Practicum Archives - Page 2 of 9 - Spartan Christianity

The Desire Factor – What do You Want?

I – Failure Often Comes From Lack of Desire

Desires are different from wants. We want different things all the time, and those wants eventually fade away. If a want does not fade away, or if it continually resurfaces, then it is not a want, but a desire. Desires will outlast wants and be more beneficial to us in our lives. We will act on our desires, and continue to act on them over the long run, even when they fade from time to time.

This is why it is critically important to uncover what our desires truly are so we can pursue them to completion.

Whenever you fail catastrophically in life, it is often due to the fact that you did not desire your goal strongly enough. This is not always true, but it applies in many cases. Perhaps you became comfortable, stopped giving the appropriate amount of effort to your pursuits, and eventually failed. While the occasional failure is inevitable and very helpful in reigniting our spirits, longer-lasting failure comes from fading desire.

When you are pursuing anything in life, you must always ask yourself what you want and why you want what you are chasing it.

Often we chase what we do not even want. We desire different things for different reasons. But all in all, desires can be boiled down into two major, overarching categories: external and internal desires.

You must constantly be assessing your desires to determine if they are internally or externally generated. Internal desires (things you personally want for your own reasons) will be more resilient to failure and difficulty than external desires (things you want because other people want them for you).

Now there is nothing wrong with the occasional external desire. We get a large amount of work done in our lives because of externally generated desires. It is not a stretch to suggest that most of our lives are filled with fulfilling the desires of those around us rather than our own, and that is where it goes too far.

Most kids grow up having no idea why they should go to school. But they are told to do so, so they do. Maybe later in life, they can think of a few half-hearted reasons why their education was valuable. But most kids go to school to fulfill external desires, which is one of the many reasons they learn so little.

External desires are large in number but lead to less powerful results than internal desires.

Internal Desire	External Desire
Going to medical school because you want to be a doctor.	Going to medical school because your parents want you to be a doctor.
Engaging with the youth group because you enjoy it and find value in it.	Engaging with the youth group so you don’t get made fun of and can make your parents happy.

Societal and Cultural Pressure vs. Internal Desire

Also, you must differentiate between societal or cultural pressures and internal desires. Again, this is not to rag on societal pressure. Some of that type of pressure is valuable for an individual. The external societal pressure can keep us working hard and focusing on valuable components of the community. It only becomes a problem when virtually all of our desires are externally generated and nothing about our unique self remains.

Outside sources of desire can squash individuality and confuse people with regard to their desires. When most individuals have the vast majority of their wants and desires generated from outside sources. They lose the ability to discern between what they want and what others want for them. Most people would confuse their own desires with the desires that have been generated by their friends and family.

What we come to realize is that external wants fade away with time.

The tragedy is that most people lock themselves into a specific life based on externally generated goals and cannot leave even when the superficial desire fades away. Many men marry the wrong woman, select the wrong career, and live the wrong life because they made permanent, life-long decisions while buried in emotionalism. They made permanent decisions based on external wants that will fade with time. Their parents wanted them to be doctors and their friends wanted them to get married. So they made long-lasting commitments based on the short-lasting desire to please others. Then once those desires fade, they are left with nothing but the shadow of a life that could have been and the regret that their deepest desires will never be realized.

This is the tragic lot of most men. The man who finds himself in this life circumstance will lie awake in the dark hours of the night, mourning over the loss of his life.

When you are determining if you truly want something, you need to ask yourself “why” at least five times. Best case scenario, none of the answers will involve third parties. If any of the answers do involve third parties, you should make yourself aware that you are making poor decisions based on outside sources. Make sure you will be able to correct your course and choice in the future if you are even somewhat unsure about your choice in the present. Do not make any major, life-long decisions if any of your answers to the question of “why” involve outside pressures.

Asking yourself why will uncover the nature of your desire and make you aware of if this goal is yours or if it is someone else’s.

Again, it is okay to have a few externally generated wants and goals in life. But as men, we should work at all times to make sure those external wants are the minority of our life goals.

Lastly, you must ask yourself what you truly want. When you begin to ask yourself what you want, dozens of answers (or no answers) may bubble up to the surface. It is your job to sift through all of these answers and make sure the things you want in life are truly the things you want. You must discover whether you have true internal desires or fleeting external wants. There are no right and wrong answers. These questions are just meant to help guide your mind and life.

