Spartan Christianity

The Eulogy of Life

Romans 14:8 – “For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s”

Ecclesiastes 12:7 – “And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”

Death is coming for us all. Therefore, we must behave in a way that gives men the opportunity to speak well of us after our passing. What are we doing today that will be on our eulogy?

What will men say about us?

Hebrews 11 is filled with the stories of men who did took great action during their life and that chapter of scripture lives on as an eternal eulogy to their lives. They left a legacy through their actions, that thought they are dead, they still speak.

Or are we living in such a way that men will struggle to find something good to say about us? The men will all huddle together and scramble to come up with something, anything of worth that you did with your life. Because even though you kept your 9-5 job, raised decent kids, was a decent guy and you checked all the boxes of a good life, you still did nothing worth remembering. You did nothing to stand out and make a difference.

You lived a simple life, which is to be admired in some, but all the while you did not excel in any endeavor. You are forgotten forever.

One day men will stand up to speak on our behalf after we can no longer speak for ourselves. They will give an overview of what we did with our lives. We have the opportunity now to live in such a way as to give them plenty of material to speak about, and to leave them with inspiration for life.

We can live so that others are still inspired by us days, weeks, even months and years after our passing.

If we live as Christians we can go to heaven, but if we live as excellent men on top of that, we can leave others a shining example to follow.

A pattern to model their lives after so they can stop being mediocre in their everyday lives. Most men are pathetic and do nothing, others do great deeds and are remembered for centuries. You have the opportunity today to live so that you are one of those excellent men, rather than the pathetic men that plague the Church today.

Very few men in the Church are admired. And if they are admired in the Church, they are likely not admired outside the Church. You can be both, but you have to live life to the extreme in your disciplines.

Through death we may live.

Application

There are not many high performance individuals in the Church. Most people need rest and recreation time. Most men need to get their minds off life and take the edge off, but not you. You can work hours on end with no rest because your mind is centered on being something great. Your mind is obsessed with being more than your predecessors. This is one of the primary ways to be remembered at the end of life and to make an impact.

You must gather many accomplishments, both inside the Church and outside the Church.

Weak men in the church berate people who succeed in the world, labeling them as “worldly men”.

No, they are just successful, unlike most men in the Church. The new generation will not respect a man who is successful in the Church but is a pauper at his work and whose life is a failure on every other front. You must be successful on all fronts. This begins by not wasting a single hour of the day. If you work 12 hours instead of your normal 8 each day, then will have over 1300 hours of extra work done by the end of the year.

You don’t need the extra rest, you do not need to relax, you need to get after the work.

This does not mean you have to hang at your job for another four hours a day, on the contrary I advise against that. Gather disciplines to yourself that you will focus on for those other hours of the day. If you write for an hour every day, you can write three 100,000 word books a year.

You must use your time wisely. You can waste it watching television or playing video games, or you can concentrate your time in endeavors that could possibly outlive you for hundreds of years. Gather accomplishments but never lose sight of the Lord. This is the mark of a truly great man. Master the use of your time. Control your thoughts. Outwork everyone around you.

Conduct yourselves like men.

Entanglement With the World

Everywhere you look you see negativity and panic concerning politics and the state of the world. Christians start their day with whatever assorted negativity is on the local news and they take that negative energy into the workplace.

Christians are overtaken by a sense of fear about how the world is turning and about the fate of the next generation. These people are too entangled with the world.

As we have explored before, the Kingdom of God never dies, it simply relocates. Yet even while knowing this most Christians are fearful about the culture of America. These Christians are prioritizing their personal comfort over their faith. They know that moving to Africa or some island would cost them a lot of time and comfort and they do not want to leave.

These Christians are worldly.

They know more about current politics than they do about the Bible.

They can tell you who is currently in office, but they couldn’t list five of the fifteen judges of Israel.

They know dozens of laws and tax codes, but you can count on two hands the number of Bible verses they know.

You can count on one hand the number of Bible verses they have learned in the past year.

This is a problem of priority. We have begun to place too much emphasis on this physical world we find ourselves in.

People forget that we die at the end of life, and where we go next is forever. There are only two possible places to go after death. One of them is eternal life and one of them is infinite death. How can we forget this and become entrenched in the world and in its meaningless trifles?

We have forgotten what is important. We sit around ingesting Fox News or CNN or any other mainstream outlet and wonder why our faith isn’t growing. Because we haven’t put any time into our faith!

We start the day with two hours of news yet forget to read our Bible every day.

Pathetic.

We need to get our priorities in order. God should always be at the forefront of our life, but we have placed the world at the front. We think about the world and politics more in one day than we think about God over the course of a year.

We care too much about political parties and the state of the world.

We care too much about the meaningless affairs of the world.

We care too little about God and about faith.

Today is the day we get our priorities in order. Turn off the news, it does not profit you. Do you even remember what was on the news last week? Last Month? Last year? I doubt it. But you definitely remember how watching the news made you feel: unhappy, depressed, and anxious.

There is no need for this to be our way of life. If we are unhappy and anxious we can never hope to convert other people to Christianity. Who wants to be part of a group of unhappy, depressed, and anxious people?

