Christianity Archives - Page 37 of 38

Endure The Pain of Change

The pain barrier breaks us down every time. The pain barrier makes us stop writing when we have 500 more words in our mind. It makes us stop running when we can go faster. It makes us stop lifting when there are a dozen more potential reps. Pain makes us binge watch on Netflix or eat sugar when we are emotional. It makes us fall back into comfortable addiction of sloth and lust.

It makes us do these things because we let it.

The pain embodies itself in the darkness, and in the isolation of quiet thought it attacks. When there are no other thoughts in the mind, the darkness will rush to fill it. Pain crashes upon the mind with an onslaught of vicious lies. It gags the mouth of positive reason and gouges out the eyes of hope in an instant. Pain slays the rational mind. Darkness tells you that the end result is not worth the renovation of character.

Still, most pain only exists in the mind. We suffer primarily in our imaginations, not in reality. The fear of pain is itself a pain so great that it shuts down any movement towards growth.

1 – The process of change is painful. The first instance of pain is the blow dealt to the ego that is the result of acknowledging a wrong. Change cannot begin until one realizes that some portion of his current character is insufficient. Humility must come into the mind before any change can begin. The ego is injured, it must take a seat.

To begin the change, you must suffer the pain of humility

2 – The second part of pain is beginning to shift away from ingrained behaviors that are the results of thousands of mindless actions. Mindless eating, video games, television and social media reading. The Mindless chatter of small talk. Mindless laziness and lies. All these things become automatized and take on a mind of their own in the unconscious and subconscious.

The automaton of habit is alive, and to engage it in battle is painful. You sustain injuries. The automaton was built by your actions over time. To destroy it is to destroy a part of yourself, this is painful.

Many stop fighting right here. When you stop fighting, you die.

Eventually you see the light at the end of the tunnel, if you persevere. The tables turn and the process of change swings to your favor. The automaton weakens and shrinks. His energy source is your personal weakness and it begins to vanish away. You see the value of perseverance and discipline. You begin to see the fruits of all your labor.

To defeat yourself, you must endure the pain of repeated failure and perseverance.

3 – If you destroy the old habit, you have to build a new one through conscious effort and discipline. Consistent Discipline over long periods of time. Actions should be consciously taken until they can be done without thought, this is habit. You are the New Being of character.

Building this character requires that you suffer the pain of patience.

4 – Even though the new character trait you have build is automatic, it still must be maintained. Joints must be lubricated and cleaned. Energy sources must be maintained. Parts and pieces must be adjusted, upgraded or replaced. The new character must never be left totally unsupervised. Because at any instant, one small action can send you spiraling back to the original behavior that you worked so hard to change. Character and habit have to be sustained over the lifespan.

To do this you must suffer the pain of endurance.

The pain of a change is for a moment, and maintaining a new habit requires much less effort. The benefits of positive change last a lifetime, and are worth the pain it took to build it from the ground.

Change is not the inspirational quote from a cheap devotional book. You cannot buy discipline from a devo book that roots itself in emotionalism. Emotions will not maintain your change for the long term. This is why mankind lacks the character refinement of the past.

There is no refinement without fire, and there is no fire in society today.

We have minimal persecution, non-existent problems. We have everything we need and still think we have it hard. There is no fire, so we have to provide our own. The fire is going to burn out the impurities of character, but it is also going to hurt us.

However, do not let the pain or the fear of pain scare you away from the gigantic potential for personal growth. Walk through the fire of change today if you want to know the peace of character tomorrow.

Spartan Christianity

Don’t be “Over-Saved”

There are way too many “icky”, Over-saved Christians.

Funny – Most are aware of this

There are Christians out in the world who are infinitely annoying. These are the people who can’t say a sentence without bringing Jesus into it. These people are masters of constantly shoving emotional ideas down your throat, and they usually have an accompanying Ph. D in Self-Righteousness.

Look, we all love Jesus, that doesn’t mean we have to end every sentence with His name.

How annoying would it be if you constantly did that with your husband’s or wife’s name? Common sense tells you not to do that. And nobody is going to want to sit around with you, holding hands and singing Kumbaya if you continue to be annoying.

If you want a surefire way to turn off everyone you meet from Christianity, be one of these annoying people. No one wants to sit by you in Church, you are annoying.

Let’s spell out what happens when other people interact with over-saved people.