II – Difficulty Erases False Desire

When inevitable difficulties come your way, false dreams will fall away while true desires will hold firm. Difficulty was created for us to fine-tune what we want and to keep us on the correct life paths. We all encounter difficulty from time to time, and this is a good thing. It keeps us focused and centered on our most valuable missions that are congruent with our individuality. If we do not truly desire something, then the want will simply fade away. Difficulty helps accelerate that process.

When difficulty hits us, we get to decide what facets of our life are actually worth the difficulty involved, and what facets of our lives are made better by difficulty. Those components of our work and life that are difficult and frustrating are like flares pointing us towards our mission. If we are still motivated and interested in what we are doing despite the difficulty, then we can know we are on one of the correct paths for our life.

It is not bad when your desire fades with pain – use this as a tool to guide you towards a better life path. The only time this becomes a problem is when you give up everything you ever try the moment you encounter difficulty. Difficulty was designed to make us better, to refine us, and to guide us. It is okay when it prunes unnecessary desires as long as a few keystone desires remain.

III – It is Acceptable to Have Very Few Desires

In the course of weeding out false desires, you may find that there is not much you want. This is acceptable. It is more than acceptable to have very few wants in life.

Think back to life right after the fall of man. Do you think Adam and Eve had many wants? They likely had very few wants because there were very few things to want. There literally were not enough things on the earth to desire. But now in this day and age, there is more to desire than could ever be experienced in a lifetime. And there is much we want to experience simply because we do not want to miss out on experiencing it (fear of missing out – FOMO).

But if we return to our roots, to the basic components of humanity and masculinity, we may discover that we actually do not want much at all. And this is acceptable.

After recognizing that there is not much you truly desire, be willing to accept that you will not get the results. You may superficially desire something because of the potential results that you see flashed before your eyes in public or on social media, but you do not truly want it. Because you do not truly want it you will not work for it and you will not earn it. Accept that you will have to live without anything you are not willing to trade a proportionate amount of effort to receive. Once you accept this, you are on your way to a life of contentment.

Ask yourself if you can live without those results – Most people can live without most of the results that are achievable.

This is why they remain in poor physical, mental, and financial shape. It is abundantly clear what must be done for anyone to get in better physical shape. It is also very clear what must be done to get into better financial shape. Yet why do so few people do either of these things? Simply because they are unwilling to trade the proportionate amount of effort in order to achieve the results. And they are unwilling to invest this proportionate amount of effort because their desire is insufficient. They will never achieve the results because the desire is not there. And there is a myriad of reasons why the desire is not there.

It is okay if your few remaining desires are superficial. You will not be the perfect, deep spiritual being you want to be. Accept it and attempt to leverage it into something better. Even if your desires are superficial, at least you know what you truly want. That is more than can be said for the majority of humanity.

IV – Find your Desires

Spend time alone. The truest self will bubble to the surface when you are alone, far from the prying eyes of external expectations. You are never going to figure out what you really want if you are constantly generating your desires based on outside influence. Get yourself away from their prying eyes and begin to think about who and what you are.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

1 – When no one can see you, who are you?

When you are far away from people and no longer have to invest mental, emotional, and physical energy into pretending to be something you are not, who are you? And when your entire false reality fades away and you no longer have to put on your mask, who are you? This is a critical question to answer about yourself because it will tell you about your core beliefs and values. And once those are known, you can ask yourself if you want to modify them or change them altogether.

2 – When no one can see you, who do you want to be?

When you are away from all the pressures of friends and family telling you who and what to be, who do you truly want to be? You may find that when you ask yourself this question, the voices of your parents, grandparents, or friends at church will answer. You need to shut out those voices. Continue to ask yourself the question, but tell yourself that you will only accept answers from yourself. No outside sources are allowed to contribute their inane opinion about you.

3 – Ask yourself, who must you be?

You have a specific uniqueness built into your individuality that only you can realize and develop to the fullest. Listen to that still, small voice in the back of your head that has always known the best life paths for you. Maybe you have not bothered listening to that voice since you were a little kid and the world was exciting. You need to start asking yourself who you must be.

What is your unique gift to bring to the world? No one can answer this but you. And you may get no answer for a long time as you ask yourself this question. You have spent so long living for the interest of others that you have forgotten how to live for yourself. But if you are patient, and continue to ask yourself who you must be, you will eventually begin to find answers. And these answers will be critical tools for you to choose life paths.

