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When it comes to the church that Christ built, there are a lot of misconceptions. many think that Christ built multiple churches, but this is not the case. In fact, Christ established one church and it came to fruition after He ascended into heaven. But the most important part is the fact that Christ is the scriptural builder of the scriptural church.

In Mathew 16:18, the bible says, “And I say unto you that you are Peter and upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it“.

Jesus clearly states that He will be the one building the church. Not Martin Luther. Not John the baptizer. Only Christ would be the one building a church.

He also specifically says that it will be His church. Christ is the scriptural builder of His own church, established in Acts 2.

He also teaches that He will build only one church. He does not say that He will build His “churches”. AndHe uses the singular form of the word to denote unity and singularity. Christ is always pursuing and desiring unity for His people.

“I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for those whom You have given Me, for they are Yours. ¹⁰ And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them. ¹¹ Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep^[d] through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.¹² While I was with them ^[e]in the world, I kept them in ^[f]Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is ^[g]lost except the son of ^[h]perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. ¹³ But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves. ¹⁴ I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. ¹⁵ I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one. ¹⁶ They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. ¹⁷ Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth. ¹⁸ As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. ¹⁹ And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth.

John 17:9-19

Christ is the scriptural builder of one and only one church.

He teaches this concept explicitly in His words. Yet there are a seemingly infinite number of divisions in the world today, and that should not be the case.

No church can claim to be from God if it was built by a man. so examine your church, study its history and decide whether you are a member of the one exclusive kingdom of God and Christ Himself built.

Other Reading: Intrinsic Motivation

If you want to eliminate obstacles in your life you need to attack them one at a time. You will never do yourself any favors by dividing and diluting your efforts. We make the most progress in life when we focus our fire on one singular pursuit.

Does this come at the cost of other pursuits? Absolutely. But it also comes at the great gain of allowing you to make rapid progress on your singular pursuits. this is important if you want to make any noticeable progress on the things you are doing in life.

I – Identify all the things you want to change i your life.

It is impossible to concentrate fire if you do not have a target to fire at. Creating targets come from making a list of all the things you want to do, or all the things you want to stop doing.

Once you have them all written out, take a good look at them. Cross out any goals or desires that are coming from external sources. The previous week’s article talked about the difference between internal and external desires. When you are wanting to be intense and make a significant difference in your life, the desire has to come from inside you if it is going to last. External desires fade quickly. Once you run into a moment of difficulty, the desire will be gone.

So make sure everything you want is what you truly want. Cull your list until you have a handful of major, critical things you want to change in your life

II – Prioritize these items based on their value.

Identify the changes that would make the biggest difference in your world and rank them from greatest to least. You can make changes in any order you want, but it only makes sense to first target those changes that will make the greatest difference in your life.

Once you have ranked the changes you need to make, select the top change and break it down into its fundamental units.

Break down the change until you have identified the smallest measurable unit of action. This action should be so small that it seems silly to take it. But it is actually going to make all the difference in the world when you take it. Because that one action, no matter how small, does something incredibly powerful for you. It gets the ball rolling

We fail so many things in life because we are not able to get the ball rolling. We don’t get the ball rolling because it seems like it will require a herculean effort to do so. By breaking down the goal into its smallest parts, you remove the mentality that it must require a herculean effort to get started. This allows you to take action and start moving, which is the most powerful of all things.

III – Once the ball is rolling, slowly add effort- Focus Fire

I’m a believer that effort should be built over time. that one should start small and improve his efforts from there.

If you start out requiring too much from yourself, you will burn out. You have to build endurance in your mind just like you would build endurance in your body. Do too much before you are ready and you will damage yourself, and then require far more time to recover than is necessary and slow your progress. But start small and work up and you will adapt to the new healthy demands you are placing on yourself and you will improve. Maybe you won’t get the results you want right off the bat, but you are building up the strength of the “take action” muscle. This muscle is weak in the majority of people. Start strengthening it with a little bit of work each day and improve yourself from there.