After talking with the over-saved individual, they assume that if they become a Christian they have to act like them. That person thinks they will have to be over-saved as well. That instantly kills any desire that they have to become a Christian. They think, “If I have to become as annoying and fake as this guy who can’t go two seconds without talking about how Jesus did something miraculous in His life, then I will just not bother with this nonsense”.

The same principle applies to other religions. People see Muslims blowing themselves up and they think, “If I have to blow myself up to be a Muslim, I think I’ll pass on that one”.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t talk about Jesus, we definitely should, but even Jesus did not constantly talk about Jesus.

He realized the need to develop common ground with men through stories they could relate to before he added spirituality to the lesson.

I enjoy talking about Christ just as much as anyone, but I also realize you can burn out the conversation extremely quickly if you can’t leave Jesus alone. The same applies to every topic of conversation. You would quickly burn a person out if all you ever talked about was football. No one would want to hang out with you because you can’t go two seconds without talking about the game. Unless you are also one of those annoying people who can’t go two seconds without talking about the game. In that case Jim is by the water cooler, you guys can stay over there and talk about sports.

It’s not wrong to talk about Jesus, it is just annoying to not be able to go one sentence without forcing Jesus down someone’s throat. There are strategic ways to share the Gospel to other people without drowning them in your emotional highs.

The main problem with over-saved people is how fake they seem.

They don’t act like humans, they put on the facade of being immune to daily troubles and persecution. They are overly nice in a very forced, unnatural way. There is a fine line between an encouraging Christian and a Christian who is probably trying to sell you something based on their forced optimism.

You can find plenty of these people in mega churches. Now personally, I don’t really care what you believe, and you obviously don’t care what you believe either if you go to a mega church. You just work out your own salvation with trembling and fear. Or in Your case, with fog machines, rocks bands and strobe lights. All we ask is that you try to show some civility when sharing the gospel.

You wouldn’t run around promoting infatuation and adolescent “love” as solid grounds for a marriage relationship, yet you think that your emotional high is what makes your faith real.

The moral of the story: Don’t be over-saved because you will be really annoying and thus will convert very few people to Christianity. Focus on being a real person. Christianity is not an act, it’s a lifestyle. Christianity is not something we do, it’s something we are.

Spartan Christianity: Hardcore Christian Principles

Christianity is Unnatural

Have you ever wondered why you don’t want to do what is right? Most of the commands you read in the Bible go against what you want to do, what you naturally desire to do. Why is that? Because Christianity is unnatural.

Maybe you have some Christian principles mastered. It could be that you aren’t tempted to steal or to murder. Maybe you aren’t tempted to drink alcohol or do drugs. Before you go on your merry way thinking you are a good person, you are probably an arrogant gossip machine and chronic liar.

Strength in some areas of spirituality does not mean strength in all areas.

There are Christians principles that are hard for some and easy for others. What is really going on with these more difficult principles such as loving your enemies? Why are you tempted to do wrong?

Temptation is a desire for something, meaning that if you are tempted to steal, it is because you desire to steal. Why does it seem that you are naturally inclined to do what is wrong? Because Christianity itself is unnatural, and that is a good thing.

You’ve heard the saying, “If it was easy, then everyone would be doing it”. The same thing applies to Christianity.

If it was easy – if living a godly life was natural – everyone would be Christians.

If the Christian walk were easy, Jesus would not have said, “Take up your cross and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

Does picking up a cross and carrying it around sound easy? The principle of a strenuous life is right here in scripture. we are not called to live easy lives and as a result we will be heavily tempted to “Throw down the cross” and live how we want to. Which is what so many other people do, they are know as atheists.

I’ve addressed this before, but monogamy is is not natural in animals. Now before you go off trying to say things like “Oh but what about doves and swans? They have one partner for life”, I would urge you to read the very bottom of this article:

Here is an excerpt:

“In fact, David Barash, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, wants to shatter the “myth of monogamy” altogether. He claims that almost every darn reported case of monogamy in the animal kingdom has been proved wrong at some point upon closer inspection, with infidelity by one or both partners in the coupling.”

The sole purpose of mating is to ensure survival of a species, and the best way to ensure survival is to have sex with as many mates as possible.

Monogamy is therefore unnatural, but it is commanded by God. Not only monogamy, but complete abstinence until marriage. Only a complete moron would tell you that abstinence is easy and natural. They likely don’t have a choice in the matter of abstinence (incel).

