Unleash Your Inner Warrior
As our body cannot live without nourishment, so our soul cannot live without prayer"
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Sometimes problems don't require a solution to solve them; instead they require maturity to outgrow them. My dear warrior,
Ridiculous though it may sound, the power of the pout is not to be underestimated. I'm not writing this post to enable those of you who use pouting and guilt trips or seek to be enabled in order to exploit other people using such techniques. No, in fact this is a slap on the wrist. Some of you may not even realize that you do it. To my great embarrassment, I have been guilty of the pout. I used even throughout my 26th year, to my great dismay. “We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of ‘our own’ pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be ‘our own’. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God’s hand, as they came, as ‘accidents’. But in the second week he is beginning to ‘know the ropes’: by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered with.” My dear warrior,
Over the last year I have often found myself struggling with the idea of job satisfaction. In jobs like mine, it seems to come with the territory to ‘live for the weekend.’ Working 8-5, having weekends and major holidays off, accruing vacation days for a few days off here and here or a proper vacation if you so desire. People spend their weekends either drinking and partying, or working on their houses and spending it with their families—depending on their goals and priorities. Me? I spend my free time with family, writing blogs and books, training martial sciences, bodybuilding, making art and being creative. But somehow (particularly with the long, dark days in which I saw no sunlight during my days in a windowless office), life seemed to become dimmer. That feeling of being ‘stuck’ in a job began to overwhelm me. That is, until a single conversation changed my perspective. My dear warrior,
Warriors cannot be effective on the battlefield with a mind that is cast into turbulent thoughts. Neither can they stay strong or be their best if their minds are similarly chaotic in their day-to-day lives. A warrior knows he must allow himself a chance to rest and recharge. Mokuso is a Japanese word we use in Martial Sciences that simply means to still your thoughts. (moku meaning still or silent, and so, meaning thoughts). It is the word my instructor uses to tell me I must take a moment to clear my mind of all the cares and burdens of the week, to lay aside distractions and put away all things that would inhibit me from training well as a warrior, or being effective in battle. It is not you that shapes God
it is God that shapes you. If you are the work of God await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season. Offer Him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you. Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers. – St. Irenaeus “Any area of our lives for which we have no hope is under the influence of a lie.” My dear warrior,
The Christmas season is a time of hope because we take time to remember Christ our Savior’s birth. But with all the stress that comes with the holidays (the shopping, cooking, cleaning, travelling, etc.), we often find ourselves in the middle of very difficult circumstances, things don’t seem to go as planned, and we can have bad days that sometimes just feel hopeless. Just this past week I found myself crying out to God and telling Him that I would much prefer to feel the weight of His glory than the weight of sadness. There are times when we may have particularly bad days, or struggles that just don’t seem to end. In those times of heartache or of losing hope or of fear and anxiety we may find ourselves wanting to throw in the towel, wanting to give up, and telling God that we don’t want to do this anymore. If you are feeling anguished this holiday season, let me encourage you, my dear wounded warrior. “Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men” My dear warrior,
I have become increasingly more aware of men struggling with what it means to be a man; struggling to understand what true masculinity is in a culture that is increasingly antagonistic towards what God designed men to be. Culture defines manliness as being tough as nails, showing no emotion; or demands men to be emasculated, submissive and sensitive; or downgrades/ debases/ demotes them to purely sexual beings, driven by their libido and knowing little more than animal instinct. None of these is correct, and each of them is a distortion of the reality set forth by our Creator. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith would not depend on men's wisdom, but on God's power. My dear warrior,
This time last year I would not have expected that I would be where I am today. I would not have expected to be completely set free and healed from all of my food allergies and health issues. I would not have thought I would be eating pizza, joining in on all the food festivities at work, and finally getting to enjoy the lush German Christmas pastries that I have missed and craved so much over the years. And yet here I am, completely healed. This Christmas I am happily eating gluten and free from the overwhelming feelings of guilt, shame and food depression that came with having food allergies. "Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible." My dear warrior,
