Absolution is the freedom from guilt of past wrongdoings.
The guilt is removed from the mind, never to be seen again. Absolution is possible through our faith, yet so many Christians are obsessed with feeling guilty because they think that emotional guilt or feeling bad about themselves somehow makes them more righteous or that God will have more compassion on them. Nothing they think is logical. The average church goer in the 21st century knows nothing about the God he claims to obey.
We have been given the freedom from guilt so that we will not be negatively affected by that guilt in our lives. God remembers our sin no more, it is completely forgotten, and we should view our evil in the same way. What weak people tend to do is focus so much on how “bad and evil” they are that they never actually improve their lives by changing their actions. They think it is enough to simply feel guilt, but action is also necessary. They are addicted to the emotional feeling of guilt. Guilt is worthless if we are not moving to improve ourselves constantly.
Absolution is a mental tool for improvement as well as a spiritual tool for salvation.
It is a mental tool in that we use it to avoid becoming bogged down in our guilt and shame, and instead we can turn our minds to the measurable progress of character. We are not constantly obsessed with what we did wrong but rather we are obsessed with improving. Absolution gives men the freedom of mind and conscience to work on their character instead of becoming paralyzed by their mountain of sin.
Mantra
My guilt is washed away and I feel it no more.
Application
Reject the lie propagated in the religious world that you need guilt, regret and shame in order to “be a good Christian” or improve. Christ did not die so that you could sit around feeling sorry for yourself. God has freed us from these negative, destructive and unproductive emotions.
No Christian man is ever required to have specific feelings and emotions in order to be righteous, that would be too much to ask of humanity. Not everyone is emotionally happy about all the commands of God, but that is the point, these commands must be kept regardless of how we feel.
We have been freed from the guilt of our sin. Therefore, if guilt remains it is because we have not conquered it in the mind. We must turn our minds to thoughts that will slowly chip away at the remainder of our unnecessary guilt. We have to consciously think, “There is no need to feel guilt. What is this guilt accomplishing in and of itself? Nothing. Therefore, I reject my own guilt. I am absolved from guilt and have no obligation to entertain it in my mind any longer”.
Over time the guilt will fade as we realize the truth of absolution. Once we are no longer wasting time by having regular guilt trips and pity parties, we can begin construction on the character we must possess as men. Guilt without action is worthless. So remove all guilt from your mind.
What kind of worship are you offering to God on a regular basis? Are you focused on worship or on yourself? Most people in the religious world focus on themselves during worship instead of on God. They are more interested in their own emotions than they are with offering praise to God.
“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
There are terms to describe this distinction between worship types, it’s referred to as “vertical worship” (Where worship goes “up” to God) or “horizontal worship” (where worship moves laterally from person to person or stays within the self). Vertical worship places the focus on God and on serving Him in the worship. This is noble and preferable to horizontal worship which places the focus on the individual, on all the members of the church and how everyone is feeling emotionally about worship. Vertical worship tends to be primarily preferred by conservatives, (including radicals) while horizontal worship seems to be primarily preferred by liberals (also including radicals).
Worship is a service, and as such it should be directed towards God and not ourselves.
The only time it seems fit to observe yourself during worship is during communion. We enter the house of God not to increase our own emotions, but to present worship and service to the Lord.
Key point: This service does not always have to include enjoyment on our part. For years Christians have shoved down the throats of their children this idea of enjoying worship. This is absurd – “enjoyment” is an emotion and God never commands us to have specific emotions. While there may be times where worship is enjoyable, it is not a requirement. God commands action not emotion, this cannot be stated enough.
Did we mention that worship is not about you? It has everything to do with God, and almost nothing to do with us.
We as human beings will have our humanity and our nature infuse worship. We as humans get bored, and therefore we will occasionally become bored in worship – boredom is a feeling, an emotion. There will be instances when we will not feel like worshiping just like there are days when we don’t feel like going to work. We will dislike certain hymns (the ones the song leader will choose to lead every single Sunday without fail).
Men must sing when they don’t feel like it.
We must pray when we are not emotional.
We must worship despite how we are feeling at the time.
