If there is one thing in this game you have begun to learn, it should be this...without disciplining yourself, you are not going to do yourself any good in anything. Calorie counting, watching the kinds of calories, exercising more than once a week, not overeating, etc...are just a few areas we must maintain in the form of discipline or we will find ourselves spinning our wheels in the race to health.
If the truth be known, life is about discipline and true living is about restricting your appetites. Many think restriction is bondage. They equate not having the 'freedom' to do what they want, is slavery or a loss of power. But in reality, true freedom come with discipline. Ask the heroin addict, the crack head, the cocaine fiend, the alcoholic, the smoker, the porn addict...ask them who is more free...the one who has disciplined themselves and restricted themselves from partaking in such excesses or the one who can't break the chains of addiction that now envelopes every fiber of their lives. The scripture doesn't lie! It says in James, that every man is drawn away and enticed of his own lusts. All of us have our own bodily appetites within us that draw us to do evil or obtain something for a sense of momentary satisfaction. Just as much as we 'feel' hunger or pains of thirst, there are other urges and appetites of the flesh. Our carnal nature desires many things...sex, power, greed, material things, and such like. As James goes on to say the basic course of this world is fairly simple...lust, sin, and then death.
Look around you, the course of this world is set to a race to fulfill its lusts. We see something and it provokes something within us. James says, when our lusts hath conceived, it brings forth sin. So our lusts/appetites are those inner desires to have or obtain something. At that point, we have a choice, we can either kick the thought out because we know in the 'long run' it will destroy us or we will play with the thought. We will let it lay there and germinate and the next thing we know, like the moment two seeds collide in the womb, it begins to grow. We begin to move ourselves into a mode of obtaining the appetites of our desires. Sin is nothing more than our actions being moved by what was already conceived in our minds.
Now the sad thing is...the end of this course is 'death'. Although sometimes the end result of a lust is literal death, the reality of an unchecked lust is usually felt somewhere down the road. It is the harvest of a seed sown years ago. Many alcoholics are wounded people who used the alcohol to soothe over their deeply embedded anger. The scripture says that 'anger rests in the bosom of a fool' and most people who are 'addicts' have allowed anger, from a very early time in their lives, to rests within them. Which in turn set forth the course of the world which we are discussing in today's blog. Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden or they would surely die. When they disobeyed God, they didn't die a literal death, but their 'death' was a multi-fold death. They were cursed with manifold curses of trials and tribulations of the living within their own mortal bodies. They were expelled from the garden, which means they lost direct communication with the God of their salvation. So many things were lost when they went to fulfill their won lusts and desires. Though they didn't die a literal death, they died a spiritual death. So it is with us, when we refuse to restrict the appetites of our natures, we become wrapped within chains of darkness. Our minds become so obsessed in pursuit of fulfilling our lusts that somewhere down the road, we lose the 'light' of the way.
If all that is in the world is the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, then the world is a manifestation of the fulfillment of these categories in people's lives. In a world lost without any restrictions and living in the idea that freedom is doing whatever feels good and fulfilling the lusts of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, then what we see around us today is nothing but a result of the 'course of this world'.
Once again, you may be saying, 'What in the world does this have to do with this blog and playing the game?' Well, I would have to say...EVERYTHING! If you will be honest with yourself (and honesty is the only way you can truly move forward). How did you get here? Why are you over weight? Why are you bound to food? Somewhere you followed the course of this world. You gave in to your pain. You justified your hurts. You followed your appetites and now you find yourself walking the tight rope of 'death'. An undisciplined life has not lead to freedom but it has brought you to this place and now the most difficult thing you will ever do is break the chains of bad habits and wrong thinking in your life! There are basically two paths you can follow: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment. Right now...you have a pure and true revelation of the lack of discipline. Don't be fooled again, the pain you feel right now is because you thought true freedom came from following your own will.
Today its time to step off the course of this world and follow a new path into the light of true freedom.
The Road not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference
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