Ever tried loving your enemies? That doesn’t come naturally for most people. When an “enemy” says something unkind to you or treats you badly, you have a flood of negative emotions toward that person. The emotions themselves are irrelevant, as an individual’s emotional state does not matter in regards to salvation.

So it is natural to have negative emotions towards an enemy, and it is the actions that one takes in response to those emotions that determine whether or not we love our enemies.

Ask any old dude who has been married for fifty years, he will tell you that love is a verb. Love is an action, not a feeling.

Loving enemies is about taking action towards their well-being (This includes not punching them in their annoying faces), not having magical warm and fuzzy feelings about them. Unless you think that Jesus had warm and fuzzy feelings about the Pharisees…

The idea of the id is that it is the part of our conscious mind that seeks pleasure and wants to avoid pain. So when experiencing pain as the result of an enemy treating you badly, the id remembers that painful experience and strongly seeks to avoid that situation again. This is why it is so hard to smile at the person who is always making negative comments about you, because it is unnatural to love our enemies.

Turning the other cheek. I really shouldn’t have to say anything about this one.

If someone hits you, you naturally want to hit them back. That’s nature.

But we weren’t called to be natural, we were called to be above our natural instincts and obey God.

Do you know what faith is? Yeah yeah, we all know faith is “The substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen“. But what is it on a level that we can understand? I have no idea. It can’t be tested in the lab or thrown under the microscope. I can’t see it or touch it or taste it.

In my understanding, the basic concept of faith is that it is what bridges the gap between knowledge and God. If we understood everything in the world, the Bible and about God, then we wouldn’t need faith; but personal knowledge can only get us so far in our understanding before we must turn to faith to cover the remaining distance between God and what we know about the God.

Faith being non-present in the animal kingdom, and not being based our own personal knowledge or understanding must, therefore, be unnatural. And without faith it is impossible to please Him.

Therefore, in order to please God we must be unnatural beings.

It is natural to seek benefits for oneself. It is not natural to humbly submit to a higher authority. Submission to God is not natural, as it is not present in the animal kingdom.

Selfishness is natural, self-sacrifice is not. Christ calls for the latter to be present in us all.

Laws of entropy apply to everything. Just as the universe wears down over time, so does the mind. Without energy input, personal growth stagnates, men become complacent and eventually begin to deteriorate. So maybe at the creation of the earth man had desire to do what is right, and over thousands of years that desire deteriorated, or maybe doing what is right is unnatural.

Perhaps Christianity itself is unnatural.

I say to you that Christianity is definitely unnatural, and that is good. If it was easy, all sorts of losers would be waltzing into heaven. We prove our worth to the Creator by self-denial. We have to do what is unnatural, and what we don’t want in order to obey God. By His commands, God is saying to us “If you love me, you will do what you don’t want to do in order to get to heaven”.

Man is two parts, a duality: one part eternal soul, one part temporary body. The body, the flesh wants what is natural, but the soul is supernatural, meaning it is “Above Nature“, and it seeks to return to God. Animals have no souls therefore they are only flesh, and they do want is natural. They kill each other, steal from each other, and spread their genes excessively. Christianity is unnatural to the physical body, but is compatible with the soul. This is where those internal battles are coming from, bodily desires that are at war with the soul.

“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” Mark 14:38

“I say then, walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, so that you do not do the things that you wish” Galatians 5:16-17

So deny yourself, take up the cross, be a physically unnatural person all the days of your life, but be supernatural in your soul.

Spartan Christianity: Hardcore Christian Principles.

The REAL Reason You Do Not Believe in God

“All of a sudden, our inner animal secretly wants God to not exist, because then we can engage in whatever animalistic activities we want with no retribution. It is this desire for no consequences for actions that is the cornerstone of atheism”.

You want all the Sex you can have.

Let us be clear, evolution and the origin of life and matter do not work from the atheistic perspective. It makes no rational sense to believe in macro-evolution, or in the random, unintelligent spontaneous generation of the universe. The atheistic standpoint violates the law of causality and rationality. It also violates the law of biogenesis and the first and second law of thermodynamics.

Spontaneous generation of matter violates the First law of Thermodynamics.
The eternality of Matter violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The generation of life from non-life in the primordial soup violates the law of Biogenesis.
The Big Bang and unintelligent spontaneous generation of life and matter violate the law of causality.
Any conclusion which cannot be warranted by the evidence is irrational. Therefore, atheism and evolution are irrational by definition of the law of rationality.

