Christianity Archives - Page 26 of 37

Character

“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Romans 5:3-5

“But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look at his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’”
1 Samuel 16:7

Character: the internal code of conduct that we stand by. The collection of values, mindsets, and philosophies within the mind of man.

People often talk about “building character”. They usually use the phrase as a way to justify giving you a very undesirable task. Why do they say “building character” instead of “getting character”, or “acquiring some character”? Because the character of the individual is built one decision at a time.

Just like anything else in life, every loser wants instant results, and everyone who succeeds knows that success only comes after a long duration of work.

Character is built by small and repetitive action. And it is only noticed by others after a long period of construction.

An individual’s character is a set of defining traits that distinguish that individual from everyone else. To be set apart from all other men is the result of being different from them in hundreds of small ways; ways that you may think do not even matter.

You drop trash on the ground, so you pick it up and throw it away. Most people just leave it there, after all, someone else is paid to get it for them.

You take your shopping cart all the way to one of the designated areas instead of leaving it in the parking lot. Most people just leave the cart in everyone’s way. After all, there are people who get paid to collect those and return them to the store.

You stay at the job you hate until the hours you agreed to work each day are fulfilled. You could dart out at 4:56 p.m., but you don’t, you have character.

Or maybe you don’t do any of these things. Maybe you allow the small details of life to slide by because they are “unimportant”. Take a good look in the mirror, what you will see is a man who lacks character. It is nothing more than the cumulative result of hundreds of small choices like the ones listed above. They aren’t any big deal, or so you think. But when added together they mean more than when they are examined individually.

Any man who will slack off and make excuses in the little endeavors of character will do so in the great endeavors.

Do you really think you will suddenly “snap out of it” when everything is on the line, or when it actually matters? No, you will fail. Your lack of character will have compounded over those small choices, leaving you as just another loser, like everyone in the world and just like most men in the Church. Don’t be those weak, pusillanimous me, have some character. Be a man. Give the Church a good name.

Mantra

Every small action I take reflects my character.

Application

Start actually taking those small actions. You will never build any character without those small actions that seemingly “don’t matter”. It is really that simple. Not always fun or convenient, but simple.

Then you repeat those small actions every day. Eventually you begin to associate them with your identity as a man of character. If you put two days of action together, it becomes easier to get that third day as well. Now you have momentum on your side. Now you have very little reason to ever be that same person who lacked character ever again.

With the momentum, you add more positive traits, more small actions, new actions that make you better as a man. Add up all these small decisions and you are a man of character.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Success: Why Success is Not Evil

KEY: Weak religious men assume that wealth confers villainy and that poverty confers righteousness.

“The LORD was with Joseph so that he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the LORD was with him and that the LORD gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the LORD blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the LORD was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field.”
Genesis 39:2-5

Weak men in the Church hate success. In fact, they point to success as a sign of worldliness and materialism. At the same time they point to their own lack of success as some kind of perverted virtue.

KEY: Weak religious men assume that wealth confers villainy and that poverty confers righteousness. Success is not Evil

However, lack of success is easily traced to our lack of work ethic or, quite simply, to the fact that what we do is not valued by society. A person’s paycheck represents nothing more than the value of their skillset in the marketplace.

Success doesn’t care about your natural gifts, it only cares about work. Not merely work in the workplace, but work done researching the best jobs, researching the highest value skills to develop, and spending time improving your value to society. Most weak men aren’t successful because they studied something stupid in college, wasted time walking to girls and playing beer pong, and didn’t work on developing marketable skills while they were there. It is as simple as that.

Are there cases where someone does everything right and works hard and still comes up short in the marketplace? Sure, but those are the rarest cases.

Most religious betas will clock in 25 hours a week or more at their television set, but scoff at the man who spends 60 hours at his job, accusing him of being “worldly”. Irony, anyone?

Success isn’t evil. In fact, if we do our work “As to the Lord and not as unto men” (Eph. 6:7), then we absolutely should be successful in whatever we do because our work ethic will be unparalleled.

