Masculinity Archives - Page 7 of 15

Hatred of Sin

In order to beat evil, many times you need to channel the power of the hatred of evil.

“O you who love the Lord, hate evil! He preserves the lives of his saints; he delivers them from the hand of the wicked”
Psalm 97:10

“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.”
Romans 12:9

“Save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.”
Jude 1:23

It is sometimes necessary to conjure extreme emotions in order to take action. People do this all the time. They watch motivational videos online to motivate themselves to train, study, work or to do just about anything. Motivation is what people look for constantly. Motivation is a motive to action. It is never wrong to have motives that press you towards an action, it only matters what that action is. Right and wrong are based on action, not motive. Motive is sometimes an emotion and sometimes it is logic.

In order to defeat some sins, or to have the motivation to beat some sins, you have to conjure an extremely powerful emotion(s) to fight it.

Men have done this from the dawn of time. Some men use anger to overpower their fear so that they can charge into battle and kill the enemy. They don’t conjure up some weak emotion like “love”. Everyone knows that “love” in the emotional state is a weak pile of garbage. It accomplishes nothing and provides no lasting motivation. It’s popularized by liberals who wallow in their imperfection and think it is fashionable to do so. You need the power of hatred. Specifically, the hatred of evil.

In order to beat your lust, you need to hate the pornography you are looking at every day. You must hate the social media outlets where you consume it. Yes, Instagram is just a porn source.

In order to stop drinking alcohol once and for all, you must hate that disgusting compound you put into your body. It both looks and smells like urine.

Now I know when it comes to extreme addictions like these, it will require more than just your hatred of the sin, but do not forget to include hatred of sin in the recipe for change.

Hate the Sin.

Be a Man.

Mantra

Hate the Sin, Destroy the Sin

Application

Man is angry by his nature. This is a result of testosterone. To deny this fact is to deny reality. Man cannot help his inclination to anger, but he can stop himself from expressing his anger in a less than ideal manner. So instead of lashing out with the hatred welling in your soul, learn to convert that hatred into a productive energy source.

Direct the hate towards your own imperfection. The challenge is to hate the sinful part of yourself without hating yourself as an individual. You must only hate the characteristics that are making you a weak man. Turn that energy of hate into the change of character that you need. Hate is a useful emotion, just direct it at your imperfections instead of at other people.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Ease

No growth of the individual ever came through ease.

“How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep?”
Proverbs 6:9

The path of least resistance is popular among weak individuals. In physics, the idea is that a moving object proceeds down some path, and when it has to decide which direction to go, it always “chooses” the one with the least resistance. If a ball is rolling along a path, it will go the direction that has the least friction. Or it will go towards the lower elevation. Or if it has the option of going down two trails, it will pick the one that is the easiest to start going down – This is natural law.

It is natural to want to take the path of least resistance, but we must reject much of what is natural. We must resist the natural urge to impregnate every single female we see. The sexual urge is natural but not moral. We must resist the natural desire to lash out in anger, for anger must be contained. We resist that natural desire to conserve energy and be sluggish.

Many of the actions our human nature pulls us toward must be avoided.

Christians love taking it easy. Everyone loves it. But it does not promote growth of the individual. Ease promotes more ease. More ease promotes decay of body, mind and character. It never gives you what it promises: rest, peace of mind, healing. It only gives you anxiety and stress, because you know you are not accomplishing the tasks you need to be when you are taking it easy. You are not keeping your disciplines. Your character is not being built. You are not growing the mind.

Taking it easy is only comforting if you have earned it.

You don’t earn it by sitting in your 9-5 job, that usually never brings any form of satisfaction. You don’t earn the comfort of ease by taking more of it. Ease is earned by doing something difficult.

It is difficult to work hard enough to earn the comfort that ease can provide. Most weak men do not know what it is like to generate that kind of work. You may not know what it is like either. Unless you really earn it, there is no benefit to ease, and it does not even satisfy.

Reject ease.

Be a Man.

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life Speech

Mantra

Ease serves no purpose.

Application

Reject most forms of ease. It profits nothing unless you have truly been at the grind for an extended period of time. Remind yourself that it does not build character nor does it improve you. The only time it is necessary is when you are truly fatigued and need a break. Those times will be very infrequent, so do not assume you are fatigued.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Integrity

“Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his ways crooked will be found out.”
Proverbs 10:9

“Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways.”
Proverbs 28:6

“The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them.”
Proverbs 11:3

Character is the internal code of an individual. Integrity is sticking to that code of conduct regardless of who is watching. There could be no one watching, but you still practice everything you preach.

