Christianity Archives - Page 3 of 8

Israel is Separated from Other Nations

One of the greatest examples of seeing God’s intention to separate His people from the rest of the world is found in His commands to Israel. They were to be separate from all the other nations. There could be no intermarrying or relationships.

This is because the incredibly negative influence of the other nations would be so powerful that it might sway Israel towards evil. And in fact, it did sway them time and time again. We read in the book of Judges how over and over again the people of Israel disobey God, worship idols, intermarry with the locals, and behave poorly.

“You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.”
Deuteronomy 7:3-4

It is easy to understand why they did this. It was because of the sexual activity involved in the various worship services of the foreign gods.

But some in the modern world might wonder why God did not allow them to intermarry so they could be a “good influence” on the people of Canaan. We are too simplistic in our thinking if we are contemplating this. We should know that the pull of a negative influence is far more powerful than the pull of a positive one. And we will always be more drawn towards evil than towards good. This is simply a part of the human condition, something we must think about as we do war with the flesh.

“For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
Galations 5:17

Israel could never be a good enough influence to change the people of the world

Sure, there were probably a few people here and there who wanted to join Israel and changed their beliefs. But these were the minority. Most people never change the way they are. And this is why God’s command was to totally annihilate these people from the face of the earth. None of them could be left alive.

“Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.”
Deuteronomy 20:17

If you are removing cancer from the human body, you obviously want to remove the whole thing. If you leave even a small portion of the cancerous tumor in the body, it will simply grow back to full strength.

This is why Israel was required to completely remove the cancer that was the pagan nations in Canaan. There could be no place for people who engaged in homosexuality and offered their children as burnt offerings to their gods. Imagine sacrificing your kids by burning them alive just so you could have a better life or a better harvest the next year. It is absolutely despicable behavior. And it was precisely this behavior that required those people to be utterly destroyed.

We live a similar life today.

The modern church overemphasized the idea of being a “good influence“. They do this in the same way that they place too much focus on accountability. These are good tools, but they should not make up the bulk of our practice. We are never going to be able to exert as much positive influence as the world will be able to exert a negative influence. The negative is always more powerful in a face-to-face assault. This is why we must be more strategic in our approach.

We have to control our environment. The best way to avoid negative behaviors is to make sure we do not have the opportunity to engage in them.

You cannot eat junk food if it is not in the house. You cannot be pulled into worldliness if you are not surrounded by people of the world. People who would be forcing their extremely powerful influence on you.

Influence always comes from a position of strength, you cannot influence someone unless you have some power or unless they look up to you in some way. There is no way around this. Influence, as well as help, always comes from a position of strength. This is a fact of life.

We have to arm ourselves and separate ourselves from the negative influence of the world. We have to split from the pack if we ever intend to become strong.

Israel failed time and time again because of negative influences.

We cannot allow our lives to be lived in the same way. Separate yourself from false ideologies and evil behavior just like you would remove yourself from a leper colony. Treat evil like a plague and hide from it. We rarely have the strength to engage it in full frontal warfare, we need to be strategic and maneuver around. Work the enemy’s strengths into weaknesses. Do not allow them to touch you. Act too quickly for them to realize what you are doing. Be fast, bold, and courageous, and do not engage with the world more than necessary.

Do not ever overestimate the strength of a positive influence. The positive influence is almost always weaker than the negative one. Do not count on your own strength of will to allow you to resist temptation or influence others. Be realistic about your own strength and only engage in skirmishes you know you can win.

Avoid evil and act like men.

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!

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The Dichotomy of The Penis and the Rational Mind

Do you know someone who has made life altering decisions based on their sex drive? If you know a man who thinks with his penis rather than his rational mind, please leave a comment below and share this article with your friends.

“For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”
Galatians 5:17

No Christian dares to speak about this matter, which is an expression of how afraid most Christians are when it comes to anything related to sex. No one wants to accept the facts of reality that are dark and nasty because they think that somehow it reflects poorly on our Creator when it does not. The greatest physical dichotomy that can be experienced by men is the one that exists between the penis and the rational mind.

The penis wants to have sex with every girl it sees, while the mind knows better.

