emotion Archives - Spartan Christianity

You Don’t Outgrow The Fear of Hell

I’ve heard it said that “As you mature in your Christian walk you will be less motivated by the fear of hell and more motivated by a desire to go to heaven.”

This is patently untrue.

And frankly, it is a ridiculous statement that has no foundation in the teachings of the Bible.

Let’s tear this idea to pieces.

The Core

To suggest that one form of motivation [heaven v. hell] is more righteous than another is pharisaical – it is something self-righteous individuals try to bind on others as a religious requirement.

Old Pharisees told the common man that he had to perform specific rituals to be righteous. And those rituals were not found in the Law of God.

Modern Pharisees say you have to be motivated specifically like them if you want to be righteous. You have to feel specific feelings [including the feeling of motivation] to be righteous.

And as we start dissecting this theory, it falls apart immediately.

Motivations differ wildly between people.

What motivates you will not motivate me. and that is perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with this.

First, the claim that as you mature you will be more motivated by heaven than by hell is unfounded because there is no biblical backing for this idea.

And that really should be the end of the discussion. If there is no biblical backing for an idea, it is just speculation and personal perspective.

And that is all this idea is: speculation and perspective.

Not fact.
Not reality.
Not Bible-based teaching.

Just the whimsical idea of some college-aged Bible major who doesn’t want to be afraid of hell because “it doesn’t feel good”.

If God wanted us to be less motivated by fear of hell over time, He would have stated it.

Everything God wants us to do is clearly articulated in scripture. Everything we do in faith is articulated for us [Rom 10:17].

Second, if God was interested in us being unmotivated by hell and more motivated by heaven, then God the Son would not have spent far more time preaching about hell than heaven.

The New Testament teachings of Christ are riddled with warnings about hellfire. Over and over again Christ makes the reality of hell a regular part of His teachings.

Why do you think He does that?

Because hell is MOTIVATING!

Who wants to go to this place called hell as described in the Bible literature? Not a single soul would choose to go there.

The descriptions of hell are vivid. They do generate fear.

But they push the Christians to remain obedient to the commands of God and faithful to the system God has set up.

Hell is operations just as it should have – as a motivator for everyone who is still alive.

Third, hell and heaven are simple motivators operating on the basic human drives – the desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

We want to avoid the pain of hell and seek the pain of heaven.

Just like in regular life, either pleasure or pain will motivate us more than the other.

The ratio of motivation will shift day to day, week to week, and year to year. With different seasons of life come different motivating factors. What motivates the young man may not motivate the old man as much.

But the old man should never be so arrogant to think that his specific portfolio of motivation is the correct one.

Neither should the young man, for that matter.

Do not worry about how your motivations portfolio looks right now. It will change over time and will never be consistent.

All that matters is if you consistently obey the commands and teachings of God. What motivates you to obey is essentially irrelevant based on all available biblical metrics.

Fourth, heaven and hell are not zero-sum motivators – they complement one another.

The motivations to avoid hell and pursue heaven are not opposed. In fact, they are complimentary drives.

We do our best when we simultaneously run from pain and chase down pleasure.

The combination of the motivations leads to the best outcomes.

It does not matter if you are more motivated by heaven or hell or vice versa. All that matters is that you do what is right.

Anyone who suggests that being more motivated by heaven is more noble, righteous, or mature is simply making up nonsense that is not found in scripture.

Breaking the Horse of Emotion

Most people are carried around by their emotions. They are pulled by them as if the emotion is a horse that has not been broken. If you have seen footage of a herd of wild horses, you know they run free and relish that freedom. When men capture them and try to domesticate them there is a process where the animal is completely resistant to being controlled. It concentrates all of its power into ridding itself of the rider who would subjugate it.

But given enough time, the horse will surrender and learn to obey the commands of the rider. You can learn to do the same thing with your emotions. Even though your emotions currently run free and wild, you can learn to put bits in their mouths and turn them where you want. You can be the one in charge of your emotions rather than having your emotions be in charge of you.

Working to control your emotions is painful at first. It contains the risk of being thrown from the horse and injured.

Many riders cannot hold onto horses and are thrown off. They break arms or legs and sometimes sustain more serious injuries. There is a basic, inherent risk in attempting to break a horse. It is the simple risk of pain. Since we are humans are trained from an early age to avoid anything painful, we continue this trend by avoiding the pain of personal change. Rather than gritting our teeth, accepting that attempting to change ourselves will be painful, we instead sit content in our own mediocrity.