To suggest that we need to be in a certain emotional state in order to worship properly is dogma and propaganda that exists both in liberal and in conservative circles. Emotion should be cast aside and ignored as a requisite for worship. What does the Lord require of you? To worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). That is all the Word of God says. To say we must feel a certain way for worship to be acceptable is an addition to the Word of God, a despicable power move by theoretical Christians (Deuteronomy 4:2; Revelation 22:18-19; Proverbs 30:6).
Another popular tactic used by individuals attempting to rationalize their emotional hysteria is this: “But my emotions make worship better”.
Make it better for who? For you or for God? The answer is simple, emotions make us feel better and have nothing to do with God. Take a restaurant for example: imagine you are going out to eat and you sit down in a restaurant and look over a menu. A waiter comes and takes your order: you order steak and baked potato, nothing more and nothing less. 20 minutes later the waiter comes back with a steak that has been smothered in a strawberry sauce and your potato is stuffed with mushrooms. You say to the waiter, “Hey, what happened to my order? I asked for steak and potato and that is all”. To which the waiter replies, “Well I just really like strawberry sauce on steak and mushrooms in my potato, it makes it better and I just like it”.
Do you see the problem here. The opinion of the server should not influence what he delivers to the table. Yet so many religious people do the same when it comes to worship. God listed in His word or left examples of what he wants in worship, yet we (the servers) decide to add what we think will make it better. When it comes to giving service to God, to focus should be on Him and never on ourselves.
The same emotionalistic tactic is applied to musical instruments in worship, clapping and hand-raising.
People are doing what makes them feel good and they do not care about focusing on God. This is proven by the fact that no one ever fact checks their own behavior with scripture. Take the hand-raising example – you have one main instance in scripture where the idea of lifting holy hands comes from, and it is in 1 Timothy 2:8. The first question should be “What does it mean to lift holy hands? Do I lift one hand or two? Where do I place my hands? How were hands raised in the 1st century when 1 Timothy was written?”
But none of those questions are asked because people are solely interested in doing whatever increases their own emotions while disregarding the principles of God. If Those individuals truly cared about raising hands for God’s sake, they would be neck deep in the scripture trying to find out what it truly means to “lift holy hands”. But instead they just do whatever they see fit, usually after seeing some other religious person raise their hands in a way they liked. This is a learned behavior that has little to do with scripture and much to do with emotionalism and socialization. Avoid doing anything for emotional reasons – that is not the way of men.
This is all not to say that we must mechanically walk through the various rituals and traditions of worship while having our minds far away from God, that would be equally wrong.
We would be honoring God with our lips while our hearts would be far from Him (Matthew 15:8-9; Isaiah 29:13). But also understand that the word “heart” that is used in scripture is not speaking about emotion. If you open your selected Hebrew study tool (BibleHub.com is recommended) you will find that the word translates “heart” in Isaiah 29:13 originally meant “Mind”, “attention”, “innerman” or “will”. Also in Matthew 15:8-9, even the Greek word translated as “heart” actually meant “mind”, “character”, “innerself”, “will” or “intention”.
Do any of these definitions sound emotional to you? No. Each definition is all about the mindset of a man. The masculine man concentrates his mind, attention, will and inner self towards God in worship. If we are participating in horizontal worship and concerned about our own emotions, then our attention is not on God – that is the end of the story. To suggest horizontal worship is anything else but emotionalism masquerading as spirituality is simply an attempt to justify one’s own behavior.
Mantra
Worship is only for God, and it is only about God.
Application
Purge the idea that worship is about you from your mind. Worship is about God.You go to a restaurant to be served food; how would you feel if the servers only cared about himself, how he was feeling, and how he was doing relative to the other waiters? You would be upset, because you are there to be served, and this fact has nothing to do with the servers besides the fact that they are the media through which that service comes. When it comes to worship, we are the server. We are providing God with worship, we should not be concerned with how we are feeling. Rather we should be concerned about whether or not our worship is done in spirit and truth.
We worship in spirit and truth, not emotion and truth, and not truth and emotion.
Spirit. Truth. With these we Worship God. We worship truthfully and with presence of mind, not thinking about food, sex or work. This is difficult and do not let any Christian tell you otherwise. It is becoming more and more difficult to keep our minds centered., in worship because our minds are conditioned to modern life with it’s constant distractions. The world itself is even a distraction and this is a tool of an enemy to keep us occupied in parts of life that do not matter.