The mind knows the consequences, the penis knows only pleasure and pleasure seeking behavior. While the penis wants sex every day, the rational mind cares about the needs of the wife. The penis is a primal force of nature, in contrast the brain uses the rational nature of thought. What do you think wins out most of the time? The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41).

The penis will throw away life, career and family for one sexual encounter. Why else would a man risk all his possessions by having sex with a woman who is not his wife? The decision is not rational, but driven by the biological needs of man. The lengths men will go to for sex are unlimited.

If women truly understood the depths of the darkness of the mind of men, they would never complain about sermons on modesty ever again.

Men, whether knowingly or not, base nearly all their choices and actions on the desire for sex. A great career and a nice house are things that come from hard work, and are marketing tools men use to attract the most sexually attractive female possible. The work of man is done for sex. Men get married for sex, and without sec there would be no marriage. How else would men be drawn into such a risky and unprofitable financial maneuver like marriage? There has to be something really nice in it for the men, otherwise marriage does not happen.

KEY: Without the urge to have sex, a man does not commit to a woman.

KEY: Do not let your penis make a decision that your rational mind regrets.

This happens all the time around us. A man makes a life altering decision based on his sex drive alone and years later ends up shaking his head to himself regretting ever having been born. Men do this with things they buy or the career moves they make. A man might choose a certain career just to attract a woman, not realizing he will spend the majority of his time at the job he hates.

Men think with their penises most often when it comes to marriage. If a woman has nice breasts that alone makes her desirable for marriage. If she looks good physically, that is all some men need in order to commit. Do you think men are committing to marriage out of rationality? They are not. They marry out of lust and the basic need for sex.

Just as the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, so the mind is rational but the penis seeks nothing but sex.

Cult prostitutes are the reason that Israel continued to leave God. The fact that any man could have sex as a part of a worship service is enough for any man to forget the miracles he saw in Egypt and turn into a heathen. If you do not think a man is capable of this, you are dead wrong.

Christian women in the church would be shocked and disgusted to see what a man can do when led by his penis alone. Ever heard of rape? Do you think that springs forth from a place of rational thinking? No. It does not, it comes from animal-like drives. Remember: Man is one part divine and one part flesh and animal. Man has the capacity not only to rape, but also to enjoy it. Such vile behavior is the result of the darkest, most evil thoughts in the soul of man. This is the dichotomy of the penis and the rational, moral being.

Mantra

Do not let your penis make a decision that your rational mind regrets.

Application

Again, do not let your penis make a decision that your rational mind regrets. The importance of this cannot possibly be overstated.

Do not marry out of lust.

Do not have sex out of lust.

Never marry a woman just because she has nice breasts, or a nice butt, or because you think she will be good in bed. These are things that your penis would do if it had full reign on your mind.

The key to making rational choices in life is to be aware of the irrationality of your biological drives.

If you know those drives are irrational, it makes it easier to resist their pull. Awareness of your sex drive is more than half the battle. Here are a few common situations where men begin to think with their penises instead of with their rational minds:

A man has been dating a girl for a few months and thinks she is “the one” (no such thing as ‘the one’). Based on the urge for sex he asks her to marry him, not realizing he had confused his sex drive for genuine love. They get married, and after a few years the newness of marriage wears off.
The dust settles and the man realizes he sprinted into marriage with a woman he did not truly love because he wanted to have sex with her.
A man has been dating a girl for years and really wants to get married. This man is skilled at hands-on jobs like electrical work or construction. But because he wants to please this woman and marry her as soon as possible, he chooses to go into business with his brother or find whatever job he can get the fastest. As soon as he has money, he marries the girl. A few years later he deeply regrets changing his career path based on his sex drive, because now he is completely unfulfilled by his work.
A man is being pressured by people in the church to get married soon (whether knowingly or not many church members exert massive pressure on young men and women when it comes to their marriage plans). He doesn’t really want to get married, but he does want to have sex. He also wants to get all these church members to leave him alone about marriage. So even though he doesn’t truly want to get married yet, he finds a woman, sees her for a period of time and then marries her.

The man soon discovers that sex is not everything it was made out to be, if he gets any of it, especially if he marries a woman who was damaged by purity culture. He sleepwalks through life, never living it to the fullest. His lifestyle is greatly reduced because he has to mentally, physically emotionally and financially accommodate a woman. He is a walking time bomb for a midlife crisis.

