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The Whole Nine Yards

The Whole Nine Yards is a War term. Some World War II fighter planes would be manned by two men, one pilot and one gunner. The pilot is in charge of the maneuvers of the plane and giving tips for shooting while the gunner’s job is to shoot down enemy planes. While flying in combat, the pilot would look for enemy planes, and if he saw one, he would shout instructions to the gunner. These instructions were about how many rounds to fire at the opposition forces, and he would shout these instructions in terms of various lengths of distance, usually yards.

So instead of shouting “fire fifty rounds at that plane”, he would shout “give em’ two yards”. The gunner would then fire two yards from the belt of ammo. The entire length of one ammunition belt was nine yards. In dire circumstances, life or death situations, the pilot would shout to the gunner, “Give them the whole nine yards”. Fire every round on the belt because our plane could be shot down.

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men”
Colossians 3:23

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going”
Ecclesiastes 9:10

“Training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age”
Titus 2:12

How many men in the religious world have that type of mentality about their faith, family or career?

Few, if any. Most men are content to warm a pew for a few hours each week. Most men are fine with thinking about faith once or twice a week, more often than most of them have sex with their wives. Where are the men who are willing to put forth an extreme effort to preserve what is valuable to them?

There are very few men left who are willing to fire the whole nine yards at anything in life. If men refuse to give extreme effort in their faith, then they will be unwilling to give extreme effort anywhere. The man whose faith is so worthless to him that he would not sacrifice life and limb for it will not sacrifice for anything lesser such as career, property or even family.

We as men must be willing to fire every single round in the belt in the name of faith, family and life. Only through tremendous effort can anything of value be built, protected and preserved. The Christian faith requires a Spartan-like intensity to defend, and it is a faith that requires the whole nine yards of our character to maintain until death.

Mantra

Hit the enemy with the whole nine yards.

Application

Start getting comfortable with discomfort. Tell your mind that you enjoy discomfort because it is getting you closer to your goals. Giving the whole nine yards is not glamorous or fun in the same way that military boot camp is not glamorous or fun for those who served.

Stop chasing dramatized ideals that populate the highlight reels in worldly endeavors.

Highlights are exactly that: mere strands of time that are forgotten. Highlights are almost instantly replaced with new highlights and the old hero is forgotten. Don’t chase the type of glory that doesn’t last.

Condition yourself to give more and more effort over time. With practice, you learn to generate more and more horsepower and your power of will grows ever stronger. This strength originates in the mind.

You must believe that you have the ability to exhibit Spartan-esque toughness and soundness of mind.

You must practice giving the whole nine yards in the small events in life. If you cannot take small situations or jobs seriously and give them your maximum effort, you will never be able to give the maximum effort when it counts. Maximum effort is a habit.

Be faithful in little in order to be considered worthy to have the opportunity to be faithful in much (Luke 16:10). Every great work of architecture started with single bricks and planks of wood that were laid one piece at a time. Your character is that great structure, so do the work now that will allow you to have a tremendous character later in life.

Give the nine yards at all times.

Do not let the small events pass you by, others will notice if you cut corners or think you are above the small tasks.

Work like men.

Conduct yourselves like men.

David – Warlord – Warrior – Writer

We typically think of King David as the peaceful writer of the Psalms. He was the man who expressed his emotions so nobly and sincerely in his writing that most people picture him as emotional or as a “big softie”. I think this is a mistake and a result of only looking at David at the surface level. Sure, if you judge David by the Psalms alone, you will see his emotional being, but you must also look at his actions.

This brief article is dedicated to giving you an additional perspective on David so that you may think of his as the Warlord he was. David was a servant of God and a King inside his walls, but he was also a barbarian filled with bloodlust when it came time to step on the battlefield.

“And as the women danced, they sang out: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” And Saul was furious and resented this song. “They have ascribed tens of thousands to David,” he said, “but only thousands to me. What more can he have but the kingdom?”
1 Samuel 18:7-8

What type of man has it in him to kills tens of thousands of people? Answer: A man with a barbaric will to kill. Modern soldiers today talk about traits that would be important in recruits who are looking to join the military. Jocko Willink says the two foundational characteristics of a soldier are “The will to kill and the will to die”. Without these a man cannot be a true warrior who performs to the best of his ability.

To put David’s number of kills in perspective, let’s think about not only the quantity but also the type of kills that David was accumulating.

These weren’t long distance kills with a gun from far away, these were face-to-face, hand-to-hand kills.

