There is a divine order to our plane of existence, but it will ever elude the human intellect. You can give yourself a leg up if you choose to embrace divine revelation to the degree possible. That means dismissing the bulk of what we learn from our Western culture — no mean feat. You have to understand everything from a moral perspective, because that is how God views it.
Because the majority of our human race rejects God’s viewpoint, we are faced with a false matrix, a vast conspiracy to force the mythology. Please notice that this is both our fallen human tendency and a culture specifically designed to cater to the worst of that fallen nature. We can mitigate the former, but reducing the effects of the latter is Sisyphean. It’s not pointless, but you have to pick your battles.
You pick them based on your own sense of calling. By making the intellect subservient to the moral-spiritual faculty, we learn that much of what preoccupies humanity is missing the point. For example, the whole of Western Christianity is hung up on the false dichotomy of a religion that is either primarily intellectual orthodoxy and discipline, or it’s all gushing feelings and sentiment. Various Christian organizations are dominated by this false dichotomy, sometimes locked in some incomprehensible internal conflict between the two. The result is that the natural moral teaching of Christ is perverted into all sorts of control schemes.
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One of the most valuable things a man can hold is a woman who is both adept and inclined to build the nest. All other traits and characteristics are negotiable, but without this two-edged sword, nothing else she has to offer is worth much.
By the same token, a woman who can’t be bothered to build the nest — perhaps because she has a deeply perverted understanding of what the nest is — is one of the most destructive forces in nature. Flee such a woman, because she will destroy your mission and your soul. Don’t give her the time of day. You are better off living without romance if that’s the best you can find.
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Follow your own instincts. If you don’t test them to see where they fail, you cannot train them. Having adjustable instincts is one of the few advantages of being human, but also a primary weakness because it needs the training.
Failure and pain are entirely normal in our fallen existence. Pain is the language of the body and soul crying out. Sometimes there is no right answer, but if you don’t learn to listen to sorrow, you will never overcome. Your greatest enemy is inside your own skin; it is the collection of fallen tendencies that fight moral truth. You cannot vanquish it once and for all, but you can train your conscious self to avoid deceptions and traps that keep you from your mission in life. That is not the same thing as struggling to avoid pain.
To be theologically precise, “flesh” is not exactly the same as your body. It’s a technical term for the fallen nature. Your body is under the Fall, but not entirely fallen. It retains the divine capabilities from Eden, however muffled and perverted by the Fall. Your own body would dearly love to be guided by a moral consciousness that takes revelation seriously.
Instead, we are an unholy mix of things we cannot ever completely slice and dice. We can discuss academically distinctions that we cannot possibly find in our daily reality. That’s the reason we do not trust our own minds, because they demand a control that simply cannot work. You must learn not to put so much trust in your own reason.