Atheism is scientifically absurd. Unscientific is a better term for it. Atheists know this, yet they still grasp at straws in a vain attempt to hold on to their beliefs. They do this while pointing the Christians, calling them the irrational ones. Why would any rational person do this?

They want to do what they want. They want to do it when they want. And they want to have no one to answer to for any of the actions that they take.

There has to be some personal motivating factor that pushes individuals to deny the existence of God. There is, and it is called “Sex”.

No Christian will deny that there are many times when they have lapses of faith and they doubt God. Most of the time this is the result of wanting to do your own thing. No one questions their faith because there is a good argument for evolution. Good arguments for evolution can still be refuted.

Usually a questioning of one’s faith is a result of hearing some argument from the atheistic perspective in conjunction with a massive personal temptation to do wrong. All of a sudden, our inner animal secretly wants God to not exist. Because then we can engage in whatever animalistic activities we want with no retribution. It is this desire for no consequences, responsibility and endless pleasure that is the cornerstone of atheism.

Evolution doesn’t make scientific sense, but sex certainly does.

“I want God to not exist because I want to have sex with as many people as I want. And I want to have no one to answer to on account of that sex”

Atheism is absurd, but the desire to self-medicate the sorrows of life with alcohol and cocaine certainly sounds great when we are at our lowest points, don’t they? I can use those drugs and anything else I want if there is no God.

God Commands His children to be sober in mind and body (I Peter 5:8), which is no problem when everything in life is easy. But when depression hits you in the face like a ton of bricks, all of a sudden that “joy in a bottle” begins to look very friendly. And the idea of a God who wants us to walk through the pain of these experiences with nothing to ease that sorrow begins to look much more distasteful.

Back to evolution for a moment: Spontaneous generation of life doesn’t make sense. But when we hate our neighbor (which we do) and want to kill him (which we have definitely been tempted to do or we would not have been commanded NOT to kill each other), it seems like a valid argument. Even though it is highly irrational to want to do so. If our neighbor is not the embodied manifestation of an eternal soul and is only a highly evolved bacterium, then there is nothing wrong with killing him off.

The concept of the Big Bang is stupid, but when you have to get up to go to Church Every single Sunday, the idea looks tempting.

When you are sick and tired of being around other humans, skipping Church sounds nice.

If you have your nagging conscious judging how you feel about other people (“Love thy neighbor, Jim”), and you are sick of the fake, icky “Christians” that pollute the church, it would be so much easier to accept that there is no God and sleep in on Sunday.

We doubt God because we do not desire to do what is right, it is as simple as that. You could hear about spirituality, duality and other new age nonsense with no evidence, but principles are usually very basic. This does make them easy, only simple.

The basic concept is that atheism cannot stand scientifically. Therefore, any and all attempts to prove or maintain atheistic beliefs are actually the misplaced attempts to justify a life full of pleasure, ease, and selfishness. So you want to know the real reason why you don’t believe in God? It’s not because it makes any sense to be an atheist. It’s because you want to do what you want to do when you want to do it, and never have to answer for anything you do in your life.

Spartan Christianity: Hard Core Christian Principles

SEX – Why Kids are Leaving the Church

“However, human sexuality itself is irrevocably intertwined with faith and the church.”

Why are kids leaving the Church? Easy, they think married Christians never have sex.

Leaving

It is literally that simple. You see Christians all the time, and they can be the most miserable people you will ever meet . You would think that someone who is looking forward to eternal life with unlimited joy and pleasure could afford to crack a smile at least once a decade. But no, there is no smiling in the King James Version.

Christians have this habit of rejecting a great deal of what science has to say simply because there are a boatload of atheists involved in science.

This includes its suggestions on the nature of human beings.

Let’s be clear, what separates humans from animals is that we are made in the image of God. We have speech, originate thoughts, art and inventions, and have innate morality. Sure, you can go deeper than just those few examples, but in general those are what separate us from the animals. But we are still like animals in many ways.

We have animalistic desires and impulses, it is our morality that keeps those in check. We want to have sex, we want to perpetuate our genetic material, it’s completely natural. But Christian parents like to pretend otherwise, and this is why kids leave the church.

The young generation sees that the world has tons of sex and that their parents and ‘Churchy’ people around them aren’t having any.

Who wants to be a part of a group of people know as “the Church” if they think it is is made up of miserable married people who never have sex? No one. Look back at the 20 year old version of yourself and imagine how you would respond if you thought that married Christians don’t have sex. You would want to follow the route that maximizes your chance to perpetuate your genetic material.

