Success Archives - Spartan Christianity

God is Glorified by YOUR Success

Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:15-16

Ask any father when it is that they are proud of their children. No doubt they will tell you that they are proud of their kids when they do well at something. It does not really matter what that something is. They could be doing well in school, sports, or displaying good character. Whatever it is, the father is proud when his kids do well.

Does it then make sense that God the father would be proud of His children when they do well? God is glorified when you do well in life.

When you succeed, the glory goes back to He who made you.

Some people have made it virtuous to aim low in life. This is especially true of modern Christians. These are the people we have talked about before who think success is evil. They also think that poverty is a virtue.

I do not see anything noble associated with aiming low and achieving few successes in life. It does not matter what those successes are. Whatever you can define as success, somewhere you can find a Christian who thinks it is good if you do not reach that successful image.

Instead of aiming high, giving credit to God along the way, they aim low. They think that the less they achieve, the nobler they are. Or that the less money they make, the more spiritual they are. Wealth and spirituality are not inversely correlated.

If you work as hard as you can, you glorify God. This is a biblical principle.

And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men,knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for^[a] you serve the Lord Christ.
Colossians 3:23-24

Bondservants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ; not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men,knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.
Ephesians 6:5-8

God is glorified by your success.

it does not bring glory to God if you aim low in life and achieve very little. Others will look at you and mock you. Every man, religious or secular, has the responsibility to achieve. This is an integral part of man’s nature. It was built into him from the beginning of time. God created you to not just work mindlessly at a 9-5, but to improve and achieve both personally and professionally.

It is not masculine to wallow in failure and lack of success. It is not noble to try to lead others down the same path you are on.

This is one of the many reasons you must be careful about who you allow being your friends. You have to control your circle of influence very carefully. Treat it like your immune system and always be on the lookout for someone who is a parasite.

Parasites are thousands of times smaller than their human hosts, but cause massive problems to the human machine. Negative influences around you are the same way. They must be rigorously controlled, monitored, and modulated.

Do not associate with anyone who promotes the idea that your lack of success is okay. You are not okay just the way you are. That has never been true and it never be will be true. You must at all times be working to cast off your current self and be more.

to put off your former way of life, your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be renewed in the spirit of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:22-24

Nobility exists in facing our personal insufficiencies and working to correct them. Never content with staying in the same place, we always look for ways to improve our weaknesses. Even if we can only make small progress, that is infinitely more profitable and masculine than making no progress.

Do not let limiting beliefs hold you back from being successful. If some Christian is trying to get you to limit your personal or professional success on the grounds that it is spiritual, get away from them. They have no biblical backing for their belief. They are propagating false doctrine. Only listen to men you admire and want to emulate. And then only listen to those who can back up what they believe with scripture. And not only with scripture, but with rational thinking as well.

It is one thing to quote a verse. It is another thing to be able to quote and think about the bible with a rational mind. Use your own mind to decide what you believe. Never take someone’s word for anything. Make sure everything passes the test of logic so you can be a man. And never limit your success. It is not spiritual, it is fatal.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
1 John 4:1

Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true
Acts 17:11

Defeat – The Foundation for Success

You must be mentally prepared to suffer defeat.

“But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
2 Corinthians 12:9-10

“More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Romans 5:3-5

It will not matter how you conduct yourself while you are winning, it only matters how you act after you have lost.

Defeat is where the true personality of man shows its ugliness to the world.

Have you ever seen a young child lose at a game and then proceed to embarrass his parents with his behavior? It happens very often. What is even more unfortunate is that fact that many of the kids never grow out of this behavior. They take their weak mentalities onto the sports field and display just how immature they are after they lose.

Then they grow up and take that mentality into the workplace. They never take responsibility for their failures and always pass the blame. Everyone knows one of these men, and they were created by their parents who failed to teach them to accept defeat graciously and with strong character.