Instead of turning our focus inward, pursuing personal excellence, we say that where we are is “good enough”, though there is no such thing. One of our many responsibilities as men is to shoulder difficulty for some greater good. And I argue to you that outside of God the greatest good is the improvement of the self. Because without the improvement of the self, you cannot take care of your family, lead others or accomplish all the other tasks that society imposes upon you. While some people focus on their families and on everything but themselves, you must learn to focus on and improve yourself. By doing this you will bring much greater value to others than those who focus exclusively on others without ever bothering to improve themselves.

The man who focuses only on his family is limited in how well he can truly serve them. Your ability to serve others is limited by your skill level. Take some time and invest in yourself and alter you will be of greater value to others.

Improve yourself by taking a firm grasp on your emotions. You cannot be moved by external events. This is the state of mind you should be training to achieve. The man who is unmoved by external circumstances is like a mountain or the stony cliffs facing the ocean. People build homes and castles on mountains or even on the edges of these stony cliffs because they trust their strength. You need to be the type of man who is the stone, who is the unmovable rock face on the ocean’s edge. With that degree of self-control, you provide a sense of peace and security to everyone around you. They all begin to relax and feel calm because you, because of the man who is the leader, the man who is in complete control of his emotions and cannot be moved by circumstance.

Most men choose not to control their emotions. They are pulled around by them because it is easier to do so. As hard as life is when you are pulled by emotion, that period of time where you work to break the horse of emotion is even more difficult than that. But on the other side is absolute freedom. You have the power of the horse combined with the power of self-control. This makes you the free, independent man who has the strength to stand on his own.

With that newfound power, you can concentrate it into any facet of life that you want.

You have harnessed the horsepower of emotion, now all you have to do is decide what to do with that limitless energy. Will you continue to work on yourself or perhaps concentrate more on that career? Whatever you decide to do, you can do it with newfound energy and focus. You are no longer losing energy through the leak of emotion.

As a man in perfect control of yourself, your energy system is flawless and perfectly sustainable. You cannot be moved by external events and on top of that, you have massive personal power. The benefits that come from being able to control your emotions cannot be understated.

Also understand I do not mean that you should not feel emotions. I am not trying to rob you of your humanity. Again, you must learn not to divorce emotions completely, but rather to use them as fuel.

Embrace the pain of change.

All change is difficult because we are reconstructing who we are all the way down to our brain cells. When changing who we are, we literally change at the cellular level. We adjust the way our hormone and emergency systems respond to events. By being in control of our emotions we limit the time we spend being stressed or in fight-or-flight mode. That not only saves buckets of personal energy but is inherently masculine to the core. The ability to resist emotion, control it or be unmoved by external circumstance is a demonstration of strength.

Be disgusted by others who have no emotional self-control.

One of the ways to continue to be motivated on the path to any change is to be disgusted by others around you who show no regard for emotional control. You can apply this to any type of change you want. Before anyone misunderstands, I am not saying that you look down on others or hate them for their actions, but rather that you simply be disgusted by the action itself. Love the weak but hate weakness.

You can apply this to diet and training by being disgusted at what the majority of people in the world decide to do with their bodies. Rather than training them and taking care of them, they live sedentary lives and pack on enough fat to last them a year-long famine.

Learn to be disgusted by people who show a complete lack of emotional control. Recognize it is total weakness and effeminacy and promise yourself that you will never be like those weak men. This is critical: you need to have a goal to aim at combined with something you want to avoid if you want maximum motivation for change. Most people do not spend enough time developing the appropriate anger and disgust at particular actions, so they simply wallow in their lifestyle. Many men live in obesity, pornography addiction, and mediocrity because they do not have the proper amount of hatred for those things. Not that simply having hatred is a cure-all for conditions, but it is a very important piece of the recipe.

Hold on tight and be persistent during your change.

You may be thrown from the horse. That is okay, remount and work again. Breaking a horse is about breaking its will and making it willing to obey a master. You also have to break your need for comfort, and your desire to be mindlessly pulled by emotions and external circumstances. Take ownership of your emotions then dominate them.

No more are you content to live a life where you are not in complete control of everything. You are unwilling to live a life dominated by emotion. Understand though, that this change will take a great deal of time as any change does. It starts with awareness of emotionalism and finishes with the complete subjugation of emotion.

Maintain gains – the consolidation.

Whenever we learn something new, there is a period of time where we are consolidating the memory and organizing it so it can be retrieved later. There will be a moment when you break the resistance of your emotions and everything seems easier to control. It is critical that at this moment you do not let go of the control you have over your emotions. You have to consolidate that victory and cement it so that it becomes permanent.

Do not be the man who finally loses all that weight and then falls right back into his old habits of overeating and laziness. You have to maintain your gains; this is of critical importance. Everything in life has to be maintained simply to mitigate the effects of the law of entropy.