Also remember that there is no single, correct path for your life. You have many unique talents and abilities, and there are multiple right paths that you could take with your life. What you are attempting to do with these exercises is make sure that you do not waste time going down the many wrong paths that are also available. There are many more wrong paths than right paths. And if you only listen to outside sources and have external wants, then you will make many errors with regard to your life paths.

Here is a step-by-step exercise for you:

Take your journal, find the nearest forest and go spend alone time in it. Leave your phone and all other distractions behind you.
Wait for the paranoia to surface and settle.
Do not stimulate the mind.
Think of running water and allow the mind to settle.
Ask yourself the important introspective questions. You will not get an answer at first. Continue to ask and answers will begin to bubble up.
Ask questions until you are satisfied that the answeres that bubbled up are your own and no one else’s.
Repeat this practice regularly, as it is easy to forget who you are and what you awant, especially after living a life where you are defined by those around you and by their desires.

Find your desires, make them your own, then trade the proportionate amount of work for those desires.

1 Verse a Day Beats 0 Verses a Day

There are a lot of Bible reading programs out there that want you to read several chapters of the Bible every day. I think that is awesome. It is noble and a good hard mental workout, so to speak.

The problem is that most people simply do not have the mental fitness to tolerate that kind of program yet. It would be great if they did, but it is simply too hard for them.

Most Christian are not reading their Bibles at all. So to go from zero verses a day to several hundred is a massive step.

Would you expect a person who has never worked out before to be able to start a professional-level training plan? They would kill themselves just attempting it. But even though we understand that you have to gradually build physical fitness, we forget that we have to do the same thing with mental fitness.

Sure, you could do that “all in” approach and make your training into a military boot camp. But most people will fail if they attempt to do that. It is just too much work. Even in military boot camp, the recruits sustain stress fractures because the workload is increased so dramatically compared to their baseline fitness that their bones do not have time to recover and adapt.

People start these Bible reading programs and almost instantly get stress fractures of the mind. The second they hit Leviticus, their motivation wanes and their new habit fails. This is because they did not have the habit built strongly enough to sustain that difficult section of reading.

Instead of slowly building up their ability to read and forming the habit of reading every day, they just right into a sprint.

Have you ever seen what happens when someone tries to jump on a treadmill that is already at top speed? The result is hilarious 100% of the time. Many people do the same thing with bible reading and have the exact same subsequent faceplant when it comes to their habits.

What is a man to do?

Here is a core principle for you to remember. 1 Verse per day is infinitely more than 0 verses per day. How much more work does the person who reads one verse per day complete compared to the person who reads zero verses? He does infinitely more work.

Reading just 1 verse per day already puts you ahead of 80% of the religious world.

Just 1 verse per day makes it easy and simple to get into the daily habit of reading your Bible.

Now is one verse anything to write home about? Not really. It is not impressive at all. But imagine that – doing something unimpressive already puts you in the 80th percentile. 15 seconds of work per day puts you ahead of 80% of Christians.

Of course, you do not want to indefinitely just read one verse per day. Once you firmly establish the habit and become the type of person who reads the Bible every day, you can start to increase your workload. And that is exactly what you are doing: you are becoming the type of person who reads the Bible every day. Get out of your mind the idea that you have to read massive amounts of scripture at once. You do not need to start out that way – but you do need to work up to it.

Start building the habit each and every day. There is no need to make a massive change. Make the smallest change that you can maintain with ease.

Starting a habit should be easy. It should not stay easy, but it should certainly start easy. Starting easy allows you to build momentum and confidence. It ensures that you are not missing any of your daily repetitions. Repetition is the key to habit formation.

Once you have been able to string together at least one month of Bible reading without fail, then you can start to add volume to your reading. It will be challenging, but it will be much easier and more sustainable than if you had tried to add all the reading onto your plate at once.

I love any kind of habits that can put you above average with small amounts of startup cost. this is one of those habits that will pay dividends if you can learn to create it.

Stop making excusing and living as one of the 80%. Pick up your bible and start putting in one verse per day. Increase the reading volume after 1 month, and never look back.