The ability to focus is rare, and should be practiced if we are to distill thoughts when we enter into the House of God. Once the thoughts of the world are purged, we must turn our complete focus to God. We are serving God, not being emotionally served by the worship service – this is the key point.
Tactic I – Prime the Mind
Detach by taking all thoughts and writing them down. Observe them objectively. Your mind can be calmed simply by writing down everything you are thinking.
Once the mind is calmed, orient it in the direction of God. Start saying that you are about to enter the presence of God for worship on the first day of the week.
Prime the mind by listening to small spiritual snippets online or by listening to hymns.
Be prepared and in the mindset to worship God before you even enter the assembly. You do not want to have to waste the first several minutes of Sunday morning worship by having to get into the right mindset.
Enter into worship with a reduced sense of self.
Increase your presence of mind but direct your thoughts away from your own life, and instead direct them onto the life of Christ and onto God Himself.
Always remember that you are here to serve, not to be served.
Happiness is one of the most overrated emotions in religion as a whole. Everyone in life is pursuing the elusive combination of brain chemicals, yet no one ever seems to find them.
“He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
People assume that what God wants for them is this good feeling that happiness provides. The truth is that how we feel is irrelevant and should not even be considered as part of the picture because emotions only muddy the waters of logical thinking.
The lust for happiness has become increasingly popular over the years, as human beings have become less and less happy over time.
Entanglement with the world (2 Timothy 2:4), self-absorption (2 Timothy 3:1-5) and the breakdown of community institutions have contributed to this famine of happiness. People are no longer participating in the activities that provide purpose to the individual. People are more solitary than ever before, yet they do not want to be. Some men think isolation brings happiness, but it only forces them to reflect on themselves and their life which causes sorrow. To escape this sorrow they medicate through television and social media, reinforcing the idea in their minds that isolation is what is making them feel better. Virtual existence grows into a disease that decays the mind. Those who live in a virtual world endlessly pursue happiness and find it not.
Happiness is extremely popular with liberals both moderate and radical.
Liberals tend to place far too much emphasis on emotions in general, but they especially pursue happiness, and it pervades their worship service shifting the focus away from God and onto their own feelings. They pursue happiness and manipulate worship to their will in order to achieve it. This is not only wrong, but the pursuit of happiness in worship is in vain. If we are chasing happiness, we are running in the wrong direction. A prostitute can bring happiness for a few minutes. So can heroin or a line of cocaine. This is because, again, happiness is just a chemical reaction in the brain, so don’t worship it.
Was Christ happy while He was on earth? I am not convinced that He was, as the scriptures note He was a “Man of Sorrow and Acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). However, Christ was filled with purpose despite a lack of earthly “happiness”. He endured temptation over thirty years and worked with human beings on a constant basis, which is a feat in itself. There does not seem to be any reason to believe that Jesus was overwhelmed with emotions all the time. Jesus was on the earth for one reason: to save the world of men.
We as men must be filled with a meaningful purpose that overrides any given emotion at any given time. It should not matter how we feel, we should be able to do what is right and be able to keep to our purpose. Purpose is infinitely more important than happiness. Finding and maintaining meaningful and beneficial purposes for our lives should be what we do every single day.
Mantra
Emotions do not matter.
Application
Get rid of the idea that happiness is required in your life.
It is a luxury that will not always be present in your life. When you pull a double shift on Saturday, fight with the wife, are mad at the kids, get two hours of sleep then show up on Sunday for a slow, dry lesson and all the songs you don’t like, are you happy? No. Can you worship in spirit and truth regardless (John 4:24)? Absolutely.
KEY: We do not have to be happy to go to heaven, but when we get to heaven we will absolutely be happy.
You must fill your mind with purpose. Focus on God, family, doing meaningful work to the best of your ability. These actions bring purpose and as a byproduct they occasionally bring happiness. But trying to achieve happiness alone should never be your goal, it is a self-centered action and almost never profits. You must focus your mind on taking actions. Action will always be more important and more profitable than emotions. Gather strength for yourself. Do great work. Avoid the trappings of emotion. Be a Man.