We often fail to act righteously and we sin. Sometimes we are caught and our sin is publicized. This is public humiliation and defeat. How do we conduct ourselves during this defeat? Do we exhibit grace, humility and repentance? Or do we manifest anger, ego and further rebelliousness? Answer these questions and you will discover everything about yourself that you will ever need to know. How you behave in defeat is an open window into your character. So you must prepare yourself not only for defeat, but also to conduct yourself like a man when you find yourself defeated.

Defeat is inevitable, but acting like an idiot while we are defeated is something we can control and avoid.

By acting graciously we show that we are men of character and add bricks to our reputation. We can convert a defeat into a great victory simply by conducting ourselves like men while we are defeated. All failures have the potential to profit us if we learn to use humility and build our character. Defeat is the foundation of victory.

Mantra

Train until virtue is automated.

Application

In every victory you should be mentally preparing yourself for defeat. Just as in the moments of happiness you must prepare yourself for depression. You have to stockpile supplies in your mind to outlast defeat. Decide how you will conduct yourself during defeat before you are ever defeated. Have your programmed behavior ready to go so that when you suffer a defeat you do not have to think about what to do, you can fall back on your plans and training and conduct yourself well. Many vices can be cured by this simple method: train. Train yourself to have the actions you want without having to think about. Then when you are in the situation you trained for, you can shift your mind to autopilot and shut down the ego immediately.

“We do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”
Archilochus

Stockpile your actions and practice them as a musician practices scales until they can be performed unconsciously.

Keep your mind vigilant and prepared.

Focus your mind on being a man of character.

Annihilate the adversary.

Remember who you represent.

Conduct yourself like men.

Success: Why Success is Not Evil

KEY: Weak religious men assume that wealth confers villainy and that poverty confers righteousness.

“The LORD was with Joseph so that he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the LORD was with him and that the LORD gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the LORD blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the LORD was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field.”
Genesis 39:2-5

Weak men in the Church hate success. In fact, they point to success as a sign of worldliness and materialism. At the same time they point to their own lack of success as some kind of perverted virtue.

KEY: Weak religious men assume that wealth confers villainy and that poverty confers righteousness. Success is not Evil

However, lack of success is easily traced to our lack of work ethic or, quite simply, to the fact that what we do is not valued by society. A person’s paycheck represents nothing more than the value of their skillset in the marketplace.

Success doesn’t care about your natural gifts, it only cares about work. Not merely work in the workplace, but work done researching the best jobs, researching the highest value skills to develop, and spending time improving your value to society. Most weak men aren’t successful because they studied something stupid in college, wasted time walking to girls and playing beer pong, and didn’t work on developing marketable skills while they were there. It is as simple as that.

Are there cases where someone does everything right and works hard and still comes up short in the marketplace? Sure, but those are the rarest cases.

Most religious betas will clock in 25 hours a week or more at their television set, but scoff at the man who spends 60 hours at his job, accusing him of being “worldly”. Irony, anyone?

Success isn’t evil. In fact, if we do our work “As to the Lord and not as unto men” (Eph. 6:7), then we absolutely should be successful in whatever we do because our work ethic will be unparalleled.

Examine the lives and character of Job, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. These men were extremely wealthy, and yet they did not place their wealth above God. Their wealth was irrelevant to them because they knew Righteousness was most important.

Unlike what you hear in the Church, You can be righteous and be successful at the same time.

Be a man, be a success. If you can’t be a success, be the hardest worker in the room and that will be a success of its own.

Mantra

Success doesn’t care about righteousness.

Application

If you are being a beta and criticizing the successful merely because they have success, stop it now. Be a man for once in your life, look in the mirror at who is responsible for the way your life turned out. Sit on your bed and look back on your life and examine all the actions you took and the choices you made that landed you where you currently are. You will see that your lack of success is 100% your fault, and it is 100% your responsibility to change that fact. Look at all the time you wasted in college studying English and watching television. It’s not a matter of “evil success just passing you by”, it’s a matter of you being stupid and failing to manage time properly.