Examine the lives and character of Job, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. These men were extremely wealthy, and yet they did not place their wealth above God. Their wealth was irrelevant to them because they knew Righteousness was most important.

Unlike what you hear in the Church, You can be righteous and be successful at the same time.

Be a man, be a success. If you can’t be a success, be the hardest worker in the room and that will be a success of its own.

Mantra

Success doesn’t care about righteousness.

Application

If you are being a beta and criticizing the successful merely because they have success, stop it now. Be a man for once in your life, look in the mirror at who is responsible for the way your life turned out. Sit on your bed and look back on your life and examine all the actions you took and the choices you made that landed you where you currently are. You will see that your lack of success is 100% your fault, and it is 100% your responsibility to change that fact. Look at all the time you wasted in college studying English and watching television. It’s not a matter of “evil success just passing you by”, it’s a matter of you being stupid and failing to manage time properly.

Today that changes. Start researching how you can improve your value to your company or start developing marketable skills on the side and change your life. Don’t waste it watching television.

Research what the fastest growing fields are and become a master of one of them.

Technology is growing at an exponential rate, becoming proficient in any form of tech would increase your value to society. Healthcare is a field that will never reach a point where it is not needed, but most men do not have the work ethic for healthcare of any form.

It is up to you to discover what is valuable in the marketplace and then build your skillset to maximize your personal value.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

Foundation

Your foundation is built on yourself, and it is only as strong as your intrinsic motivation. If you still rely on mommy and daddy for answers, you have a problem.

What do you base your faith on? Why do you even have the faith? For most of the weak men in the church, the answer is, “because my parents taught me what to believe”. Last I checked, faith is an individual matter. It doesn’t care who your parents and grandparents were because every faith must be unique to the individual. If you base your faith on other people, your parents, significant other or Church members, then you have a pathetic faith. You should not have faith because of other people, it should be because of and for yourself. Human beings are a weak foundation to build anything on, much less a religious faith; every thinker since Machiavelli has known that.

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock, And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Matthew 7:24-27

“He who builds on the people, builds on the mud”
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Your foundation is built on yourself, and it is only as strong as your intrinsic motivation.

If you still rely on mommy and daddy for answers, you have a problem. The beta does these things, as does the Demominationalist; ask anyone from a denomination about a specific passage and they “have to ask their pastor”, because they are incapable of using their own minds and thinking for themselves. We have minds for the sole purpose of using them to make good decisions. We have minds with which we may build the faith.

The modern man in the Church is a disgrace. He sings about having a “Firm Foundation”, yet he has already built his house on the sand. He already cares too much about the world to have a strong faith. In his mind he knows he is only doing the minimum amount necessary to get by and hopes that God will let him slip on into heaven after life is done. Our foundation is our own, and we must build it ourselves. We must constantly build it every day or we will die. Lay the foundation of your faith in your own mind.

Mantra

My faith is my own. To mindlessly accept the knowledge of others is for the weak.

Application

Starting today, when you question the faith, don’t go to the internet or to some other Christian for answers, try to answer it yourself with your own mind. There is nothing wrong with getting help from others, however most people ask for help for the purpose of simply accepting whatever answer they get so they don’t have to do the difficult work of thinking. Mental laziness is the great evil we are trying to avoid. We must think through the faith on our own. Until we get to a point mentally where we always question what others say and write, then we should rely on ourselves for answers. We have to use our own minds. Don’t just accept what I write to you, think about it, because I could be dead wrong and you won’t know unless you think for yourself.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

Apathy

Gather all your skill and remember why you are doing the things you are doing. Apathy is born out of a lack of reason and purpose.

With age comes apathy, so it seems. The Church is filled with the apathetic, the people who think doing the least amount of work is acceptable. The people who are content to sit in the pew and do nothing; to never improve or progress. These are people who utterly and completely lack zeal in every aspect of their faith. They do not share the faith, they do not talk about the faith. You can count on one hand the contributions they have made to the Church over the past 50 years.

“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”
Revelation 3:16

“Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.”
Romans 12:11

These individuals put the “pathetic” in apathetic.