It may be your impression after reading a portion of this material that Spartan Christianity is Anti-emotion. After all, we do spend a great deal of time talking about the ways emotion affects the minds of men negatively. But that is not to say that all emotion is bad or useless, in fact it is not the case at all! The principles that are presented here are meant to motivate men to first build a foundation of logic that is later supplemented by emotion rather than using emotions as the foundation.
To help illustrate this, we will look at a few non-religious examples where emotions are used before skill or logic is developed, and how it typically ends in disaster.
Here are a few examples:
No doubt you have seen a singer or watched one of those television singing shows and seen someone who was clearly filled with passion and excitement about singing but had absolutely no skill in it whatsoever. He may have had a certain amount of talent, or some potential that could be built on through training, but he had no appreciable level of skill with music.
Yet he still tries out for the show thinking that passion alone is enough to allow him to fulfill his dreams. This is not the case, passion can only be added after a respectable skill level has been reached.
Also consider the aggressive man who exercises and channels all his anger into his physical training, but injures himself because he lacks proper form in exercise. No doubt aggression improves the intensity of training, but only if an appreciable level of skill in training has been established first.
Proper body mechanics must be established before aggression or other emotions can be unleashed.
The best singers in the world or the best athletes in the world undoubtedly have high levels of passion for their skill. But they also added that passion to an already high level of pre-existing skill. The best singers in the world are the ones who have high levels of technical skill built on hours of practice that they later supplemented with passion. That passion provides the human element that allows music to be a connecting experience between people. But the value of a man’s passion is stifled when he obviously lacks technical skill in music.
How many times has one of your favorite songs been ruined for you because someone played or sang it badly?
The best athletes in the world are the ones who know their exercises, drills and sports plays so fluently that they do not need to think about them. Their skill level is so high that they can go on mental autopilot and then focus on concentrating massive amounts of energy, aggression and passion into the sport.
The Spartan Christian must be the same way.
It is absolutely necessary to have supplemental emotions for your faith, but you must not build upon them as the foundation. Emotions alone are not enough. First you must cement in your mind what it is you believe through logic and rationality. Upon a Foundation of rationality you can add your emotions to make your faith unbeatable.
Once you understand the evils of sin, you can concentrate your aggression into crushing those evils. Once you mentally appreciate the magnitude of gifts and blessings that God has given you, then you can thank Him with tears and emotional joy.
Emotions are jet fuel for the mind and for action.
But you must first build a functioning plane before the type of fuel even begins to matter. What good is the best jet fuel if your engines blow out two minutes after takeoff? What good is jet fuel if you can’t even “crank up” your plane?
The greatest structures in the world started out as logical blueprints on paper. Those blueprints later became a concrete foundation and stable wooden frame. Creating the beautiful appearance of a building is the final thing to be completed. You cannot have a beautiful building without a strong foundation first.
Your faith must have titanium architecture built on logic before you can add the beautiful aesthetics of emotions.
Even God designed parts of the human body to be the same way.
Consider all your bones. Bones are 50% collagen and 50% ground substance, which is made up of minerals like calcium. Both pieces are vitally important for the structural integrity of your bones, and your body wouldn’t work without this combination.
The collagen gives the bones flexibility. If we didn’t have collagen, our bones would crumble and break because they would only have calcium and other salts. It would then be as easy to break a bone as it would be to snap a calcium pill in half with your fingers.
But the calcium is still important. It provides the bone with rigidity and strength. Without the calcium and other bone salts, your bones would bend and snap like a sapling.
But when combined together, the benefits of each substance create bones that pound for pound are stronger than concrete at a fraction of the weight.
Emotions are the same way. Our emotion must be combined with logic for there to be any appreciable level of strength in each one.
Emotions are not strong without logic, and logic is not strong without emotion.
Emotions alone will crumble under adversity. How strong is the faith of an emotional person when those precious emotions fade to nothing? How faithful is the emotional Christian once it is no longer safe or convenient for him to be a Christian? Most people leave the church as soon as it becomes dangerous to be a Christian.
Logic alone is not enough for some men to maintain their faith. When atheists seem to make such great, logical points about the origin of the universe many men must call on emotion to maintain their faith.
This is the main point: emotion and logic are complementary.
You will be weak if you have one without the other. But many Christians today are so concerned with increasing their emotions or their passion that they neglect logic altogether. At Spartan Christianity, the purpose is to increase logic in a world of men who worship emotion.