Today that changes. Start researching how you can improve your value to your company or start developing marketable skills on the side and change your life. Don’t waste it watching television.

Research what the fastest growing fields are and become a master of one of them.

Technology is growing at an exponential rate, becoming proficient in any form of tech would increase your value to society. Healthcare is a field that will never reach a point where it is not needed, but most men do not have the work ethic for healthcare of any form.

It is up to you to discover what is valuable in the marketplace and then build your skillset to maximize your personal value.

Conduct yourselves like Men.

Learn Lessons From Secular Men

Christians think we should only model ourselves after other Christians, and never after secular men. That would be to our detriment if we were trying to learn how to be successful in the world.

“Now these things happened unto them by way of example; and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages are come.”
1 Corinthians 10:11

“If you know the way broadly, you see it in all things”
Miyamoto Musashi

Most people in the Church would shriek in horror if you so much as mentioned the idea that you have men who inspire you who are not Christians.

You are inspired by a non-religious war hero? “How dare you!”

A secular athlete inspires you to take better care of your body? “Heretic!”

A successful man of the world provides a good model for material success? “You materialistic fiend!”

The thinking in the Church is often so dogmatic and narrow minded in many facets that it handicaps the faith socially. No one wants to be around those “weird, religious people”. Who wants to spend time around people who constantly demonize the world instead of improving it.

I think there absolutely is something to be said about being a “peculiar people” as a result of behaving righteously, but we take it to a whole other level when we go out of our way to be peculiar.

It’s the difference between someone who studies to get a good grade and someone who studies to understand a subject.

In going out of our way to be peculiar we have placed the peculiarity itself above the Christian disciplines and practices that cause us to be peculiar in the first place. We make peculiarity the goal instead of making righteous the goal. Our focus should be on being Christians first and foremost, and a by-product of this lifestyle just so happens to be peculiarity.

All of this to say, it does not rob us of our peculiarity when we learn lessons from secular men, either historically or ones who still live. It is not wrong to learn from secular men, we do it all the time. It is not wrong to be inspired by secular men, because often secular men are more successful than religious men. This is a result primarily of statistics, because there are far more secular men than Christian men. It just so happens that successful people are more likely to be worldly. This does not mean we cannot still be inspired by them.

The second reason for worldly men being more successful than Christian men is the fact that the majority of 21st century Christians lack the work ethic of our Christian forerunners in earlier centuries.

People use the Bible’s command to avoid worldliness, greed, and materialism as an excuse to justify their slothfulness.

We should also remember that lessons come in two primary parts: Learning what to do, and learning what not to do. We can learn both kinds from men both inside and outside the church. Every man is a walking lesson, regardless of his spirituality. Just because someone does not have salvation does not mean we cannot learn from them. Why do you think we study history? Be a man by learning from all men.

Mantra

Every moment has a lifetime of lessons.

Application

First you have to rid yourself of prejudice. You think you are better than others because you possess salvation. Wrong. You are just as much of a loser as them. What are you without salvation? Nothing? Then your worth has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the gift of salvation that has been given to you. Rid yourself of ego; embrace humility.

Find some role models who inspire you. You may have a hard time finding great role models in the Church.

Every Christian wants to tell you to have good role models, yet none of them want to be role models themselves.

List out men who inspire you. Write them down as a list and then to the side of each name write out the characteristics you find inspiring. No single man can be a role model of everything. Take all the traits you find most admirable and then think about what that would look like if one man possessed them all. You are now visualizing the ideal man. Try to imitate this Ideal Man every day, and you will find that you improve.

Every interaction with your fellow man is a learning opportunity. You will either learn how to be or you will learn how not to be. Both are equally valuable because they catalyze action. Learning is rooted in awareness and vigilance. You cannot capitalize on learning opportunities if you are not aware of their existence. Once you notice the lesson, you must apply it. Without these two foundational principles, growth will be limited. Be a man, learn always.

Conduct yourselves like Men.