Read on: Common Core of Religion

Evaluate Yourself to Improve

One of the mistakes that we all make yet is easily correctable is that we never evaluate ourselves. We never analyze our performance, behavior, or thoughts and look at what we are doing well and what we need to improve. This is partly because it is painful to take a nice, long look at our flaws. No one wants to dissect all the ways they come up short. But this analysis can massively improve your rate of growth. Both of your character and of your mentality.

In the military, every individual is evaluated based on their performance. They go into the office of a ranking official to hear how they are performing. There are even written feedback forms where they can see exactly where their weak points are. They go over what they are doing well on and what they need to improve. These men then implement the notes from the officer and strengthen their weak points and double down on their strong points. If evaluations are good enough for the military, they are good enough for us.

Tracking and analyzing behavior is the only surefire way to know what you are currently doing and if it is working or not.

If you never track your workouts, how can you know if you are improving your strength or endurance? You may say “Well I know I can do 35 pushups now, and last week I could only do 30. So, I do know that I am improving”. Well, then you are tracking your ability in your mind. Less effective, but you are still tracking and analyzing your performance. You are evaluating your progress and continuing to work.

I suggest to you that every single behavior and habit should be evaluated on a semi-regular basis. This allows you to see your personal trajectory over time. You do not have to start analyzing every single step you take. You are not doing an internal review on yourself. All you are doing is observing and analyzing behavior. I would suggest starting with just one trait that you currently have or that you want to develop. What are your current habits? What are some behaviors that you like or dislike? Pick any one of those and commit to evaluating them on various occasions.

Take gratitude for example. Say that you have analyzed your behavior and determined that you spend too much time complaining. Or perhaps you just want to improve your current level of gratitude.

For most people, that is where they would stop. They would just say to themselves, “I want to develop more gratitude in my life” and then do nothing about it. It essentially becomes like a New Year’s resolution that is never completed. This happens because there is no accountability, no written commitment to the behavior, and no evaluation of performance.

Start with deciding what you want to improve, for us, it is gratitude.

I know that gratitude can sometimes come off as one of those “soft” Christian principles. But remember that gratitude is the cure for the negative behavior of complaining. Also, remember that God hates complaining so much that He has killed people for it (Numbers 11).

After you have decided what to work on, you need to hold yourself accountable for that behavior.

I do not believe that external accountability is a useful long-term solution. In fact, accountability does not work. It creates weak men who sit in a circle of chairs crying about their problems. They have no strength because they have no need to develop any. What need is there to develop strength when you can lean on all of your friends as a crutch? Crutches are useful for a few days or weeks after an injury or surgery. Use them too long, and your body will adapt to them and never improve its own strength. So as far as accountability goes, you must be accountable only to yourself.

Third, make a written commitment.

You can do this in the same place where you will perform your evaluations. Get a notebook that you will use for your self-evaluations. At the top of the page put the trait you are working on. Then on the first line put the written commitment to develop it and give it a deadline.

“By August 25^th, 2021, I will have reduced my habit of complaining to no more than four times per week maximum and I will express gratitude for my possessions at least twice per day”.

With that line completed, you have done more than the majority of average people do in their lives. Perhaps only 10% of the world has written goals with deadlines to complete them. When you make this statement, you put yourself in that top 10%.

Now that you have your self-accountability, your goal, and your written commitment, now you can get ready to evaluate yourself.

You need to determine what behaviors will be acceptable and unacceptable. Then you need to assign values to various levels of performance. By that, I mean that just as you get certain grades in school based on how well you do, you must also give yourself a “grade” based on how well you perform your new behavior. You can give yourself letter grades (A, B, C, D, F), Number grades (0-5, 0-10, etc.), or come up with your own system. The point is that you have clear delimitation between grades so you can give yourself feedback on your performance.

Decide what each grade means:

A – Perfect performance. Zero complaints and three separate expression of gratitude.

B – Expressed gratitude once.

C – Did not express gratitude.

D – Did not express gratitude; complained once.

F – Complained all day.

Your list does not have to look anything like this. This is just to give you an idea. You can change the expectations and standards however you wish and grade yourself accordingly. The important part is that you are grading yourself and working to make improvements.

I would also suggest that you carry a small notebook with you, preferably one that can fit in your pocket. In this book, you can make notes about your performance throughout the day. It does not have to be drawn out; it could be simple bullet points. The point here is that you do not want to trust your memory when it comes to your performance.

Unless you are carrying around your evaluation notebook everywhere you go, you will need a book for field notes.

