Practicum Archives - Page 7 of 9 - Spartan Christianity

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.

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.

Ego: A Defining Trait of a Weak Man

Ego is a hallmark of the beta male. Church youth groups are teeming with ego, you can smell it on them. Wherever you find ego, you can be sure you have found an individual with significant insecurity or stupidity.

Ego is a hallmark of the beta male. Church youth groups are teeming with it and you can smell it on them. Wherever you find ego, you can be sure you have found an individual with significant insecurity or stupidity. The confident man has no need of ego. Ego is an outwardly expressed overcompensation for inner emptiness.

“Pride comes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall”.
Proverbs 16:18

“The LORD Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted (and they will be humbled).”
Isaiah 2:12

Ego is what some refer to as “bad pride”.

There is a good type of pride that is fulfillment in your work. There is the negative pride of ego that leads you to believe you are good at something or better than someone. Men who have even a small amount of self awareness know they can constantly improve, and so they reject any type of ego.

There are different levels of ego. The mildest is the boastful form.

This form is found in the lowest of all males; the males who no female would ever mate with. They have the need to talk about themselves or their “accomplishments”, as if anyone in a one-thousand mile radius even cares at all. These men are deluded about how impressive their accomplishments are.

Young men brag about what sport they play (because doing what hundreds of thousands of other males do obviously sets them apart).

They brag about how many girlfriends they have had or how much money they are making. They boast in superficial accomplishments that no one will remember in ten minutes, much less ten years.

Middle aged men brag about their kids. The older man’s children absorbed his entire life so now he is forced to live vicariously through them. He has no pride in what he does, only in his kids. These men do not understand how uninterested in his kids all other men are.

Older men brag about what they did ‘back in their day’ in order to justify their lack of success in the present moment. Low-level ego is spread across all age groups. Low-level ego is a marker for low character and low intelligence.

Another level of ego is the person who gets offended constantly.

Why are your ideas so important that you must be emotionally “Offended” when someone else has a different idea? Why are your philosophies so intertwined with your personality and character that an individual cannot question your ideas without questioning your personally? Here is the answer: your ideas aren’t important; consider putting your ego to death.

KEY: Any idea that is weak and built on unstable grounds must be supported by combining it with emotionalism. Atheism is a prime example of this. Atheists hold beliefs that blatantly violate natural law (Big bang = 1st & 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics, possible Newton’s 1st law, Law of Causality. Spontaneous generation = violates the Law of Biogenesis), and as a result, they are forced to become militant and emotional about their faith in order to justify it. You see this in modern politics as well, where men attack each other’s character instead of questioning one another’s ideas using rationality and a genuine desire for the truth, instead of a desire to hit the opponent with a zinger.

More subtle levels of ego would include simply being defensive at criticism. Why are you being defensive? Ego. Why do you dislike criticism? Ego. “But I have a highly sensitive personality”, no you don’t, you have a weak personality and a huge ego.

Even if you are sensitive, no man may justify his failure or a negative character trait by blaming his personality, that behavior is for the weak.

Ego is the mark of a boy, not a man. Become a man by putting the ego to death or you will die.

Mantra

I walk in humility, and my ego is fading to dust.

Application

Awareness of your own ego is going to be one of your best tools for bringing it under your power. Notice yourself boasting about your petty accomplishments, getting offended by the statements of others or becoming defensive at their criticisms. Noticing your problems is a key to victory in the war of converting those problems into power.

Some men may even find that simply by becoming aware of their ego, it went away. Men who notice it are often so disgusted by how it truly looks that they stop letting their ego determine their actions. They are able to see themselves from the outside.

How am I appearing to others?
How will this statement be taken?
Am I talking about myself in conversation?
Is my tone arrogant?

These are all questions you must ask yourself regularly to exercise the muscle of self-awareness necessary to bring your “bad pride” into submission. Ego stands in the way of your ability to gain power, both personal and worldly.

Shut down your negative character traits one at a time.

Start by killing your boasting habit if you are on that level of character development. Kill that form of ego before moving onto the more slippery and subtle manifestations. Whatever you do, utterly destroy that ego from the face of the earth.

When you interact with others with ego, do not get annoyed. Know that you have found a person with profound weakness of character. This is a man who is either insecure, stupid or both. There is no point in attacking this person directly, you will only enrage him. The way you help this individual is by taking indirect routes of attack and flanking the ego. Do not say to him, “You are really arrogant. You need to work on that ego”. You will only create an enemy if you do this. Instead, outline the benefits of being a man of humility. You have to appeal to the other person’s self-interest or they will not care what you have to say. Just know, that unless a man is willing to change and reduce his ego, there is very little point in trying to help him.

Conduct yourselves like Men

Consistency

Maintaining your good habits every day is a key to success.

Consistency beaks inconsistent intensity.

“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”
Galatians 6:9

“When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.
Daniel 6:10

Are you still committed to your plan to change yourself into a more masculine and capable man? Have you kept reading this book each day? Have you applied the ideals of masculinity and focused your mind on becoming a better man? Or like so many other weak-willed, weak-minded individuals in the Church, have you given up because the change is too hard or because you simply missed a day of Bible reading? Streaks in and of themselves do not matter if you are not improving in a way that can be measured.

Men, consistency and intensity will destroy volume every day in terms of sheer production.

There are some men who read large chunks of Bible a couple times a month, but they will lose out to the man who reads a chapter every day. Men who are “weekend warriors” with their physical training are almost never fast, strong or intelligent.

The weak cannot stick to their goals. The weak talk about “challenge” and spiritual nonsense the instant before they utterly fail as men and fail in their efforts to change themselves. Maintaining your good habits every day is a key to success. No matter how small the habits are when you begin, and no matter how much you are doing currently, what matters most is being consistent with those habits every single day.