Feed and water the horse. Keep up with your victory over yourself and maintain the virtue of self-control.

Emotions Versus Thought

The great battle of the ages is emotions versus thought. One side wishes to use feelings and emotions as the basis for action. The other side would rather plan each step thoroughly before taking it.

The emotional camp is always a temporary one. Once a society becomes safe enough for any idea, no matter how stupid, to survive, emotionalism begins to spring up. Feelings are prioritized over thoughts. Emotions over rational actions.

The emotional man asks, “Why can’t we just all get along and be a big family?” Because human beings were not designed to act that way. He is attempting to justify the philosophy of socialism. This socialism was created by an atheist. It is only an option in times of abundance and peace. It then quickly devastates a plan and reduces it to poverty and war.

The great war of our time: emotions versus truth.

The logical mind is not devoid of emotion. Many people have this impression of rational thinkers and accuse them of heartless action and thinking. It is not that the rational person wants to avoid helping others, they just want to ensure it is sustainable to do so. they are not against charity, they just know that someone has to pay for the charity.

When emotions are pitted against thoughts, it is because the emotional mind wants to do something absurd. It is a childlike mentality that is unaware of any and all limitations imposed by reality. There is nothing it holds itself back from. And it wants all change to come at the expense of someone else.

In the war of emotions versus thought, emotion will always attempt to claim the moral high ground.

Because it cannot support its position with rational thought, the emotional position can only demonize the enemy. I cannot levy a rational accusation against thought so it resorts to name-calling. Know that when a position must be supported by emotion rather than by logic, it is inherently weak. Any position founded on truth will be able to support itself. Any emotion added would signal weakness.

Just like a dying animal thrashes around at everything near it before it dies, so also the emotional position screams, puts on a big show, and finally breathes its last when it can hold on no longer.

In the war of emotions versus truth, choose the side of rational thought. Truth will always be forced to come out of rational thinking and it will remain solid despite years of attack.

Read this article from Apologetics Press: Feelings Follow Facts

You Don’t Have to Want To Go to Church

I hear a great deal of talk in religion about how people should want to do what’s right or how they should want to go to church. People should want to go to heaven or want to behave “appropriately”. I’m here to tell you that you do not have to want to go to church. You do not have to desire to do the right thing. You do not have to want to do anything because Christian living is all about action. We will explain why by diving into a little bit of science, so please bear with me.

Every feeling and emotion can be reduced to various hormones and chemicals in the body.

This includes the emotion/sensation of wanting to do something. In fact, the biochemistry of desire is actually quite well understood. While many chemicals and hormones play a role in “the want factor“, the main one we will discuss is DOPAMINE.

You may be very aware of this chemical as it is the focus of many self-improvement gurus, articles, and books. We will briefly describe it here in case you are not aware of what this chemical does. This is not a flawless scientific description, but it should give you the basic idea.

Dopamine is the “wanting” chemical. It is a neurotransmitter that regulates goal-oriented behavior and cravings. When we engage in some action that is pleasurable or rewarding, we release dopamine. For example, when we take a big bite out of chocolate cake, our brain says, “Wow, this is delicious. There are a lot of calories in here, so you should remember this for later. This food will aid us in survival”. That is what happens when dopamine is released and the brain remembers the pleasurable activity. Then when cravings for chocolate cake come up a few days later, that is your brain telling you to engage in that dopamine inducing behavior.

Here is the basic principle: Dopamine is tied to a reward.

We release dopamine when we are rewarded for doing something making it more likely that we will do it again. This is how good and bad habits are formed. Without dopamine, we cannot experience the feeling of wanting to do something.

Now if we are punished instead of rewarded for a certain behavior, we do not release dopamine. And because we were punished, it becomes less likely that we will engage in that behavior again. Remember that point, because it is the basis for refuting every individual who says:

“Johnny, you should want to do what is right. You should want to go to church, save yourself for marriage and go to heaven”.
A standard religious individual who has thought through precisely zero of their own philosophical positions.

Rewarded actions are likely to be repeated and punished actions are likely to be avoided. This is built upon the first and most foundational principle of human nature – self-interest. The desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

To release dopamine and therefore associate pleasure with doing an activity, there must be a reward for doing it. So let me ask you this, is there always a reward for doing what is right, saving yourself for marriage, or going to church?

NO

Church can be draining. Many times I leave feeling worse than when I arrived.

You can save yourself for marriage only to marry a frigid prude, which happens to many religious men who mistake “attraction” for “arousal”.

Or you can do the right thing and actually suffer for it, everyone knows this.