Then once you get home for the day, you can look at your performance, and jot more notes in the main notebook. You can look at what you did well and what you did poorly. When you perform poorly, try to determine what leads to that. Did you start complaining because you were hanging around negative people? Did you encounter stress in the day and that caused you to let down your guard? Try to determine what was the cause of the unsatisfactory performance.

Then do the same with your good days. On those days when you perform extremely well, look for the roots of success. Discover what thought patterns, behaviors lead to gratitude. What people were you around and what thoughts did you have that caused you to be thankful?

The point of looking at what influenced your behavior is so you can either modify or maintain those circumstances. If your environment influenced you negatively, you need to modify it. If you were inspired to be more positive by your surroundings, then try to replicate those situations again.

Then determine how often you are going to do your main evaluation.

This is where you sit down and go over in detail your performance over a period of time. Here you are really getting to the bottom of your behavior and looking at everything you are currently doing and how you can improve.

Repeat this evaluation process over the weeks and you have no choice but to see improvements. Most people refuse to evaluate their performance, so they stay in the same place you years. You can skyrocket past them with this simple exercise.

Track Your Habits

Track your habits: If you were to ask any person about the things they do most consistently, they would probably give you generic answers. “I always eat healthily”. “I always work out consistently”. “My marriage is great, but don’t ask my wife”.

But if you ask these people how they know this, they have no answer. They have no evidence for their supposedly consistent lifestyle. And you will find they often follow up their answers with frustration. “I always eat healthily, but I don’t know why I can’t lose weight!” “I workout consistently, but I don’t know why I am not making progress”. “My marriage is great, but I don’t know why my wife never wants to have sex”.

The truth is that we are not nearly as consistent as we think we are when it comes to our habits.

Our consistency may be hit-and-miss, but as long as we are doing our habit a few times here and there we think we are hitting it consistently. When left to our own devices, we think we are demi-gods who never miss workouts, eat perfectly, have the best marriage, and work 20 hours per day. The truth is that we workout 2-3 times per week, and only one of those sessions is actually effortful. We eat one good meal in the morning, but every night we eat a buffet in our homes. Or we live in relative peace with our wife, but we simply are not engaging in enough masculine behavior to arouse her. And we work about 4 hours per day at max and then waste the rest of the day on frivolities.

The reason for this discrepancy between what we think we do and what we actually do is rooted in the fact that we have no system to measure our behaviors. We have no tool that keeps us grounded in reality when it comes to our habits. I am going to suggest a habit tracking system here that I have used for years. You can use any type that you want, but it is very important that you have this system. It keeps you honest, preventing you from thinking you are never missing workouts when you are regularly missing workouts.

First, get a blank notebook. It does not matter what kind. It could be college ruled, wide ruled, graph rule or you could get one of those small, lined journals. On each line, you are going to write the habits you think are valuable that you want to start. I would suggest that you write down several habits you already do consistently. This will give you some positive reinforcement when you can effortlessly put checks beside those habits. Hopefully one of those habits is daily Bible reading and prayer. Maybe after that, you put exercise and meditation. Then put journaling, visualization, guitar, or exercise in there.

If you are just starting some of these behaviors limit yourself to 3-6 habits. You do not want to burn out after a week or two and quit all your new behaviors before you reap the rewards from them. Start small, there is nothing wrong with placing small amounts of money in an investment account. These habits are the investment account for your life, and they will pay you dividends down the line.

Just track your habits and you will make progress.

Now that you have made a short list of the habits you already have and the ones you are going to start, write the date on the line below all of them. You are not going to write a date for every day, the point is to be able to get a generalized view of how you perform over time.

Now for the fun part, every time you complete a behavior, put a small check beside it. It seems silly, but that simple act of checking off a behavior is rewarding and will encourage you to check it off again. Now all you have to do is keep checking off behaviors. Lose yourself in the process of just checking off each habit each day. Learn to love the small steps and progress you are making towards your goals.

Here is another option for habit tracking you may be interested in:

On the rest of the paper below your check-off list, write down your observations about yourself or other personal development notes. Make notes about what you notice happens that causes you to miss a habit. What gets in the way of you completing your goals? Are the habits too big and need to be broken down into smaller more manageable chunks? Perhaps you started too many habits at once and need to put a few of them on hold. Is the time of day that you perform your habits so scattered that you cannot guarantee that you will complete your tasks?