Of course, none of this is to say that politics and the state of the world is unimportant. It is very important – but it isn’t everything.

I’m not telling you to be ignorant of the state of the world. I’m not telling you to be uninvolved with politics.

I’m telling you to keep those things where they should be – below God in priority.

You need to be able to watch the news, catch up on politics, be aware of current events without having it bother your emotional state. This is absolutely key.

I’ll give you an exercise I performed to acquire this skill. It is simple, and involves managing your physiology. Because if you can manage your physiology, you can manage your mind and emoitons much better.

Dial up whatever news source you listen to. Preferably you can do this with some form of media that you can pause and restart.

Next, start listening to it and start a timer. While you listen, hold awareness on your bdy and emotions. Once you feel those old negative emotions bubble up [fear, anger, worry, etc.] stop your timer and pause your news source.

Now you have to wait for those sensations to go away. Introduce positive thoughts and do some deep diaphragmatic breathing. Bring your heart rate back down to its resting level and be aware of how those hot emotions cool off and leave your body. Do not restart your news source until you are as calm and peaceful as you were before you started. Then you may restart, and repeat the exercise.

Also, use your timer to record how long it takes before you get emotionally worked up. And then time how long it takes to cool off. Record and keep track of these numbers so you monitor your progress over time. You will find that as you progress, you are able to last much longer without feeling negative emotions.

You will also be much more powerful because you will be able to maintain a calm, cool, collected emotional state in the midst of disturbing stimuli. That will make you infinitely powerful in a world of people ruled by their emotions.

You are the general with your perspective elevated above the battlefield. You can now see things more clearly than the men engaged in the battle who are overcome with fear and stress. you have calmed your mind and physiology and can command yourself.

That is something to be proud of, not many people can do that.

You can also repeat this exercise in other areas of your life.

Correct your mindsets and place God back at the highest priority where He belongs.

Lay the Ax to The Root

Jesus talks in His sermon on the mount about how we should sever body parts if they cause us to sin. “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it out and cast it from you” and “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you” citing that “it is better to enter into heaven lame, maimed or blind than to enter into hell with a whole body.

This seems a little extreme if we were to take it literally.

It would be painful to cut off our hand, and inconvenient to cut out our eye just because it is causing us to stumble here and there. What does Jesus mean? Surely He does not mean that we are literally supposed to cut off pieces of ourselves. That would be damaging the body He designed and the body that is supposed to be the temple of the Spirit.

Christ is using hyperbole to illustrate how we must lay our ax to the root of sin and cut it off at its most basic source.

You look at pornography and lust after the images, does that mean you should cut out your eyes? No. Does that mean you should get rid of your computer and replace your smart phone with a flip phone? Yes. This is extreme, but it is necessary for you, since you are a “hopeless” addict. Lax your ax to the root of the problem.

Anxiety is causing you to sin, what do you do? Find the root. Are you watching the news, becoming entangled with world politics that mean nothing on the eternal scale? If this is the source of your anxiety, cut it off.

Cut cable TV.
Block news sites on your computer. News sites are almost as toxic as porn sites. Cut the unnecessary events that are causing you anxiety. Lay your ax to the root.

Do you impose jealousy and envy on yourself? Cut your social media.

Not only is media a waste of time that does not improve you one bit, but it is the source of the majority of envy we see today.

Same with People Magazine or any other moronic media outlet. Cut these off, your envy will subside. Lay your ax to the root.

All of our evil must be attacked at the core, at the very root. If we do not cut off our behavior at the very root, it will spring back up given enough time. Many trees can regrow after being cut down to a stump. New branches and leaves grow out of the stump and the tree starts over because the root system is still intact. However, No tree can survive being cut off from its source of nourishment. For this reason we lay an ax to the root of our evil.

Fully remove evil from yourself. Remove every possible entrance of sin. This is inconvenient and uncomfortable, but it is necessary. Better to enter into heaven having lived your whole life without social media or television than to enter into hell because your worldly interests and negative habits eventually led you away form the faith.

We must kill sin at the root everywhere we can.

It may be hard to throw a computer out a window because we “need” it for work. So we must Install software that isolates the function of your computer to a few select applications. This guarantees that you use your computer for work only.

Set up programs that do not allow News media, social media and porn. This is a simple equation, but few have the guts to make it happen. We are too attached to our comforts. Men must learn how to exist outside the comfort zone. We must cut every unnecessary outlet from our lives. You must be productive and focused. You do not want to look back on your life and realize you spent all of it on social media, politics and lust of the flesh. We have to focus on our true work, living a meaningful life of righteousness.

Relocation of the Church

The Church never dies, is simply relocates. Many older Americans are paranoid about the fate of the country, and have made the mistake of intertwining the fate of Christianity with the fate of America.

This is absurd and Christians should know better. Take a good look as history, gentlemen.

Every time the home base nation for Christianity has fallen, Christianity has not fallen with it, but has simply relocated to another nation.

Throughout the Old Testament God’s people wandered from place to place until settling in Canaan. They went through several judges before they switched over to kings. Kings came and went and the nation rose and fell yet Israel remained God’s chosen nation.