Do not push yourself to improve your work endurance too quickly. Our primary goal is to develop day to day consistency with the new self.

Increasing the workload of what we are doing is a secondary goal. It is a very important goal, but it will not profit us anything if we cannot even be consistent day-to-day.

This is why it is more important to develop consistency in small goals than to be sporadic with large efforts. Small efforts can be increased over time. But you cannot do anything about sporadic large efforts until you develop consistency. And the person giving large efforts will have a harder time painting those large efforts day-to-day as opposed to a person who is already used to day-to-day consistency and just had to increase his total daily work volume.

Consistency will always be the key to anything in life. From investing your money, to fitness, to learning. A small effort repeated in clear intervals will always provide more of a reward than the occasional intense effort. So learn to focus your fire on one task at a time and you will make progress.

Environmental control is 75% of discipline. This is why it is critically important to learn to control your environment.

The majority of the actions you take are done for the sake of convenience. We will do what is easy, convenient, and right in front of us. In reality, we were designed to be this way, it does not have to be a negative fact.

We can use this facet of human nature to our advantage by structuring our environment in strategic ways.

By learning to control your environment and set it up to encourage the behaviors you want, you become powerful. You make it more likely that good behaviors will happen naturally, or at least with less effort than they required before.

Make it easy to do what you need to do and what is right and you will win.
Make it easy to do what is wrong and you will always lose.

If you can control your environment, you can control your life.

You begin by identifying the behaviors you most want to engage in.

What is it you actually want to be doing? You need to write the answers to these questions on paper.

What is getting in the way of you doing what you want to do?

Answering these questions will give us the foundational blueprint for how you should control your environment.

If your desired behavior is to read the Bible, but the rest Bible is locked away in a drawer or somewhere out of sight, you are going to have a hard time reading it. And if your phone or computer is in plain sight, you are going to opt for what is right in front of you. Next thing you know, instead of participating in your desired behavior, you are wasting the time of your life.

All of this happens because the environment was not controlled and we did not set ourselves up for success.

You have to rearrange your environment to be congruent with the desired behavior. If you want to read the Bible, it must be in plain sight, where you can see it. Anything that would compete with that behavior must be relocated.

The simple act of rearranging your environment can do wonders for your behavior. Try it for yourself. Take advantage of those moments where you feel extremely motivated to change yourself and start new habits. Instead of starting the habit immediately, use that energy to rebuild your environment in a way that would best support that goal. Once you have that finished, then start your habit.

This ensures that by tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week when your inspiration fades, the environment is still set up in your favor. you have built it in such a way that your desired behavior is easier, so you do not need as much of the motivation to begin.

You must also control your environment in the opposite way.

You must put up all kinds of barricades and friction points against negative behaviors and competing interests. The more points of friction you can put between you and the behaviors you do not want to perform, the better off you will be.

This makes it so that it is automatically harder to complete the unwanted behavior.

If you are playing too many computer games, it could be that you uninstall the games or uninstall Steam after you are done playing. Or you take the batteries out of your TV remote and unplug the TV. Anything you can do to add more points of friction for negative behaviors, the better off you will be.

The upside is that in both cases, it is not hard to do. It is not hard to take the batteries out of the TV or uninstall Steam, especially if you finish a binge and are disgusted with your lack of drive to achieve in life. Use that energy to drive change.

Drive change by learning to control your environment.

Many of these ideas come from the excellent book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I would highly recommend reading that book.

In the book, the author also talks about the classic data from the Vietnam war. Many soldiers were addicted to heroin while they were overseas. This turned into a crisis in the minds of the American government. The leaders had no idea how they would be able to rehabilitate all these soldiers and send them back into the civilian world after the war.

What shocked the American government was the fact that after returning home, most soldiers were able to quit cold turkey, had no problems with withdrawal, and never went back to their old habits.

