has heading, read one chunk from heading to heading. Be consistent in the reading every day. That is much better than not reading at all.

Be consistent in the tiny details of life if you want success. Be a man of commitment.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

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