Men are called to strength. At the end of King David’s life, he summoned his son to his bedside and said: Be strong, and show yourself a man, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his rules, and his testimonies that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn.

To those of you who have the privilege of being fathers, Happy Fathers’ Day. I want to begin this episode with a question: What do you think of the prayer, “God forgive us for aiming too low and hitting the target every time?” Do you want to go through life aiming low so you can hit the standard of mediocrity? Is that what you want the defining word for your life to be, mediocre? “He was a mediocre father. His commitment to Jesus was…mediocre.” If you receive this blog, I doubt very much that mediocre is the adjective that you want describing the caliber of your commitment to godly fatherhood. 

To aim low, when it comes to our efforts to guide our sons into godly manhood is to fail them and to fail the Lord. Toxic, self-centered, masculinity is real in this world; it has harmed countless women. Its only cure is the gospel of Jesus Christ, which transforms. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Cor 5:17). Answering Jesus’ call to Christian men to show the world his power to fix broken manhood, restoring it to its self-sacrificing design, has never been more important. This episode examines the very high bar of what God designed manhood to be and calls us to pursue it.

Let’s take a moment to review where we’ve come in this June series. In the first episode, we examined the rising popularity of kick-boxing champion Andrew Tate among Christian teen guys as evidence that many in the rising generation of males are tired of being emasculated. With no positive vision of manhood that matches their masculine shape, many boys and men turn to online gurus who assure them, contrary to the message they get everywhere else, that their masculinity is good. The attraction of Christian teens to the broken masculinity of Andrew Tate should be a wake-up call to the church. If the church does not challenge our boys with a call to biblical manhood, they will be attracted to broken ones. To better understand the crisis of identity that young men face today, we identified five obstacles to them embracing the biblical call to godly masculinity.

Obstacle #1: the damage men have done to women by using their positions of power and authority to exploit them. Masculinity would not be under such severe attack if there weren’t so many women harmed by toxic expressions of it.

Obstacle #2: cultural Marxism being spread by Western colleges and universities, which views life through the lens of all men being oppressors.

Obstacle #3: the culture’s embrace of egalitarianism, which defines all structures of authority as oppressive and advances the deception that requiring submission to a boss, police officer, coach, or parent is demeaning (which we all know is not).

Obstacle #4: voices in the church retooling old arguments that attempt to label Paul’s teaching, if not all of the Bible, to be corrupted by surrounding culture, and not God’s inerrant truth.

Obstacle #5: the silence of complementarian church leaders who may express cultural sensitivity to unpopular biblical worldviews in preaching but who might not realize the devasting impact their silence is having on the rising generation of young men who cannot succeed in traveling through the cultural onslaught we just identified without the help of the church.  

Last week, we began with Jesus’ observation that those who ignore God’s Word, building their lives instead upon a foundation of cultural lies, (e.g. about gender and sexuality), build their lives on a foundation of sand—something that as fathers, we must not let our children do. God has ordained that society itself is built upon the foundation of the family, and the family rests upon the foundation of marriage between one man and one woman, the first institution established by God before the church or civil government. The foundation of marriage rests upon the uniting of two different creatures, male and female, whose differences, God went out of his way to emphasize in Genesis 2. We noted last week that God chose an intentional parallel structure to describe his creation of Adam, and Eve:

• The creation of Adam begins with an explanation of why he was needed. When…there was no man to work the ground then the Lord God formed the man (Gen 2:5-6). Adam is made FOR the ground. The creation of Eve begins with an explanation of why she was needed, Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Eve is created FOR Adam, to be his companion and lover.
• Adam is given a name that means ground (ADAMAH). Eve is given a name that means out of the man (Gen 2:23). The word for male is ISH the word for woman is ISHAH.
• Adam is made from the ground (Gen 2:7). Eve is made from the man. She, unlike any other creature, is fashioned from part of another creature—the rib  of Adam (Gen 2:21-22).
• Adam’s creation calling is to work the ground (Gen 2:9-15). Eve’s creation calling is to assist the man (Gen 2:18, 20).
• When Adam sins, what is cursed is the ground (Gen 3:17). When Eve sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man & his kids.

God created very different scripts for Adam and Eve. But our kids are swimming every day in polluted cultural waters that deny male-female differences and are flooding into the church undermining the difference in roles assigned to Christian husbands and wives—roles that lead to a flourishing marriage and portray Christ and his relationship with his bride, the church.

The Manhood Script

Excerpts from Chapter 2, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood.

(Remember that questions for the adult and son to interact with each other are sprinkled all through each chapter in the book, which are left out of this excerpt.)

Godly manhood is a calling. Christ wants to redeem every Christian man’s fallen, self-centered masculinity and restore him to the original design God displayed in creating unfallen Adam as a male. Christ came to fix everything broken in this world, including masculinity. In the Second Adam, men are empowered to become the Christ-like man Adam was designed to be. This chapter looks at that man.

1. Adam Is Placed in the Garden to Cause It and Its Inhabitants to Flourish

In Genesis 2:15 we are told that Adam is put into the garden to work it (ESV). The Hebrew word is avad, which is also translated cultivate. It means to make fruitful, to cause to reach its full potential. Adam is to provide what the garden (which includes its inhabitants—his wife, kids, and clients) needs to thrive. Men may want to be heroes, ourselves, but Scripture says that successful manhood is measured by the degree to which we are hero-makers. Remember Jesus’ words, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” Life reinforces this truth. Successful businessmen serve their customers well. Successful coaches help their players reach their full potential. Effective managers equip those they lead to be the best they can be.

1. When it comes to providing materially for the family, Scripture makes clear that Eve fully shares Adam’s mandate to build culture through vocation and that her gifts are required for the economic success of the family. However, Adam is assigned the primary responsibility for providing what his family needs, materially, to flourish. Eve loves by nourishing, i.e. the giving of herself. But Adam is more specifically assigned to cultivate the garden. i.e. provide from one part of the garden what another part needs (e.g. water in the garden to irrigate the pear tree, pears from the garden to feed humans, etc.) This refers to a man’s vocation. Scripture says God created us with specific work in mine.

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