This is because the environment associated with the habit was completely gone. They were not overseas, around war, in the military, or around their friends who were users as well. The environment in America was nearly 100% different than the environment in Vietnam.

Because of this, there were no environmental triggers pushing the soldiers back into their negative drug-using behaviors. Without the trigger for the behavior, there was no more behavior.

This common drug habit that so many people struggle with for years upon years was gone in a matter of weeks for these soldiers. And this is a testimony to how powerful your immediate environment is to your habits. It also tells us how difficult it is to rse out of our old habits if we exist in the exact same environment with all the same environmental triggers.

You will continue to get squashed by your negative behaviors if you cannot control your environment.

This is the same for every person who has ever lived before.

To identify your desired behaviors and strategize about how you can make it easier to complete them. Think about how you can remove every single point of friction from those behaviors that you possibly can. you do not want anything getting in the way of what you want to do. The fewer “sticking points”, the better.

Additionally, you want to add as many friction points for negative behaviors as you can. If you can think of any possible way to make a negative behavior harder, then do it. It does not matter how small it is. Putting the unhealthy snacks in the back of the cupboard is a start.

Putting water closer to you and candy farther away is a start.

It does not matter how small it seems, you have to make those changes to the environment. This is the best way to ensure that you are consistent with your good behaviors and inconsistent with your negative behaviors.

Small changes maintained over time lead to massive results. Rearranging your environment is an investment that will pay you dividends in the long run.

Think long and hard about how you can make these changes. The next time you feel all fired up and motivated to make a change, start by making a change in your environment. then go from there.

The title is as close to hippie culture as I ever intend to get. But the truth is that if you want to start to control your anxiety, you have to live in the present.

The only place anxiety can live is in the past and future. It cannot survive in the present moment.

Think about it, when are you anxious? That anxiety generally comes from two main sources, no matter how many different variations on anxiety you can think of.

Anxiety can come from thinking about past mistakes.

More specifically, it comes from thinking about how past mistakes are going to damage our future selves. We ruminate on everything we have done in the past the catastrophize about how it will ruin our lives in the future. Perhaps we think we have already ruined our lives beyond repair.

In this way, anxiety lives in the past.

Anxiety also comes from thinking about future pain.

So in a way, ruminating on the past is actually a version of worrying about the future. Because we concern ourselves with how our past will create a more negative and painful future for us.

So we sit and look into the future and generate all the various events in our lives that will go wrong or cause us pain. This is anxiety in a nutshell.

You are likely familiar with the experience of sitting in one particular physical place, but your mind is a million miles away. Your mind is somewhere in the future, generating negative outcomes for your life. This is no way to live.

Anxiety robs you of the ability to live in the present and enjoy each present moment.

No negative future event is ever as evil as we make it in our minds. In our minds, we not only think of the worst-case scenario. We also think of every related worst-case scenario and combine them into one monster of negativity.

Our imagination, a tool for creativity and endogenous motivation becomes our enemy.

The way to combat this is to re-learn how to live in the present moment.

One of the best ways to do this is to begin the practice of meditation. Specifically, the mind-clearing form of meditation, which tends to be Eastern in origin.

1. Sit in a chair with good posture (back straight and eyes closed). Focus on your breathing. Breathe however you want. I personally just focus on making sure my exhale is shorter than m inhale.
2. Try to bring your mind to the present moment and visualize it being clear like water.
3. Observe thoughts as they come into your mind, but try to keep your mind in the present.
4. As your mind wanders into the future, gently pull it back to the present moment.
5. Continue for as long as you see fit.

This exercise helps you being to learn how to live in the present.

By staying in the present moment, you can better manage your life.

In the book Psycho-Cybernetics, you learn that problems may seem like they are all hitting you at once, but in reality, they are coming to you one at a time, in a single file line.