This would continue until the Birth and Christ and the Church. Israel and Judaism would be obliterated with the destruction of the tempt in A.D. 70 and Christianity would eventually be named as the national religion of Rome (only after extreme levels of persecution from Romans).

Judaism was replaced by Christianity, and God’s chosen religion merely changed locations and forms.

Christianity relocated.

Over time Rome became rank with debauchery, the men became soft and weak and Rome would fall. The world power was toppled and small nations like the Byzantine empire resulted from what once was a great power.

What happened to Christianity in that time of Rome’s destruction? It remained alive. The Church grew and eventually would migrate into European country.

The Church would be spread out over England and remain there until the discovery of the new world. A little over a hundred years later the American colonies would be settled and begin to grow.

Over time people in America would grow tired of the regulation on religion and be disgusted with the church of England. Many of them left England to go to the colonies for this very reason.

Men decided that God was not being worshiped correctly so they left to have space where they could worship in spirit and truth.

America would eventually cut ties with England which sparked the revolutionary war. The American Revolution was not really a revolution. Most revolutions involve the attempt to overthrow the government of the nation. Americans simply wanted to go off and make their own nation instead, but the English would not have it. Thus a war began with the battles of Lexington and Concord. The war would end in British surrender, which marked the beginning of the end of England as a world power, and Britain would lose many other lands they “owned”. (They would also lose those lands because they become weak with political correctness). Christianity relocated to Britain, it was never damaged or destroyed. The Kingdom the relocated to America.

The Kingdom lives forever.

Now we are in the year 2019, America is becoming more evil and debauchery is praised. America looks much like the final Generation of Rome before its great downfall. However, this should not make us fear for the Church, because we can see through history that the Church has never fallen. The Kingdom has never been destroyed, it has simply relocated to more fertile ground.

Christianity is growing exponentially in Africa, and it may be that the next home base for Christians is the massive desert continent below Europe. And that would be just fine. It does not matter where the Hub of the Kingdom is while we are still on the earth, it only matters that there is a Kingdom, and it has never been damaged or destroyed by wars or the destruction of nations. The Kingdom lives forever, and it will thrive wherever necessary.

So do not lose heart. The Church will never end, the Kingdom will never die. We will simply move to the place where we are most able to worship God in Spirit and in Truth.

They Preach What They Do Not Know

Once upon a time, a weak “Christian” man preached on the benefits of saving oneself for marriage.

He only had sex once a month, but he still preached to the young generation.

The man preached that which he did not know.

He preached sexual fulfillment in marriage when he himself had none. He preached emotional fulfillment in marriage when it was not possible for him as a sex-deprived preacher.

Men who never tried heroin preached against the dangers of heroin.
Men who have only had sex with one woman preach about how much better and more fulfilling it is compared to someone who has had sex with multiple women. How would he know which is better without experiencing both in order to be able to compare it?

(That is not to say that you must partake in every evil before you have the right to talk about it, absolutely not.)

It is to say that when men in the Church do not know what they are talking about should not speak.

They will preach about what they do not know until they preach it to the wrong person, the young men who actually tests what the preacher says.

They will preach about how unfulfilling and regretful it is to have sex with many women and most men will believe them. Until one decides to go against the grain and try sex with multiple women. He quickly learns that he has no regret and the so-called “meaningless” sex is very fulfilling.

You cannot out-“spiritualize” biology. Hormones will win the battles that are fought with willpower alone. The Church wants to pretend that sex is not enjoyable outside of marriage, but men will learn that this is untrue and this inspires men to leave the Church.

The problem in the Church is men who speak about sinful and earthly matters as if they know about them. Young men see through this nonsense and decide to test the evil for themselves.

In testing evil they find that the men in the Church lied.

The primary way to combat this is to have someone who has actually committed all the evil he speaks against. It is not necessary for everyone to have committed every evil.

But a person who has committed every sin imaginable and can still say that they are unfulfilling is infinitely more convincing than the man who has experienced none of the sins.

Sin is pleasurable and enjoyable, and we should stop trying to pretend that it isn’t. Yes, sin does inevitably lead to death, but before it gets there is passes through the candy-land world of pleasure.

We must teach the kids that sin is gratifying and fun on the front end, then on the back end it supplies you with pain. Sometimes that pain will not come until the next life, so telling kids that “bad things will happen to them” if they commit sins is moronic.

Because someone is going to take that gamble, and they are going to learn that you were wrong, and they will think the church lies to people simply to keep them from enjoying the few pleasurable moments in life.

This is the negative reputation that the Church needs to fix.

Teach that sin feels good. Teach that sin actually feels great, but that heaven will feel better. We can either enjoy ourselves in this present moment, or enjoy ourselves later, but we cannot have both.

Contrary to what the Church demagogues spew, life is not fulfilling nor is it supposed to be. Sure, there are many times when we “feel” fulfilled, but we should not base our lives on these emoticons because they will leave as quickly as they came. All we should focus on is making it to heaven.

All of life is simply a massive moment of delayed gratification.

If we can outlast the desire to do evil in the moment, we can win the war in the end.

This is a difficult truth, but it must be accepted if we are to be more efficient in the Faith.

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