You do not miss days; missing days is for the weak. You are not “too tired”; tiredness is for ancient men. You are not “too busy”; being too busy is nothing more than you either lying to yourself or being too weak to tell other people “no”. You don’t have “other things to do”; reorder your priorities or be forgotten forever.

You do not have any excuses; excuses are for beta males who look for anything but themselves to blame for the way their lives have turned out. This is your life, take ownership of it and be consistent every day into transforming it into something great. You will be making exponential progress while the betas in church manipulate the virtue “contentment” to justify their laziness and complacency in their own lives.

Mantra

Every day, consistency, focus, and progress are in my hands.

Application

If you are having trouble with consistency, cut out all habits except one and focus on it every day until you can do it automatically and without fail. Automaticity is the key. You want to build a habit to the point where it takes very little effort to start it. This automation does not make the habit easy, it just makes it easier to initiate the habit every day. Your physical training may be very difficult, but it should not be a massive internal struggle to show up to your training grounds.

You can build this automaticity by making your desired habit extremely small.

If you are trying to read Scripture every day, you need to start with one verse per day. This strategy flies in the face of what almost everyone in society does. They want to begin with some monstrous goal and they are shocked when they fail and cannot sustain the discipline. The key to consistency is to be start so small that it seems insignificant. You are not directly building the habit of reading Scripture every day, you are actually building the habit of consistency. This consistency will serve as the framework for the other habits you will start.

Always add additional work slowly.

Do not add more Scripture until you can handle it. Once you can handle one verse a day, move to two verses a day. If you cannot sustain two verses, go back to one until you build the strength to handle it. It may seem silly to suggest that people cannot handle two verses per day, but remember that if you are like most Christians, you have not been able to sustain even one verse per day for most of your life. Lay one brick at a time. Don’t worry about the end state, worry about developing consistency.

Conduct yourselves like men.

The Masculine Desire for War

Weak men in the Church have a habit of denying reality. They deny the innate need of man to wage war against something – against anything – to raise his sword and utterly destroy an enemy that stands before him, even if that enemy is himself. The desire to kill is in the nature of man.

“a time for war and a time for peace.”
Ecclesiastes 3:8b

“You are my war club, my weapon for battle— with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms.”
Jeremiah 51:20

“Contend, LORD, with those who contend with me; fight against those who fight against me. Take up shield and armor; arise and come to my aid. Brandish spear and javelin against those who pursue me. Say to me, “I am your salvation.” May those who seek my life be disgraced and put to shame, may those who plot my ruin be turned back in dismay. May they be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the LORD driving them away; may their path be dark and slippery, with the angel of the LORD pursuing them. Since they hid their net for me without cause and without cause dug a pit for me, may ruin overtake them by surprise— may the net they hid entangle them, may they fall into the pit, to their ruin. Then my soul will rejoice in the LORD and delight in his salvation.”
Psalm 35: 1-9

Weak men in the Church have a habit of denying reality.

They deny the innate need of man to wage war against something – against anything – to raise his sword and utterly destroy an enemy that stands before him, even if that enemy is himself. The desire to kill is in the nature of man.

The Church wants to repress the warlike nature of man in the same way they have repressed the sex drive of men for hundreds of years. They fear both because it takes away their power and control over the younger generations and over the “uncontrollable” drives of man. This is incompetence at its finest.

What happened when the Church repressed sex and refused to even mention its existence? Did it successfully suppress men’s sexual urges and increase overall sexual purity or did it cause men to push back even harder saying, “I am not listening to this blithering, the men in the Church are just as miserable as I am. I’m not waiting for sex”.

KEY: Every time the Church wants to suppress some alleged “evil”, that same evil grows even faster.

Not only does it grow, but it becomes dark and all consuming in the minds of those who suppress it until the Church loses the war against that evil. Waitingtillmarriage.org shared some data that suggested only 20% of the members of highly religious communities are successfully waiting for marriage. Does it look like sexual repression is working for the Church?

Repression does not work with sexual drives, and it will not work in subverting your warlike nature. If you are not a man who is going to engage in a real physical fight, the best you can hope for is to find a personal war into which you can channel your barbaric desire for bloodshed.

Fight your evil nature. Wage war in your work and destroy mediocrity. You must have something to fight, so make your war result in the construction of positive qualities of character.

Mantra

I Destroy whatever stands in opposition to me with strength.

Application

The internal anger you feel and the desire to go to war are incredibly powerful forces that you must channel into a constructive pursuit. If you do not channel them somewhere, they will destroy you from within. The easiest way to redirect your warlike nature is to channel it into something physical, such as training. Get your lazy, weak minded self into physical exercise. You cannot fully be a man if you do not possess some level of strength. There is no excuse for a man to be weak. It doesn’t even matter what kind of training you do, just do something. That physical training will then spill over into mental fortitude.

Wage war in the workplace. When you begin to tire and mentally accept mediocre work, call upon your aggression.

This emotion will override the desire to quit or to be lazy. When you are typing that essay for school and you want to stop, conjure your warlike nature and type as if the words you are writing are weapons. When you are exercising and approaching muscular failure, call upon your internal warlord. If you cannot channel aggression with something as simple and silly as typing an essay or training the body, you will not be able to channel it at all. Then that extreme energy will force an outlet in some unproductive endeavor like promiscuity or drugs.

Practice controlling and directing your internal energies on small tasks, and you can then easily apply it to large tasks.

References:

Mike. “4 Cool Statistics About Abstinence in the USA.” Waitingtillmarriage.org, 30 Nov. 2012.

Page 7 of 9

« Previous 1 … 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next »