By thinking about them as being in a single file line, you can handle them better. By living in the moment and focusing on the problem right in front of you, you can succeed and resolve the problem. Do not worry about the line of problems behind the first problem, they will each get their time

How often do you hear people complain about having “so much work to do” or “so many problems to deal with“. These people have a hard time accomplishing anything. They become so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of problems that they cannot settle their mind and deal with the first problem in front of them. If they would just quiet their minds and focus on the first problem, they would soon find it solved. They would find that it was not nearly as difficult as they believed and that none of their problems are that tough in and of themselves.

Most problems are small. And the problems that seem to be big are just a collection of dozens of tiny problems. Each one can be solved if we can learn to live in the present and take them one at a time.

This practice requires effort and patience on your part. you have to be patient with yourself and realize you are not going to develop this discipline overnight. Most people quit any type of attempt to change themselves because they expect results far too quickly. Instead, just focus on your system. You are developing a system of thinking which will allow you to live in the present. So maintain your meditation discipline and try to apply it outside of meditation, in the real world. Do not worry if you hit roadblocks, just focus on developing the habit of living in the present.

Learn to have self-awareness in all the situtations you find yourself in. Maybe put something on your wrist or desk as a reminder to live in the rpesent and take one problem at a time.

We can generate all kinds of negativity in our minds if we forget to live in the present moment. There is no limit to the amount of negative possible scenarios that we can dream up if we allow our imagination to run wild. By learning to live in the present, we can begin to discipline that part of our minds that constantly generates monsters to fear. All of us could use some training in that kind of behavior.

Live in the present.
Take on a brief meditation practice.
Become self-aware by using a reminder and taking one problem at a time.

Do not try to accomplish all your tasks at once. Avoid trying to solve all your problem at once. Everything can be solved in due time if we will take them one step at a time.

Even being at war with temptation requires you to live in the moment. When do you give in to temptation? When you imagine some negative outcomes in the future that will come as a result of you resisting. Learn to live in the present and accept that small amount of discomfort that comes from resisting temptation Each temptation will come to you in single file, one at a time. You are never tempted by a thousand things. They have lined themselves up and will continue to drip on your face until you give in.

Train your mind to stay in the present through the meditation practice and you can decrease the discomfort that comes from having so many temptations.

Do not forget to go to war.

One of the primary reasons that so many people avoid taking action towards their goals is because they have made their goals massive in their minds. And they believe that unless their actions are equally massive, then the action is worthless. But really, every small task completed is a step towards your goal.

And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.

Deuteronomy 17:19

The problem is that this paralyzes people and prevents them from taking any action at all. We forget that small action beats no action every day of the week. We forget that you can still get to a destination by taking a few small steps instead of sprinting several miles.

When we make tasks massive in our minds, we then require some massive amount of motivation to get us started. How could we ever imagine tackling some massive task if we aren’t extremely fired up to attack that task?

The problem is that most of us can never generate that motivation on our own. The average person often gets his motivation from external sources. When it comes down to internally generating motivation for his own goals, he falls short.

We are so accustomed to having the luxury of external pressure that we forget how to internally generate that same pressure. Without that ability to generate the pressure, we are never able to make any progress on our own individual goals.

We can perhaps make progress on the goals that others have for us. At work, we can generate results on a project or rise up to meet a deadline. In school, we can finish assignments and perform when it is required. But for some reason, we lose the ability to push ourselves for our own goals.

Part of this is the fact that we do not really want our goals.

In fact, we structure our goals based on what others think and based on arbitrary desires. But on the other hand, we do not take action because we think that only massive action is adequate. And by this thinking, we eliminate 100% of the benefit that would come from taking small actions.

While we won’t make massive progress with tiny action, we will still be making some progress. That small amount of progress is infinitely better than staying where we are.

Related :AchIEve as a Man By Making Everything Into a Goal

Here is a protocol for simplifying action taking in life.

I – Identify your objective.

You would be shocked at how often you do not know what you really want. It doesn’t matter if it is work, relationships, personal life – most people have no idea what they want, myself included.