There are a few common examples that you have probably witnessed yourself while growing up in the church. There are many more examples; write down a few that you have seen.

You must discipline yourself and recognize that you are going to want many things in life, and the majority of those will be the secondary and tertiary results of your desire for sex. The only men who do not accept the reality of this principle have forgotten what it is like to have more than one nanoliter of testosterone in their bodies.

You must be constantly aware of your desires; the penis will try to shut off the rational part of your brain and force you to think with your sex drive alone. This is the opposite of wisdom. This is how men find themselves in unfulfilling marriages.

You must make all facets of your body subject to you.

You must make the body submit to your rational mind (1 Corinthians 9:27). Without this, you will mindlessly impregnate women and suffer the consequences of that behavior. Command over the sex drive is the defining characteristic of a great man.

Be aware of your drives, and force them into submission.

Behave with honor.

Keep your penis in your pants.

Redirect that sexual energy to your work. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Profanity – Idle Words – Mindless Talk

“But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.”
Colossians 3:8

“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”
Ephesians 4:29

“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”
Matthew 12:36, 37

“but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”
James 3:8

The problem of profanity has nothing to do with the words themselves, and everything to do with what the words mean. The church has a bad habit of focusing completely on what the “bad words” are and ignoring the root problem behind the words. Syllables, sounds and words are not sinful in and of themselves. It is what they mean that is sinful.

If we curse at someone, we are verbalizing hatred towards that person. This is the sin. Not physically saying the “bad word”, but devaluing a human being with curse words is the evil.

A person only has to cut you off on the road for you to hate him.

Someone takes too long in an aisle of a store and you are up in arms.

We manifest this anger by the use of our language. The hatred, the undisciplined tongue, and the thought behind those words make them sinful.

Profanity is also not a great choice because it aligns us with the world.

When Peter was accused of being a disciple of Christ, he tried to prove he was of the world by cursing. What better way to instantly show that you have nothing to do with any religion or Christianity other than by cursing? It is a quick and easy way to show that you are a person of the world, not a person of God. This is the only decent argument against using profanity out of mere frustration, and not out of hate for another human being.

Profanity accomplishes nothing. Scripture would classify it “idle words” (Matthew 12:36-37), or mindlessly spoken words. Mindlessly spoken words reflect a lack of vigilance in the mind. That is as far as the logic behind profanity can be stretched.

Men do not need profanity. Many use it, but they don’t need to.

There is also a large group of Christians who seem to be okay with profanity because “words are just words”. I can’t say they are wrong. They argue from this basic idea: “What makes one word worse than another?” Societal implication? Who gets to choose which words are bad and which ones are not? The inability of Christians to answer questions like these is the reason why the profanity-sympathizers exist.

Christians try to argue back and say that some words started out good and then were perverted and turned evil by the way that men were using them. This is more evidence for the idea that the problem is not the words themselves, but the meaning behind the words. Based on this argument, any word we use to degrade another person is profane. Any way we manifest hate towards a fellow human is an instance of profanity. So we must stop pointing at specific words as the problem and start focusing on the hearts of men. Stop demonizing the words that men use and instead condemn the attitudes that are the basis of those words. Words are words. Reject aligning yourself with the world.

Mantra

Words are not evil, verbal manifestation of hate towards a brother is profane and evil.

Application

Nothing good comes from profanity, so you might as well stop using those words. But remember that the problem is the heart of man, the evil of the mind and the hatred of our fellow man. Dig up the weed by the root or it will just grow back. Fix the problem at the heart or the profanity will persist for your entire life.

Cursing is difficult to stop because it becomes a mindless habit.

You get used to uttering words without thought. So awareness is going to be your best tool. Again, you must have vigilance. This cannot be overstated, because no improvement is possible without awareness, without vigilance. Get a grip on your words by thinking and be cognizant of what you say.

Once you are aware of the way you use your words, you must identify the situations when you use those words.

Do you use profanity out of frustration while driving or working?
Are you mindlessly using profanity in conversation in order to build rapport?
Are you trying to accentuate a point?

As soon as you identify the environments in which you use the most profanity, you must learn to stop yourself.