You can take the right action, be punished for it, and therefore release no dopamine in association with those activities. Because of this, you will not have a desire or craving for these activities. When it is painful to go to church, you will not want to go there. If you are punished for doing the right thing, you will not desire to repeat those noble deeds.

However, all that being said, you can still do what is right without wanting to do it. You can behave righteously without having the dopamine-induced craving to spur you on. So many in the religious world want to tell you that an emotional, dopamine-based desire for church or righteous behavior is required for you to do what is right, but this is not true. You do not have to want to do what is right, you simply have to do it.

You do not have to want to go to church.

Read: Repentance – Change of action, not emotion.

Because it is possible to want to behave righteously and still behave immorally. It is also possible to want to behave immorally but still manage to act righteously. Which case is better? Obviously the action-based case. Feelings do not matter, only action matters.

Maybe with time, the desire to do what is right or to attend church will resurface, but do not worry about that right now. Just worry about taking action, because at the end of the day that is all that matters.

Faith – The Bridge Between Knowledge and God

“And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
Hebrews 11:6

“So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
Romans 10:17

“And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
Mark 11:22-24

It is difficult to find a satisfactory explanation of faith in the modern religious world. No one can nail down a concrete definition of what faith is. It is always vague, ambiguous and unhelpful to the rational mind. The definitions most Christians give are so unclear that you may not even know if you have faith or not, because you have been confused about exactly what faith is.

Imagine a ladder leading to God. We build this ladder by gaining knowledge of God. We learn all we can about Him until a certain point where we no longer understand with our finite minds what He is and why He commands certain actions. At first we build knowledge until we can get no closer to God through our knowledge alone. The ladder we have built still does not reach God, so our faith has to cover the remaining distance. Note that faith must begin with rational knowledge (the ladder), and end with trust.

Faith is a distant relative to trust.

It is a type of hope. We do not fully understand how there can be an invisible being who created everything, so we must have faith. We do not see how it is possible to exist for eternity, so we have faith. Some do not believe that the punishment of hell fits the crimes of sin, do they still have faith then? We do not know, therefore we hope/trust/have faith.

As difficult as it is to have faith, it is much harder to have faith in atheism. Atheism is unnatural because it violates laws of nature by its very definition. It requires ten times more faith to be an atheist than to be Christian. Any man who comes to the conclusion that atheism is a rational belief is simply trying to justify a lifestyle of no accountability and maximum pleasure.

What we want to avoid are the weak minded habits of the religious people who use faith as an excuse to never learn anything.

Men want to just “have faith” so that they do not have to think about any difficult or complex religious idea. Faith replaces work for these men. Faith replaces the need of man to progress and improve, therefore men become fat and lazy. We must avoid this justification of weakness. Men then mistake faith for an emotion rather than a thought process. Faith is not a feeling, gentlemen, faith is a set of beliefs and thoughts that result in specific types of action and are founded on rationality first and foremost. Feelings are almost always irrelevant.

Of course, the opposite of the blind faith man is the blindly rational man. While there are overly emotional men, there are also overly rational men who never accept anything outside science even though science shows itself to be limited time and time again because it is carried out by human beings. Any highly logical man will find religious faith difficult, and this is not evil. This makes his faith more powerful than others because once he achieves a respectable degree of faith, it is set in stone forever because it took him so long to build. We must build our faith in the same way because we are rational men who do not trust in mere emotion.

Mantra

I trust Him who I cannot see.

Application

Faith is built by thinking, not by feeling. Therefore, we must foster the types of thoughts that lead to a bolstered faith rather than an emotional faith. The emotional faith can be destroyed in one second, it is the house built on the sand. The rational faith will outlast any siege.

You believe in God because it is rational and because all other explanations violate laws of nature. What God has told you about Himself is what you must trust. God has told us that He is merciful and longsuffering (Exodus 34:6), that He loves mankind and does not want any of them to be lost (2 Peter 3:9). Do we believe those words of Scripture or do we allow our emotions to think for us?

We must think rightly about God, and avoid “thinking” with our feelings. One of the benefits of faith is that it covers what we cannot understand logically, so we must use it as a tool. It is not intended to replace the work we are required to do in building our thoughts and belief in God.

Build thoughts conducive to a strong faith. Imagine the great heroes of the faith in the Word, mimic the thoughts you think they would have had. Above all, never let your faith be damaged simply because you are feeling a certain way. No one cares about your feelings, you must do what is right regardless of how you feel.

Ignore emotions, actions are what matter.

Strengthen your faith.

Harden your mind.

Build faith through constructive thought.

Conduct yourselves like men.

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