A man is made by the small decisions he makes every day. The decision to do right or wrong; to indulge his fancy or be disciplined; to work hard toward his future or to lay back and enjoy folly; to dream big or resign himself to ‘que sera sera’. It is the small choices that shape our paths and therefore our lives. The choice to resist or give in to sin is always there. And no matter how large or small the instance may be, God is moved by our hearts when we choose to resist sin and (in our passion for Him) to live a life pleasing to Him. Likewise, even the smallest decision to give into sin (thinking ‘just this once can’t hurt’) causes us to be separated from God and leads us down the path of destruction. "The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders, and interfering with God’s work within us." “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.” My dear warrior,
As C.S. Lewis and A.W. Tozer both so eloquently stated, the almost impossible thing is to come to the end of ourselves. We struggle and wrangle to kill the flesh; we fight against temptation; we want to live our lives as ‘good people’; and yet, we fight to maintain control. We want to be in charge. We have to have the last word. If that sounds familiar because you are in the middle of that selfsame struggle, if you recognize yourself in this, let this be a letter for you. My dear warrior,
Over the last year, my understanding about grace and the law have been intensely challenged. As the questions came flying, I found myself unable to answer and I realized that though I knew God’s heart for me, I did not understand His grace as fully or deeply as I ought. The challenge caused me to become hungry for answers, and I became all the more ravenous after God’s heart and mind. I wanted more than just to know His heart for me; I wanted to know His thoughts! Being challenged this way caused me to delve constantly deeper into His Word, and constantly ask for wisdom and spiritual understanding and seek to understand the reality of His Kingdom. Those questions lit a fire in my heart that launched me onto the greatest adventure of my life—and also inspired me to start this blog, because I cannot stand to keep what I have been learning to myself. My dear warriors,
I’ve heard it said many times that the Christian army is the only army in existence that kills its own wounded. While I did not originally intend on releasing this blog today, my heart was too burdened with this subject to wait any longer to release it. Warriors who have a great calling on their lives often seem to get beaten down more than anyone else. My dear wounded warriors: you who press on despite the mocking, derision and beating you take on an almost daily basis, let me take this moment to honor you. The God-given call on your life is not simply a cloak that you wrap yourself in and see yourself magically step into. When you have a call on your life, you have direct orders from the King Himself about what it is you’re supposed to do, and you see who you are meant to become through His lens. The moment you receive your call, it is both thrilling and terrifying. You can scarcely contain your excitement as you realize “Wow. That is what I’m going to become! I know what I want to do for the rest of my life!!” At the same time, you suddenly feel yourself shrinking under the weight of this new call, and feel yourself becoming infinitely smaller as the mountain you must overcome to get there rises straight out of the earth and into the heavens before you. You suddenly realize you have no idea how you’re going to get there from here. But that’s ok. You’re not meant to do it on your own “Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.” My dear warrior,
So many are offended by the doctrines of God, by Scripture itself; even people who call themselves believers. We're living in a time in which it is counter-cultural to be a lover of God, to be a man or woman after His own heart and mind. In a society where men create God in their own image and exchange truth for a lie so they can comfortably live in their own sin, I challenge you to wrestle with these topics and not be offended by the Word of God. Do not be put off by this seemingly difficult topic, but rather allow your heart to become ravenously hungry after God’s heart, and challenge yourself to delve deeper into God’s nature. You call me out upon the waters My dearest warrior,
Imagine yourself standing before an ocean of possibilities. The ocean reaches to the farthest expanses, disappearing into the horizon line in such a way that sea and sky seem to blend together. You cannot tell where the ocean ends and the sky begins. All that is before you is vast and overwhelming. That is what our future often seems like. It’s an endless expanse filled with possibilities, and we don’t know how to take it all in. We have a goal in mind, but we cannot see how to get there from where we stand, and the idea of simply taking the plunge, diving headlong into our future can be daunting, to put it mildly. For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. — 2 Timothy 1:7 My dear warrior,
I will begin by being open about something in my own life: I have struggled with the fear of man for years without ever even recognizing what it was. I understand how easy it can be to be overwhelmed by the enemy, to become fearful in any given situation because it all seems so much bigger than you. It’s easy to look at all the crises around the world, to look at ISIS, or to see the influence of the Masons at work in the media and to simply feel like you’re being overtaken by wave after tsunami wave. It can feel like you are drowning in it all, but I also know that this feeling (which is so easy to get) is a sign that you are focusing on the wrong things. |
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Mere Humanity: Becoming a Mature Christian in an Immature World
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