You pick up the straw wrapper you dropped.

You take the shopping cart back.

On all your jobs you use your best effort and complete tasks to the best of your ability, even the ones you impose on yourself.

Even the small tasks around your home.

Do you clean the whole kitchen, or just the visible parts of it?

Do you dust around the picture frame or do you pick it up and clean the entire dresser?

Are all of your jobs done right?

These are the basic questions that give you a direct view into who you are as an individual. Are you the kind of person who takes shortcuts to avoid doing that little bit of extra work? Are you the type of person to use the phrase “good enough”? If you are that weak man, then today is the day you begin to cast off that old man of sloth and sluggishness. The Church has enough weak men already, you do not need to add yourself to their numbers.

You are the kind of man who does everything to the best of your ability.

It doesn’t matter who is watching. It does not matter if you have an audience of 50,000 people or if you are completely isolated. Integrity ensures that you are the same man in both situations. Integrity guarantees that you have consistent character over time, that your word has value, that you always follow through and do what you say you will do.

These philosophies are embedded within you. Like anything else, once you begin to apply these actions and disciplines consistently over time, they eventually become habit, and require no more willpower.

You take back that shopping cart without even thinking about it, it’s programmed into your character. Once programmed into character, it is there forever. That is the beauty of discipline and habits. You work hard to build them over long periods of life, then they are fit to stand the test of time for years to come. Don’t be discouraged by how long it takes to build the habit, because eventually you will be profiting from the compound interest of life.

Character takes a shopping cart back to the store. Integrity takes the cart back at night when it’s dark, no one can see you, and you were the only shopper.

Character picks up the trash it drops. Integrity picks up the trash even when no one saw who dropped it in the first place.

Have Character. Get Integrity. Be a Man.

Mantra

Even if no one sees me, I do what is right.

Application

The application is simple. Keep to your character even if you are alone. This is the way of men. There are few principles more foundational for building yourself as a man than these of integrity and character.

Time may take your health, your mind, your sight, your hearing and your wealth, but your character will last forever. Your character will continue to impact other people long after you are dead if you build it correctly. Start building integrity today, reap the benefits tomorrow.

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.

Youth

“Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.”
1 Timothy 4:12

“Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.”
Ecclesiastes 11:9

Youth is the painful transition from childhood to adulthood. In the minds of the youth, life goes from bad to worse. Childhood was great, adolescence is uncomfortable, and adulthood is a living nightmare. Where is all the joy that the Church talks about?

This realization that for most people life goes downhill causes the youth up to making all kinds of errors. Youth is a chance to get ahead of everyone around you, but most young people squander it. Instead of trying to make progress, most young men try to dilute the pain of becoming adults. They try to make everything they experience less painful and more pleasurable. It is as if the id resurfaces to be just as prominent as it was when they were toddlers. Chances are that young men who try to take the edge off early will continue on that habit.

Remember: Weak men take the edge off. Strong men get the edge.

All around you, males are wasting their time.

They chase girls to no profitable end.

They squander hours on social media.

Males waste weeks looking at porn.

They attempt moronic stunts in order to climb the dominance hierarchy.

For these reasons, any and all progress you make in your own life puts you light years ahead of the competition.

You don’t waste your time.

You get up early and read or write.

Every day you train your body.

Every day you train your mind.

You practice your instruments and you study.

Consistently you gain knowledge and wisdom.

You memorize huge portions of scripture.

Over time this constructive use of time will add up to be the differential between a failed beta male in a pew, and you – a masculine Spartan Christian. All the incredibly masculine men you look up to are nothing more than the cumulative result of the small masculine actions they have taken. They took good action early in life and ended as an inspiration.

Most males take poor action and are forgotten or despised. You must be a man. It is your responsibility to be disciplined and focused at all times. You must never give any room or foothold to the devil. You must be masculine always. Do not waste your youth. Get ahead of the curve. Be a man.

Mantra

Get the edge while there is time

Application

Most likely you wasted your youth. There is still time for improvement. Never get to a point in life where you look back and wish you had spent your time in a wiser manner and as a result you never change anything in the present moment.

If you are young, get to work right now. You have time on your side in developing key traits of character and manhood that most never develop. The traits and characteristics outlined in this book are idealistic descriptions of the most masculine man possible.

Apply lessons and ideals.

Read books.

Gain knowledge.

Build skill.

Acquire marketable ability.

Gain one positive, masculine characteristic at a time. Once the masculine trait is automated, then you add another. This is how you use youth to your advantage. This is how you use any time to your advantage. Take advantage of the compound interest of a well invested youth. You must always make progress, this is mandatory.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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