We would never disrespect or downplay the importance of modern military men, but these guys are not even having to look at the men they are killing much of the time, and they still get PTSD when they come home. Now imagine having to kill men face to face and what that must do to the psyche of a human being.

If shooting a man can give you PTSD, what would decapitating a man do to your mind? How would your mind handle impaling enemies or severing arms and legs and getting covered in their blood? What would splitting the skull of an enemy do to your mental state? This was the state of the old school warfare that David was engaging in, yet we still think of him primarily as peaceful and emotional.

May I suggest to you that a man capable of killing ten thousand men is an absolute warlord.

This man was a master of compartmentalization. Nothing could phase him. Still, the mental burden David carried must have been so tremendous that it would crush many of us men who are accustomed to the soft, modern world.

David was a man of war even from his youth. There was obviously some sort of warrior spirit in him before he ever even saw the field of combat. The Bible speaks about David:

“But David said to Saul, “Your servant used to keep his father’s sheep, and when a lion or a bear came and took a lamb out of the flock,I went out after it and struck it, and delivered the lamb from its mouth; and when it arose against me, I caught it by its beard, and struck and killed it.Your servant has killed both lion and bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.” Moreover David said, “The Lord, who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, He will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”
1 Samuel 17:34-37

Anyone who has ever killed an animal, even a small one knows that taking life changes a man in specific ways. A man who has the fortitude to kill a bear by hand is a warrior.

The man who grabs a lion by the beard and kills it is able to channel his inner darkness into the craft of war.

David was killing animals from his youth and would eventually progress to the battlefield and take his first human life, as far as we know based on what was recorded. This is the account of David and Goliath. David would throw a stone directly into Goliath’s Forehead and then chop off his head with his own sword.

Now maybe it was somewhat of a cultural thing to chop heads and take them around, but that was still barbaric. Only a man of war could do such a thing. Even in socially acceptable animal kills like deer, men still get sick to their stomach the first time they gut the deer. Now imagine chopping off a human head, that is something that would be difficult to stomach. But it would nevertheless be fair play on the field of war.

So it was, when the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, that David hurried and ran toward the army to meet the Philistine.Then David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone; and he slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead, so that the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the earth.So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, and struck the Philistine and killed him. But there was no sword in the hand of David.Therefore David ran and stood over the Philistine, took his sword and drew it out of its sheath and killed him, and cut off his head with it.
1 Samuel 17:48-51

David would then go on to live his life waging wars and killing men and yet simultaneously writing some of the most heartfelt songs and prayers ever recorded. How did he do this?

Extreme Compartmentalization

There is no doubt that David had to put his warlike nature in a box. This is necessary even today, and most men cannot do it. Many men engage in warfare and are damaged in their minds. They cannot bear the great burden of war and its consequences.

It could be that David also had forms of PTSD. No doubt there were nights when he would sit straight up in bed, awoken by a vivid dream recounting some of his battlefield kills. He likely dreamed he was being chased by men he had personally killed on the battlefield. Those types of dreams would have been a common side effect of such a large number of kills. David may have slept with Bathsheba to comfort his own mind because of how it was tormented from war. Or perhaps he was perfectly fine. Perhaps the mind of David was untroubled by all of the war he had engaged in, knowing it was righteous. Or perhaps David was not bothered because he had the very nature and spirit of a warlord.

Whatever the answer may be, you must begin to look at King David in a different light. He is not simply a mild-mannered writer of psalms. He is a man with blood on his hands. So much blood that God would not allow him to build the temple (2 Chronicles 22:5-10). You must also embody a warrior spirit in your own life by attacking your own weakness with warlike ferocity. You must compartmentalize your life so you are in command of your emotions. Attack everything with aggression and crush your enemies.

Developing the Inner Drill Sergeant

Developing the Inner Drill Sergeant

“Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.”
2 Timothy 2:3 & 4

One of the problems with most men is the fact that they have negative self-talk and do not demand enough from themselves. We fail ourselves often because our standards are not high enough. In fact, most men cannot even reach low standards, much less the maximum standard that is required of a Christian man. What men need to do to combat this is to develop their inner drill sergeant.

A drill sergeant is a man who pushes army recruits through the army boot camp. A drill instructor is one who pushes marine recruits through the marine boot camp. You can watch a handful of videos online and see that these instructors seem like they are totally insane, but what they are doing to the men is completely controlled and calculated. Let us examine a few of the purposes of a drill instructor or sergeant and then learn why we must develop our own drill instructor in our minds.