The purpose of the notes is to analyze your own behavior and see where you are coming up short.

Where are the bottlenecks in your protocols? What is keeping you from making better progress in your life? The fastest way to improve is actually to eliminate a negative, not build a positive. By that I mean it is easier for us as humans to break something down than to build something up. So why not break down something negative before building something positive?

By analyzing when you make mistakes, you can prepare for next time. Learn to be a strategic thinker about the machine of your body. Learn what to do when your machine is not operating normally or the way you want it to. Write down ideas for how you can push yourself to complete your habits even on the days you do not want to. This ensures steady progress. It also helps you build great willpower. There is nothing more satisfying than finishing a task or completing your habits on the days when you were not feeling like doing anything. If you can override your own desire for comfort just for a moment, you are building the strength of character and of the mind.

As you track habits, you will notice that many of them become automatic.

This is good and the whole point of tracking them. You want to get to the point where you can complete your habits without needing willpower or motivation. Also be ready, because this is the point where other people will begin to compliment you for your “talent” or “gifts” even though you know your habits are the result of persistence. Anytime people want to excuse their own mediocrity, they complement the natural ability of others. Because if you are not gifted, the only thing separating them from you is a certain volume of work. They cannot blame their “lousy genetics” or lack of ability for mediocrity, they can only blame their unwillingness to put in the effort to be more than they currently are.

Never be angry at those people, in fact, be excited. They demonstrate by their very words that they will never be competition for you. They will always assume that the difference between them and the great men of this world is natural ability. Until they can correct their mind and accept that what separates them from the greats is simply work volume, they will forever be mediocre. They will forever live in your shadow, and you have nothing to fear from them in the marketplace.

All this started from simply tracking your habits. So start the habit of habit tracking and you will reap the rewards for it later in life.

Tips For an Effective Bible Study

I find that the church can be a lot like a popular gym. If you were to walk into a gym on any given day, you would find several people running on a treadmill at a decent pace. If you leave and come back several months later, you will see those same people still running on the treadmill but they look no different compared to the last time you saw them. Not only have they not improved, but by definition of running on a treadmill, they have gotten nowhere.

What is sadder is that many people repeat this same behavior with their religion. They jog on the treadmill of study but never actually improve themselves. If you find yourself in a similar boat, try these tips to increase the effectiveness of your study sessions.

I – Have a Specific Goal for The Study

You are not doing yourself any favors by having vague goals that are somewhere out there in the clouds. You need to clarify your goals and set up parameters for success and failure. Without a specific goal, you are like a sailor without a harbor to sail towards. So you simply float on the ocean, tossed wherever the winds will take you.

So decide exactly what it is you want. Do you want more general Bible knowledge? Do you want to understand more of the Historical context of what you are reading? Maybe you want actionable steps or strategies for your life. whatever it is, if you do not have a goal to find something, you will find nothing.

II – Do not just Cover Ground (The Treadmill Trick)

The main problem with the treadmill people is that their only goal is to cover ground. That is fine and dandy, but it does not provide a clear “finish line” for you. People who get on a treadmill start and stop at exactly the same place. You must have a finish line to run towards, some destination in your mind, otherwise, you are just grinding your gears.

Many people make the January mistake of saying, “This year I will read my entire Bible“. While that is a noble goal, the purpose of it is to cover ground. When the goal becomes to put miles under your feet, the quality of your effort will be decreased. Instead of being focused and present in the study session, your mind may wander and your focus will be lost. This is because the goal is not to learn, but simply to read. While you may gain some knowledge passively by reading, your gains will not make you happy. You will forever make mediocre gains in your biblical knowledge with passive study methods.

Instead of just trying to cover ground, give yourself some kind of evaluation to test your knowledge. Which is the next tip!

III – Evaluate Yourself with Tests

While I tend to be a fierce critic of the school system and of standardized tests, the idea of testing is an excellent learning tool. Though not always a metric of a person’s IQ or comprehensive understanding of a subject, it is a good measurement of how much stuff they have managed to remember.

Before you start a study, do a broad overview of the section of reading, write down a few questions from the next and test yourself on them in 3-7 days. Or you can go online and find test questions about the part of the Bible you want to study. Then you can do your own study, take the online test, and see how your knowledge stacks up to the questions someone else has presented.