It would surprise you how unclear you are on your own life objectives. clarity of purpose and goals comes in part from taking time to think about what you truly value. You also need to think about the things you truly want. These are not the desires that come and go with the wind. Pay attention to the things you want and identify those desires that are consistently around week after week, month after month, and year after year. Even if the desire doesn’t feel powerful, the fact that it has lived so long makes it incredibly powerful.

II – Identify where you currently are in relation to what you want.

For a GPS system to work it needs two pieces of data. It needs to know where you are, and where you want to go. You just defined where you want to go, now you have to figure out where you are. How much progress have you made towards these goals of yours? Have you made any progress at all? If your goal is to read the Bible through and you are stuck in the book of Leviticus, that’s fine. At least you know where you are. Now you can develop a strategy to get to where you want to go.

III – Identify the major steps to get there.

To read through the Bible you need to read through each of the books. That breaks 1 massive goal into 66 medium-sized goals (66 books of the Bible). But that is not small enough. You still need to make your objectives smaller.

IV – Break each major step into the smallest workable unit.

Continue to reduce the goal until making your objective smaller would reduce its functionality. The smallest workable unit for reading the Bible is 1 sentence. Notice that the smallest unit is not just one word, because that would not be a workable unit. You need to have a task small enough that it can be accomplished, but just big enough so that it is a functional goal.

V – Once those incredibly small objectives have been identified, see if you can make the goal any smaller.

You want your daily objective to be so simple and small that it is almost impossible not to do it. It must be so small that it would be embarrassing to miss your habit.

VI – Once you separate the task into each of the parts, resist the urge to look at how many parts you need to accomplish to complete your goal.

All that work of fine slicing the task would be for nothing if you suddenly look up, realize you have tens of thousands of verses to read, get panicked, overwhelmed, and quit altogether. You have to focus only on the one block of work in front of you. Put a box around it in your mind. Separate each individual task out and keep them all separate from each other. Do not allow them to mix.

VII -Start right now and complete the smallest workable unit.

If the task is small enough, you should be able to accomplish it without issue.

You will also need to get rid of the objects of friction that are preventing you from achieving your goal. These types of things are often environmental in nature. If you control your environment you can control yourself.

These items are friction are most often external to your goal. Take for example your goal to read the Bible every day. One of the external friction points for that goal that might get in the way of your accomplishment is where the Bible is physically in your house. This seems silly, but it actually makes a huge difference.

Even though your goal of reading one verse per day is small, you can still have problems initiating if your Bible is located inconveniently. If you keep your bible in the closet, out of sight, you will have a problem reading. Because now you not only have to read one verse, but you have to go to where your Bible is stored, find it, get it out of your closet, then open it and start reading. That is several extra tasks that cause unnecessary friction that can keep you from achieving your goal.

If you are trying to read the Bible on your phone, you will have to resist the urge to do everything else you already do on your phone.

You carry a 10-ounce box of distraction with you at all times. If you try to read every day on your phone, you will have to deal with the competing interest of your phone. I would suggest a paper Bible, conveniently and strategically placed to maximize the likelihood of you reading it.

Look for any of these points of friction in your life and remove them. This is absolutely critical. Remove all points of friction for good behavior, and create as many points of friction for negative behavior as possible.

The main point is to make every task small so that you can achieve it without any problems.

If the task is small enough, you will be able to achieve it.

But be careful about tasks that seem small and simple but really have multiple hidden tasks inside them, such as reading the Bible when the Bible is in the closet. Simplify and reduce friction to succeed.

Organize your environment for success. Place the Bible in plain sight, where you will easily access it each day, and then follow through with reading the smallest workable, functional unit. If your task is small enough, you should have no problem with follow-through.

If you are still having a problem with follow-through, reexamine the behavior. Find out if you simplified and removed enough points of friction. Make sure there is nothing else pulling you away from the task at hand.

Every great task is just the accumulation of thousands of tiny tasks. Worry about each small, achievable discipline and it will add up to success.