A Drill Instructor Simulates the Panic of War

One of the purposes of boot camp is to get men used to the mayhem and chaos that they will experience in combat scenarios. Drill Instructors cannot give the men the actual experience of launching live fire (i.e. real bullets) at them, but they can give them the next best thing. Battle sounds, screaming, smoke and hard training can give men a basic introduction to combat.

A Drill Instructor Simulates Stresses and Hyper-Stimulates the Senses

Combat is no place for Zen meditation. Calmness and coolness under pressure are learned by being put under pressure, not by meditating on a soft pillow in a cool room with nature sounds coming from a noise machine. A drill instructor has to make sure that men are adapting and adjusting to combat sounds and stress. Men need to learn how to be calm during dangerous scenarios. The ability to be cool when you are in imminent danger is the type of skill that saves lives.

A Drill Instructor Accepts No Excuses

Blood could be dripping off your face. You could be vomiting on the ground or you could pass out from heat or dehydration, but it does not matter. You are expected to finish the job, training scenario or drill. Because even if you are bleeding, puking or passing out, the enemy will not call a “time out” and fan you back to consciousness while squirting water in your mouth. Men must learn to handle the physical demands of war or die. Drill instructors know this and will accept no excuses.

A Drill Sergeant Pushes Men Beyond the Limits of Their Limits

It is one thing to “go to the limit”, as if any of us truly knows what that is. But it is a completely different scenario to be pushed so far beyond your current “limitations” that you wonder how you could have been holding yourself back all these years. A drill sergeant will do just that for you. He will show you that the point where you thought you could do no more was just the beginning. He does not do this to torture you, he does this to show you that your limits are far beyond where you think they are now.

A Drill Sergeant is Brutal on The Men

Men are never physically assaulted by their drill sergeants, but that does not mean that they are given mental rest. The sergeant speaks to the men like dogs and trains them to ignore any outside stimulation. The only way the recruits can become hard is if they are treated brutally.

A Drill Sergeant Makes the Men Tougher

No one comes out of bootcamp as soft as they were before. That is the whole point of the training. You do not want to send men to war in the mental and physical condition that were in as civilians. Men must get tough if they are going to kill other men.

Recommended Reading: The Masculine Desire For War

Mantra

I will never accept “Good Enough” from myself.

Application

Even if you are like me and have never served in the military, it is still easy to appreciate everything these men endure for the greater good. It is easier to be grateful for the military now that we have countless documentaries that have recorded what these men went through and accomplished in their lives. You will find that thankfulness comes much easier after you watch a few video clips of men going through boot camp and being screamed at and trained at high levels. When you gain knowledge of the difficulties that others face in their lives, then it is much easier to be thankful for your own life and its luxury.

What you must do today is work to develop your own drill sergeant in your mind.

It does not matter what you think you are capable of now, you need a voice in your head that will always tell you the following truths:

You are not working hard enough, you can do more.
You have not reached your limitations; there is more effort left in your tank.
Whatever your current work output is, you should double it.
There is no honor in being weak and apathetic.
You have the responsibility to lead other men; would you follow yourself?
Your character is not good enough, work harder.
Your strength is not enough, train harder.
You must contribute more value to the world, learn and apply yourself.

The second you begin to feel yourself getting weak, you should imagine your sergeant is in your head and examining your current effort. Is he impressed by your intensity or embarrassed by your weakness?

The easiest place to learn to apply this principle is in your physical training. You are performing your exercise of choice and it begins to be painful. You reach your “limit” and consider stopping for the day.

Pull Out the Mental Drill Sergeant

That voice in your head should be screaming at you by this point. “This current level of effort is completely unacceptable. Is this how you take advantage of your freedom, by quitting like a pantywaist? No. You are better and stronger than that. Keep moving.”

Note: this is not negative self-talk. You are not telling yourself what a failure you are. You are telling yourself how much more you are capable of and expect of yourself. By telling yourself that there is more that you can achieve and that you are capable of working harder, you learn to tap into that extra work ethic you have buried in your mind.

You can eventually apply the same techniques to your spiritual life.

The minute you feel yourself slacking in your spiritual disciplines, unleash the sergeant. “Do you really think reading one single Bible verse is making you more spiritual? You are better than that. Do not excuse yourself by saying that you ‘don’t have time’ because you have plenty of time. You would not expect to improve your body by training for one minute, so do not expect to improve your soul by reading for 8 seconds. Work harder. You are capable of more”.

Apply the same principle to other areas of your life. If you find yourself losing control over yourself (Note Galatians 5:22) then you should be hearing the voice in your head: “No real man loses control over himself. You are capable of commanding your emotions. If you want a better life, then you better start controlling yourself. Have some character and improve because this current behavior is unacceptable”. You get the picture for how to apply this. It does not really matter what you are saying to yourself in your mind as long as it drives you to work harder.