By testing yourself, you are forcing your brain to recall information. It is this difficult task of recalling info that forcing your mind into greater growth and knowledge gain. Self-quizzing allows you to gain knowledge much more rapidly than you have before. We will talk about recall next.

IV – Actively Recall the Previous Day’s Work

Once you finish your reading for the day, close your text, shut your eyes and actively remember everything you can about whatever you just read. You can also do this by taking a blank piece of paper and writing down everything you can remember from the text. By pulling these facts out of your mind you engrain them deeper into your knowledge base and increase the likelihood that they will be stored in your long-term memory.

This is even more potent if you repeat it the next day. Take another blank paper and try to recreate the previous day’s notes and reading from memory. These exercises are difficult but provide a much higher return on investment for the effort.

V – Shorten Your Study Volume

Many people take on far too much reading volume, especially if they are starting one of those “Read your Bible in a Year” programs. By volume I mean the amount of reading they try to get done in a day. Most of those yearly programs require people to read 4 chapters of the Bible per day. While that is not an insane amount of volume, it is very heavy for a person who was previously reading zero verses. Especially considering those programs have you start in the Old Testament where chapters can be 60+ verses long on occasion.

It would be better to reduce the volume of reading and incorporate the active reading techniques outlined above. You will have much better results from studying one chapter, performing the active recall and self-testing exercises than you will from straining to read a massive volume of the Bible in one sitting.

VI – Increase Your Study Intensity

Just because you are reducing your training volume does not mean you are off the hook! You do not get to frolic around the daisies like a progressive and expect to make gains. You still have to give some form of an intense effort if you want to see any results. Just like training the physical body in the gym, if you want results, there must be a degree of intensity that is sufficient enough to overload your body systems. It is not enough to do a small amount of volume if you are not being intense with your focus and active recall.

Instead of passively and mindlessly reading Psalms for the 80th time, muster as much focus as you can and aim it at your reading for the day. Make your intensity like that of a laser beam. Focus on reading short passages and then asking yourself questions about them:

What does this mean?
Exactly what is the context?
What is the historical significance of this?
What are the cultural norms at this time?
How does this story fit into the big picture?
How would I explain this concept to a 5-year-old?

By asking yourself questions and focusing, you keep the studying intensity high which will result in more knowledge gains.

VII – Incorporate Memory Work

No training plan is complete without some level of memory work. For this, I always recommend the old-fashioned method of writing verses on index cards. The most noticeable gains in Bible knowledge will likely come as a result of your memory work. By memorizing large portions of scripture you make yourself more dangerous in an argument. The man whose sword is shaper is more dangerous in battle. You now place yourself in a position of strength to strike your foes.

Start with the Aggressive Verse Study

Memorization is best done by starting with a few repetitions of the verse, and then seeing how much you can remember without looking at the index card. Try to repeat the whole verse without looking.

Try to create a mental picture of what is going on in the passage you are memorizing. This mental movie should be as realistic and memorable as possible so you can recall the verse later.

VIII – Long-Term Goals

While the “Read the Bible in a year” plans are noble, they are very common and do not really inspire people because they are not personal enough. I know this because the majority of new Bible readers will quit this plan as soon as they get to Leviticus. Instead of taking on the same goal as everyone else, create your own long-term goal for Bible reading.

Maybe your goal is to become an expert in the book of James in one month. That is a very reasonable goal that would allow you to be very intense and focused without mindlessly following the crowd. By making your own goals you will have a greater connection to them, they will mean more to you and you can stay focused and motivated for longer.

IX – Day-To-Day Goals

It’s not enough to just be the person who reads a certain amount of Bible in a year, you need to have some kind of day-to-day goals. You need to be the type of person who studies the Bible each day. When your long-term goals seem lofty and far off, just focus on the short-term goals that you can accomplish today.

Did you read the amount of Bible that you decided on personally? Did you engage your mind in active learning with recall and self-testing? Can you look at what you accomplished for the day and check it off as a solid day’s work? It does not have to be a massive amount of work, just a small amount of discipline that is done every day.

Final Thoughts

These tactics should help you greatly in gaining more knowledge than you have gained before. 95% of people study passively 95% of the time. By simply becoming active in the study process, you set yourself apart from the masses and will make massive knowledge gains. Active learning is the key to success.

Do you have any tactics you like to use in your study? Leave them in a comment below!

Subscribe to the Newsletter!

Page 2 of 9

« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 … 9 Next »