Build your faith with the mind before you add your emotions to it. This is the Spartan way. Once your faith is built, then add emotional conviction and become unstoppable.
The Church is riddled with demagogues. The basic definition applies to political people, but you are ignorant if you do not think the Church is political. You don’t have to be an office holder in the American government to make political power plays in whatever institution you are a part of. Demagogues plague the news media. No one in the news media can get paid without forcing stories that make you angry or afraid. Their funding is based on getting you to react emotionally to what they are saying.
Demagogues in the church are the foundation for mega churches.
Even the faith of most Christians is founded on emotion or tradition rather than logical fact. This is why 90% of Christians cannot defend their faith rationally and logically.
If you want a mental image of a demagogue, think of a Joel Osteen character. An individual whose message appeals to your self-interest rather than to your rational mind. There is nothing wrong with self-interest, and taking action out of self-interest (I assume you are interested in the personal benefits of heaven), but we run into problems when we sell religion cloaked in emotionalism and materialism.
People don’t listen to Osteen because they think he is telling them the truth, they listen to him because he tells them that they can have faith and salvation while focusing their entire lives on their wealth.
Again, nothing wrong with wealth. But there is something wrong with placing wealth above everything, or using God to sell a wealth-based gospel.
It’s not only large-scale churches in which this type of materialism happens. It also happens in the small Churches: the local Community Church, your local Baptist Church, you find emotionalism and demagoguery.
This fact is very common for Baptists, who tend to value the name “baptist” above the gospel. They even have their own mantra that they repeat in closed circles: “Born a baptist, live as a baptist, die a baptist”.
Does anyone see anything wrong with that type of thinking? Is there a problem with people placing their name and tradition above the truth? These individuals have huge ego investments in their tradition. They have so much pride in their name that they cannot see anything besides what they believe. What they are saying with that mantra is that it does not matter if the truth were to be revealed to their eyes, they would not forsake the name “Baptist”. John the Baptizer did not die for your sin, so why name yourself after him? This weak thinking is the result of traditionalism and emotionalism. You can call it neo-renaissance liberalism if you want. If you are a baptist, you should meditate on this.
Any speech that appeals primarily to the emotion of men is irrational.
That is the point of emotions, they are not rational and they cannot think. Arousing the emotions of individuals in order to sway their thinking is a breakdown of one of Aristotle’s rules of rhetoric. He labels these emotions as “non-essentials”, because all that matters is the facts.
The majority of sermons and lessons given today are based on feelings. This is not masculine, rather it is stupidity. Because if your faith is ever tested by fire, emotions will be inconsequential. Most church-goers never will have a heavy test of faith, though they may think otherwise.
Denominationalism has its foundation in emotionalism and demagoguery. People form new religions to suit what they feel is right, not based on what can be known based on the Word alone. Or someone in the Church gets their feelings hurt by the truth so they leave and form their own religion that better caters to their personal likes; where they can leave out the “unsavory” doctrines that offend them.
All the aforementioned situations are a result of emotions overtaking individuals. Rational thinking then takes a backseat to feelings. This must be avoided at all costs. Emotions stand in opposition to rationality, and as a result they retard masculinity.
Mantra
Be alert for those who stir up anger and fear.
Application
The Bible speaks often about vigilance and being aware of evil (1 Peter 5:8), this is because the foundation of resisting evil is awareness. You must be aware that there are individuals in the religious world who want to use your emotions against you. They aim to cause you to lose touch with rationality so that they may win you over to their camp. This can be combated by simply calling it out.
When you address someone’s tactics and bring them out in the open, they are no longer an ethereal concept; meaning they are no longer hidden in a vapor, unable to be touched.
By your words you force demagoguery into a tangible material that can be destroyed. Just as God spoke and the world was made, we may, on a significantly smaller, non-miraculous scale, speak and materialize what we have spoken. Against this extraction the enemy seldom has a defense. Demagogues rely on being camouflaged and spreading their parasitic idiocy from their hiding places.
Also, you must be aware that you yourself may attempt to use emotions and demagoguery to beguile others and win arguments. This is not how men argue. If you must resort to emotion, your argument is pathetic and should be bolstered by this strange entity known as “Fact”.
Be aware of yourself, you are not as Noble as you believe.
