Godliness, Manhood and Leadership
As men, we’re in crisis. The crisis we experience is deeper and more pervasive than probably any of us realize.
It’s a crisis which impacts us first as males -- then it shifts – and it twists and troubles relationships with others, especially with women. This crisis will impact our marriages, if we have them, it will affect our children and it will influence our children’s children. Of course, the crisis pervades and perverts our culture.
Tony Evans terms it a “crisis of manhood” and he nails it when he calls it is a theological crisis. That simply means we have abandoned what God says on the topic of gender, and
in particular, on the meaning of maleness. Because of that abandonment, we’re paying a
huge price and we will continue to do so -- unless God’s men fulfill their calling.
The crisis of manhood began long before we were born and it influences every issue we’d name if we were to describe what it means to be a man -- what it means to be a man of God -- certainly what it means to be God’s man in relationships, marriage, and in culture.
We’re going to hit three areas today. This morning, we’ll talk about this crisis -- this predicament in which we find ourselves. I want to close our session this morning by giving some attention to what I will call “the prospect.“ Then later today, I want to hold out for you a powerful possibility -- the possibility that under Jesus Christ, we can be everything God meant for us to be as men -- His men, His leaders and His warriors in the cosmic battle that’s been raging since our first humans walked in the garden.
First, let’s think through the crisis we experience and how we got there -- this is
The Predicament
To get some background, we need to go back to the headwaters of creation.
Look at Genesis 1-3. In Genesis we discover 1. We have an inheritance which betrays us.
Of course, I’m talking about our first parents -- especially our first father, Adam.
Genesis chapter 1: The first chapter of Genesis sketches a broad overview of God’s creation -- the heavens -- the earth -- everything on the earth. We don’t have time to look at the broader creation; let me make two observations.
First, for the world and everything that came from it, God simply spoke and it was created.
Light, the material world, the seas, the land masses, then fish, animals, botanical life forms
-- all of that, God simply willed, and He spoke and commanded it to happen, and -- because
God is God -- it happened. The creation of man is quite different.
Another observation: Everything in God’s original creation was good. More than once in the narrative, God takes time to observe His creative works and pronounce them good. At the
conclusion of the world’s creation, God declares all of it good. Before the Fall, creation powerfully reflected the nature of God’s own goodness.
Some dramatic changes happen at verse 26. Then God said, “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Here, again, there is an overview in Genesis 1 -- the perspective there is that mankind is created including both man and woman.
God commands them to rule creation and to reproduce. In verse 29 he gifts them with every good thing, all the plants that produced seed -- all the trees giving fruit -- all good things they can eat and enjoy. Verse 31 is the capstone of God’s much more personal and precise creation of man. God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good.
Chapter 2. This is the detailed view of the creation of man, then woman, where chapter 1’s view is of God creating mankind. These are the details. Verse 8. After God carefully formed man, something He did nowhere else in the creation, He breathed into Adam the breath of life and Adam became a living soul. From the beginning we realize that this creature is remarkably different than all others. God planted a garden and places Adam there.
Again, God provides everything for him, all of it great to look at and good to eat.
This was a garden and orchard fully enjoyable to the eyes and to the taste buds. Everything was there to choose and enjoy. But, verse 9. The tree of life was also in the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
In verse 15 Adam is assigned the work of cultivating this wonderful place. Then God commands the man, saying, From any tree in the garden you may eat freely; (no limits there, there as almost unlimited variety) but, from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat from it, you will surely die. That original command was not heard by both the man and the woman, it came to Adam because in the detailed account of chapter 2, woman has yet to be created.
Then, God determined something in His creation which was not good. It is not good that the man be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him. God parades all the animals before Adam, he names them, showing his headship over the natural world, but in that process, Adam himself came to the conclusion God had already reached: Each animal had a specific purpose, maybe he saw also that each one had a mate. In that naming process,
Adam realized that for himself that there was no one who was like him, no one who could
be his mate, his complement, no one to complete him.
Only then does God anesthetize Adam and take bone and flesh from him, and create, again by special, personal, precise means, this specific counterpart who, when Adam sees her, he also names; she is one like him, taken from him.
The observation we need to make from all of that is that -- at creation, man received headship. Leadership. Let me give you a definition of headship to chew on. Headship: In a partnership of spiritually equal human beings (man and woman) the man bears the primary responsibility to lead the partnership in a God-glorifying direction.
What evidence is there of man’s headship? The creation record tells us man was created first. The NT refers to the order of creation both for headship in marriage and leadership in the Body of Christ. Woman was taken from him. Again, Adam named her, showing headship. She is not unequal, she is not his to dominate, she is his to protect and lead. She is under his leadership.
Creation teaches us that it is man to whom God looks as the leader. That was man’s assignment. Adam failed in the assignment. Let’s move on into chapter 3. Enter the serpent. Chapter 3, verses 1-6. The serpent is described initially as the “most crafty of the beasts” -- we take it from NT interpretations that Satan himself filled and controlled this creature. In that form, he enticed the woman. He questioned God’s command.
He misstated God‘s command. He maligned God’s character. Finally he contradicted out rightly what God had said.