You must not be this individual. You must be the person who is focused and improving himself. Does this mean you are always going to feel like doing what is right or feel like sharing the gospel? Absolutely not. Emotions are for women and weak males. Zeal is focused effort on a task, and it is divorced from emotion.

Gather all your skill and remember why you are doing the things you are doing. Apathy is born out of a lack of reason and purpose. Make sure you have a purpose. Ensure that you have a reason. Apathy is a slow-rot disease, you will not notice how much you have decayed until you are destroyed by the small, trivial matters of life. You will be like a rotten tree that is blown over by a gentle breeze.

Apathy will continue to exist until it is opposed by an outside force. Men will be content in their ways until some event large enough to disrupt normal life knocks them onto their heads.

Mantra

Apathy is for the dead.

Application

The best way to face apathy is to recenter your focus on your goal. Take your mind and aim it at the end state that you want to achieve and focus on it. If you truly want to achieve that goal, you can be reignited mentally to get there. If you do not truly want to achieve that goal, you will experience burnout, lack of motivation and apathy.

Find out what your skills are.

“Following your passion” is a moronic phrase because most people do not know what their “passion” is. I say follow your skills and natural inclinations. What are your natural talents? Identify the goals that really motivate you to take action. Not everyone is going to be motivated to do what is right by the idea of heaven, many will be motivated by the fear of hell. To rid yourself of apathy you have to identify what really motivates you to take action.

Identify your true goals.

You will become apathetic if you spend your time trying to achieve your parent’s goals. Do not become a doctor or lawyer just because your friends and family tell you that you would be good at it. You must make a decision for yourself based on what you truly know about your own skills and what you want to achieve and spend your time doing in life. Creating an intrinsic purpose is the way to defeat apathy.

Conduct yourselves like men.

Service

Service is inconvenient. It is not really enjoyable. What most men in the Church call “service” looks weak and unmasculine. We have transformed service into something feminine, and then we are surprised when men want nothing to do with it.

“Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.”
John 12:26

Service requires a small ego, or at least the ability to pretend like the ego is small. Many personality types do not enjoy service, this is an unavoidable fact. Good. There is no need to enjoy doing the right thing, there is only the need to do it.

Service is inconvenient. It is not really enjoyable. What most men in the Church call “service” looks weak and unmasculine.

We have transformed service into something feminine, and then we are surprised when men want nothing to do with it.

The problem that many Church people have with service (as with many other spiritual actions) is the idea that everything we do must be some great, grand and glorious event and that is must feel good. We serve in “Community Outreach Day” when the entire Church comes out to make a big show to the community about how righteous they are. We are required to have these “Huge” Bible studies with people or take half the Church out to door-knock (which is the spiritual equivalent of putting money in a bank with 0.02% interest as a way to generate income).

What if we focused on consistent, small daily disciplines instead?

Just mention the Church to a coworker instead of smothering him with the gospel and having him hate you. Pray silently in public before your meal, that can be a conversation starter. Serving others does not have to be a ballroom dance complete with dresses and metro-sexual males.

Also, serving others can begin with serving yourself.

The man who checks himself into rehab or starts an Alcohol Anonymous program is absolutely taking several weeks to focus on himself, but he is doing it so that he can be better equipped to serve his family. No one would call that man selfish even though he will spend weeks in rehab. Because people understand that he is bettering himself so that he can be better for others. The same thing applies in the smaller aspects of life. You must improve yourself before you can expect people to want anything to do with you. You must improve your value to society if you want to be competitive in the marketplace and be able to support a family. Work on yourself so that you are no longer a loser.

Taking time to improve the self is a necessity. No one wants to be served by a loser.

Mantra

Service of Self is Service of others.

Application

Do not make a big deal about your service. Most people do not care, though a few might notice. When you serve, do it quietly and professionally. Serve in humility. Do the small things. Quote a verse to someone, but don’t mention the book, chapter and verse immediately. Just mention the Word. You are planting small seeds in the mind, not forcing them down the other person’s throat. The sower scattered the seed, He did not uproot the earth and force the seed down (Mark 4).

Conduct yourselves like Men.

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