Force-Feeding

What do you do on days that you don’t want to read your Bible? What about the days where you would rather vomit than stick to your daily disciplines? You force feed the Word anyways. You force the discipline by applying the heat of aggression. Force yourself to take the right actions and impose your will upon your own weak body. You eliminate the need for emotional motivation. You cannot wait for the stars to align, or for the perfect motivation cocktail to swell within you, you must be able to force yourself to be disciplined at all times.

“In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following. But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance. For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.”

1 Timothy 4:6-10

Take an example:

Two men read the Word of God. One man is excited and energetic, the other is unmotivated, exhausted, perhaps even bored with his daily discipline, yet they both put in their designated chapters of reading. If they each maintain the discipline, who profits more? The man who was bored profits the most. Because even though they both read, the one who read when he was bored and unmotivated created more sweat-equity of discipline within himself. He had to force feed the Word, but it profits him nonetheless.

The man who maintained discipline is mentally better and stronger than the man who has “all the right emotions” for his Bible reading.

There is profit in doing things when you are motivated, or even when you only feel average, but there is much more profit when you maintain the discipline even though you do not feel like it. The forcing of the body and mind to be disciplined where all the profit rests. You gain equity within yourself, establishing dominance of your mind over the body. You command the body and it has no choice but to respond to your authoritarian law.

This self-discipline is more important than anything else: the ability to override your personal weakness and execute discipline every day. It is more important than any emotionalistic, effeminate pseudo-motivation you hear from liberals. It is more important than the mechanically liturgic ideology propagated by conservatives. Self-discipline goes far beyond labels and chunks of ideals. This discipline is the ability to force yourself to study the Word of God every day without fail. Vomit out your emotions and command your mind with a focused discipline that is unparallelled. 

There will be many, many days where the “feeling is not in you”.

You just don’t feel like reading the Bible and memorizing scripture, but you do it anyway, and you come out the other side of that discipline much better for it. It is more profitable to take difficult action when you are not motivated than to take action when you have all the motivation in the world. The only way to build the character of an individual is to endure difficulties or small trials that you would rather not go through (Almost everything we endure is “small”, we are too soft as men and think everything is difficult).

You must force feed the Word of God at times if you ever want to grow.

Mantra

I am forcing my body into submission to my mind.

Application

If a bodybuilder is trying to grow muscular size, he must eat multiple meals every day that add up to an absurd amount of calories. Many bodybuilders eat upwards of eight meals per day. Do you think they are hungry and excited to eat every one? Nope. Some of the meals are bland. The 7th and 8th meal are ridiculously difficult to eat because they are already stuffed. But they force those meals down every single day without fail. 

Why? Because that is how they grow. They ingest more and more food in order to integrate it into the various structures of the body. This same principle applies to spiritual growth. You consume the Word of God everyday, and you do so even when you are “full” and do not want to read. 

This is the mistake most people make: they assume that if they are not feeling like reading or if they are not super motivated to read then they would be irreverent in trying to force themselves to do so.

This is idiocy. There is nothing in life that we will feel like doing all the time, but we must do it anyways, and in doing so we establish mental dominance over ourselves. The same applies to reading and studying the scriptures. You must adjust your perspective about what it is to be a student of the Word of God – it will require you to work through boredom and frustration in order to grow. 

You must read the word of God every single day without fail. Pick a set amount of chapters or verses and you stick to it, never missing a day. Only weak men miss days of reading. A good starting place is 10 verses. This does not seem like a large amount, but reading huge amounts of the Bible at first is not the first goal you should set for yourself. You must first become the type of man who reads his Bible daily without fail. 10 verses per day is sustainable even for someone who completely lacks any form of self-discipline, so you must start there. 

You must win. 

Force your will over yourself. 

Read constantly. 

Memorize the Word. 

Strengthen your will. 

Fortify your discipline. 

Conduct Yourselves like Men.