If you are mindlessly using profanity out of frustration, you lack self-control. Why are you allowing minor events like driving to make you that angry? In this case the profanity is just a symptom of your overall lack of self control. Work on controlling yourself and your profanity problem may resolve itself.
If you are using profanity in conversation, you have to realize there are better ways to build rapport with individuals. You also do not know the person you are talking to. They may be instantly turned off by your use of profanity. Using language in regular conversation is simply unsavory. It makes you look less intelligent than you are. Very few men in the world can be highly intelligent and continue to sound intelligent in conversation while using non-stop profanity.
There are better ways to add emphasis to an idea than by using profanity. Try expanding your vocabulary. If you cannot accentuate your point without profanity, you simply do not know enough words.

Men need no profanity. Discipline your tongue. Be a Man.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Radical Liberalism

Liberalism taken to an extreme becomes pure emotionalism.

“In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”
Matthew 15:9

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
John 4:24

“And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.”
Exodus 32:4-6

Liberalism pushes for progression in worship. They want more welcoming Churches and more “enjoyable” worship services. They tend to place the focus of worship on emotion, how they personally feel or the spiritual high they get while “worshiping”. This becomes a problem because it makes the individual the primary object of the worship service instead of God.

You are no longer worshiping God, but are merely using the worship as a tool to feel good about yourself.

Liberals enjoy anything that promotes emotion and that rejects negativity or feeling bad. They use negative emotion only as a tool to promote guilt. Because guilt is obviously a highlight of a good Christian.

Liberals love to feel guilty and “broken” and in need of a savior. The problem arises when liberals begin to wallow in their brokenness yet do nothing to fix the problem. God demands improvement and progression of faith. This,“I’m so bad, I need Jesus so much. I need grace so much” mentality is emotionalistic nonsense. It promotes no growth, and it generates nothing positive.

Liberalism is fundamentally effeminate.

Liberalism is feminized religion.

Weak, emotional men tend to gravitate towards this because it makes them think all their emotions are okay and should even be applauded.

It is okay for these men to cry and break down because they have bought into the feminist lie that a “vulnerable man is an attractive man”. (A Strong, masculine man is an attractive man).

It is okay for them to express emotion like a child. They think it is okay for them to get all emotional and touchy-feely about worship. They think it is fine to have no mastery over emotion and to just let it all out when anyone so much as mentions the name of Jesus. This is all nonsense.

This is not spirituality, it is emotionalism masquerading as spirituality.

Forms of liberalism are also beneficial. Without some element or progressiveness, nothing would ever change. Radical conservatives would have been unwilling to adapt to the modern times of technology and the Church would be stuck in the bronze age. Progressiveness is the reason we can accept PowerPoint and microphones in worship. The push for new things can bring about many benefits. But we should never try to make progress purely for the sake of making progress, which is the mission of the progressive. Progress should be made when newness is truly needed.

Radical liberalism has just as many problems and pitfalls as radical conservatism. Both should be avoided at all costs. We are called to be Christians, and such we should be. Reject these labels of extreme Christian genres.

Mantra

To embrace a label is to kiss death.

Application

Again, all labels must be rejected. After this, emotions must be controlled at all cost. Emotion may be fun and enjoyable, but it is neither productive nor rational, and is the birthplace of all kinds of problems.

You have heard about crimes of passion: emotion pushes individuals to kill.

Emotion pushes Kids to have sex before they are married because they think they are “in love”.

Extreme, unbridled emotion is a root of all kinds of evil and there is no need to bring it in the worship assembly.

To reject emotionalistic worship is to reject selfishness, because one who focuses on emotion in worship cannot also be focused on God. Emotions are not to be applauded, they are to be warned against.

Be willing to recognize overly emotional traits within yourself and start working to reject them. If you are an “emotional man” acknowledge that this is a weakness. Other men will exploit this trait if they ever discover you have it. And when it comes to something as apparent as emotions, they will certainly discover it.

You have to ask yourself difficult questions:

Am I concerned with worshipping God or merely with feeling good?

Do I make decisions based on logic and the Bible or based on emotions?

Do I tend to try extra hard to justify ideas or actions that I cannot support with reason or Scripture?

Be a man. Control your emotions. Be Serious with your faith.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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