Learning to push yourself in this way does not happen instantaneously. The biggest mistake so many people make when beginning any new technique or habit like this is that they expect instant, massive results in exchange for minimal effort. What you should aim for is small amounts of progress each day.

If you pushed yourself farther and harder than yesterday, then consider the day a success.

If you got your mental drill sergeant to yell at you a little and drive you harder, then consider the day a success.

By making small progress every day, you will eventually look up and notice that you have completely left your peer group behind. Now you need a new peer group of men who want to perform better and achieve more in their personal lives and careers. So, get moving now and leave your peer group behind. You do not want your life to be limited by their influence on you.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

The Masculine Desire for War

Weak men in the Church have a habit of denying reality. They deny the innate need of man to wage war against something – against anything – to raise his sword and utterly destroy an enemy that stands before him, even if that enemy is himself. The desire to kill is in the nature of man.

“a time for war and a time for peace.”
Ecclesiastes 3:8b

“You are my war club, my weapon for battle— with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms.”
Jeremiah 51:20

“Contend, LORD, with those who contend with me; fight against those who fight against me. Take up shield and armor; arise and come to my aid. Brandish spear and javelin against those who pursue me. Say to me, “I am your salvation.” May those who seek my life be disgraced and put to shame, may those who plot my ruin be turned back in dismay. May they be like chaff before the wind, with the angel of the LORD driving them away; may their path be dark and slippery, with the angel of the LORD pursuing them. Since they hid their net for me without cause and without cause dug a pit for me, may ruin overtake them by surprise— may the net they hid entangle them, may they fall into the pit, to their ruin. Then my soul will rejoice in the LORD and delight in his salvation.”
Psalm 35: 1-9

Weak men in the Church have a habit of denying reality.

They deny the innate need of man to wage war against something – against anything – to raise his sword and utterly destroy an enemy that stands before him, even if that enemy is himself. The desire to kill is in the nature of man.

The Church wants to repress the warlike nature of man in the same way they have repressed the sex drive of men for hundreds of years. They fear both because it takes away their power and control over the younger generations and over the “uncontrollable” drives of man. This is incompetence at its finest.

What happened when the Church repressed sex and refused to even mention its existence? Did it successfully suppress men’s sexual urges and increase overall sexual purity or did it cause men to push back even harder saying, “I am not listening to this blithering, the men in the Church are just as miserable as I am. I’m not waiting for sex”.

KEY: Every time the Church wants to suppress some alleged “evil”, that same evil grows even faster.

Not only does it grow, but it becomes dark and all consuming in the minds of those who suppress it until the Church loses the war against that evil. Waitingtillmarriage.org shared some data that suggested only 20% of the members of highly religious communities are successfully waiting for marriage. Does it look like sexual repression is working for the Church?

Repression does not work with sexual drives, and it will not work in subverting your warlike nature. If you are not a man who is going to engage in a real physical fight, the best you can hope for is to find a personal war into which you can channel your barbaric desire for bloodshed.

Fight your evil nature. Wage war in your work and destroy mediocrity. You must have something to fight, so make your war result in the construction of positive qualities of character.

Mantra

I Destroy whatever stands in opposition to me with strength.

Application

The internal anger you feel and the desire to go to war are incredibly powerful forces that you must channel into a constructive pursuit. If you do not channel them somewhere, they will destroy you from within. The easiest way to redirect your warlike nature is to channel it into something physical, such as training. Get your lazy, weak minded self into physical exercise. You cannot fully be a man if you do not possess some level of strength. There is no excuse for a man to be weak. It doesn’t even matter what kind of training you do, just do something. That physical training will then spill over into mental fortitude.

Wage war in the workplace. When you begin to tire and mentally accept mediocre work, call upon your aggression.

This emotion will override the desire to quit or to be lazy. When you are typing that essay for school and you want to stop, conjure your warlike nature and type as if the words you are writing are weapons. When you are exercising and approaching muscular failure, call upon your internal warlord. If you cannot channel aggression with something as simple and silly as typing an essay or training the body, you will not be able to channel it at all. Then that extreme energy will force an outlet in some unproductive endeavor like promiscuity or drugs.

Practice controlling and directing your internal energies on small tasks, and you can then easily apply it to large tasks.

References:

Mike. “4 Cool Statistics About Abstinence in the USA.” Waitingtillmarriage.org, 30 Nov. 2012.

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