We know you would like to pretend that you were asexual even in your 20’s, but it’s not true. You were a raging ball of hormones just like everyone else. Physiology hasn’t changed, folks. There is no evolution in the chemical makeup of human beings. You are supposed to be the people who are anti-evolution, so then accept that hormones haven’t evolved either.

The problem in the modern world is that culture is hyper-sexual. So sexual activity that seems normal to the older generation now seems asexual and boring by comparison.

But for those individuals who are unmarried, how do they know what is normal and what is not normal sexual activity? Sex twice a week? Once a week? Four times? Once a month? Three times then skip for menstruation?

Oh right, your wife has chronic headaches. It’s definitely a “medical condition” and not a lack of you tending to her emotional needs as the wife. What is normal sexual frequency in the bedroom? In the minds of unmarried Christian kids leaving the Church, it looks like “Zero times per year”. How many kids does a couple have? Two? Then they had sex twice. It’s pretty obvious they haven’t had any more sex given how miserable they are.

This issue of kids being uninformed about the marriage bed is made worse by the English translation of certain Bible passages.

Hebrews 13:4 “The marriage bed is undefiled, but fornicators and adulterers God will judge”.

Congratulations, the marriage bed is “undefiled”. As great as that may be, it’s not exactly exciting or encouraging in the way that it is stated. It’s like saying “Yeah, you are allowed to do this thing. It won’t kill you or anything”. It’s not saying “Yes, do this thing often and enjoy it and don’t feel guilty about it because it is a gift!”. This translation comes off as very passive. It makes it sounds like, “Well, if you have to do it, then marriage is okay for that sex stuff”. This is not what the young generation needs to hear if you want them to stay in the Church

If you were in your 20’s why would you want to stay in the Church? Based on the fact that Christian adults never talk about sex you wouldn’t want to? In Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs sexual intimacy is right above food, water and shelter/security. And it just so happens that Christian couples aren’t “getting any”.

Let us also be clear, sex and sexual intimacy are different. Intimacy implies romantic love. Sex without this love is primal and lower tier on the hierarchy of needs.

If you knew that all you had to look forward to as a Christian was a sexless marriage then why would you stay in the Church when people in the world are seemingly having tons of sex?

If this “Heaven” is going to be just as “enjoyable” as the “romance-less” marriages we see around us, then why would we care to go there?

It doesn’t matter that millennials are having less sex than any of the previous generations (Millennials Have Less Sex). They think that Christians do not enjoy their marriages based on the image portrayed by modern Christians.

So what is this lofty “Image” portrayed by Christians that I keep talking about? At the core, it is the refusal of Christians to talk about sex at all. Christians think that it is better to be silent on the matter of sexuality than to walk through the discomfort and potential embarrassment of talking about sex with young Christians. And as a result, the young Christians assume, “Well if they never talk about it, they must never do it”. Yes, this thought process is irrational, but so is the thought process that results in the fear of frogs. People still fear frogs anyways.

Rationality does not apply here, we are talking about the minds of millennials.

The silence of the Church on the matter of sex causes millennial Christians to be uneducated about it. Guess what happens when young Christians are not taught the truth by the Church? They learn the “truth” from the world and society.

Who do you want teaching your kids about sex: your preacher, or Lady Gaga? Elders, or fraternity bothers? Strong, faithful, loving husbands or (insert stereotypical rap “artist” here)? Kind, patient, open wives or the Kardashians?

Common sense tells you that it is better to learn from the Church. Strong members of the church should be educating the youth, not society. The sexual silence of religious individuals must be broken. Kids need to know that there is a reason for the heavy regulation of sex in the Bible. If the youth think that sex is not worth the wait, then they will have no reason to wait for marriage. They will have no reason to stay in the church.

We are not suggesting that marriage is all about sex.

What we are saying is that young Christians have no idea about sexuality because individuals in the Church are too afraid and uncomfortable to tell them. The youth will never know if it’s worth the wait. They are not going to gamble on committing eternally to one person for something that may not be worth it. Christians need to start telling young people in the Church the truth about what happens in the bedroom if they want kids to stop leaving. It is literally as simple as that.

Is this the only reason that the young generation is leaving the church? No. Is this a major reason why they are leaving the Church? Definitely.

Spartan Christianity: Hardcore Christian Principles

Page 37 of 38

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