Quiz time: to whom had God given the command? To Adam. But Adam didn’t lead his wife with Truth.
Second question: where was Adam during this temptation? Verse 6: When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from the fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her (some translations say who was with her) and he ate. Now we can’t prove it beyond any doubt, but I tend to agree with Larry Crabb and others who suggest that the whole time Adam’s beloved was being addressed by Satan, Adam stood right there, and like a good sweet husband, he kept quiet.
Adam chose passivity. We’ll talk about that attribute much more this afternoon, but let me tell you this right up front. It doesn’t matter what you’ve observed in most men in most churches and Christian circles in America. Passivity is not godliness. The quiet, sweet, submissive man in the corner is not demonstrating leadership nor love nor godliness. When it’s time to act, it’s time to act. Passive men don’t.
What we draw from that is simply this: As a man, as our first father, and as an influence in our lives through inherited sin, Adam abdicated and men have leaned toward abdication ever since. He took the one fruit God withheld out of his wife’s hand, he bit and he fell into sin.
The NT says, Eve was deceived, but it was Adam who sinned. And why? Because, like we saw, he was the one to whom God delivered the command. He was the one who did not make absolutely certain that she had God’s command down pat. When the crafty
serpent misquoted and misconstrued, she didn’t have the weapon of Truth in her armory.
Adam’s abdication continues. They ate, then hid -- God came looking for Adam -- verses 8 and 9 of chapter 3 -- notice it says, God walked in the garden in the cool of the day and….
The Lord God called to the man and said, “Where are you?“ God sought Adam out because Adam is the one to whom God looked for leadership. Man and woman were both in hiding. Instead of owning up, Adam ran.
God finds them, confronts them and again -- zero leadership. No ownership of sin.
Adam blames his wife, in reality he blames God. The first words out of his mouth were this woman you gave me.
So what did we inherit from our first father? Obviously a sin nature. But when it comes to manhood, our sin nature brims over with selfishness, with the urge to have my desires fulfilled. I want what I want, when I want it. I want to be served. I run from responsibility. We blame others for problems. We ditch the Truth. We prefer passivity. We let life happen and we respond only if and when it’s necessary. We avoid responsibility for the people around us who are ours to lead.
We have an inheritance which betrays us. There’s another force to reckon with, if we’re going to be what God wants us to be as men.
2. We have a culture which confuses us
Let me mention just a couple of significant cultural factors which have dramatically influenced modern men in the West.
One is what’s been called the “fatherless” generations. The impact on sons, and our current 3 generations of males is significant. The trend likely began with WW II -- first fathers went off to war -- those who returned, returned to work away from home 50 or more hours a week; they powered the engine of the economic miracle of the 1950’s. The fruit of men gone from their kids’ lives was a generation of sons -- my own generation of Baby Boomers -- who had much less influence of fathers in our lives. Divorce became acceptable, materialism ran rampant -- the end product was vital relationships and influence got sacrificed on the altar of that materialism.
Of course, when we in the Boomer generation became fathers, many of us had few or no models. We had lost our way. The only place many of us looked was defective models.
The father-son relationship is one of the weakest links in modern culture.
In your generation and the one following you, 60-70% of children spend part of their childhood without a father present. 1/3 of live births are to unmarried women. Over a million men with children under 18 are in prison. Every year, thousands of children lose their fathers to accidents or illnesses. The only possible result is that millions of us from the Boomers forward to you and to your younger siblings, either didn’t have a father or didn’t have one who was close and leading and nurturing. Where do you go to make up for the absence of a father’s love and influence? Our culture leaves us confused.
For the last 30 years, a second force swept through Western culture. Feminism not only brought the demand for equal pay for equal work, its influence has left both men and women without a foundation on which to stand when it comes to roles. There was a time when we as men doubted our role -- it moved to the place where a man’s role was diminished, then roles became indistinguishable from one another. Now, women and men are aimlessly, furtively, looking here and there to try to determine how things out to work.
We’re not only sons of our first father, we’re children of our culture. The result is mass confusion. We’re confused about what we are, what women are, we’re certainly confused as Christian men as to whether we ought to bow to the cultural trends or go off and find a model we like and mimic that.
Two prevalent kinds of men exist in the culture and in Christian circles. One is the passive man; the other is the dominator. Neither of those aligns with how God has made us.
Confusion has produced a fear of commitment. The statistics keep climbing of men and women who stay single or marry very late. I’ve had Christian guys in their mid-20’s
tell me, they’re afraid of marriage. On the flip side single gals tell my wife and me, they wonder why guys won’t commit. If and when we do commit -- for instance to marriage,
we still suffer fear of intimacy. We don‘t reveal ourselves to the most important people in our lives.
Instead of becoming men, we hang back at the stages of boys or guys. We’re behaving
what we’ve inherited, we’re just doing what we know, we’re out in the world, trying to
succeed where we know we can -- in business or somewhere else -- instead of taking up the massive calling to lead God‘s way.
The fruit of confusion is self-absorption with no real satisfaction. If we don’t know what we ought to be, we just go with our gut and play out life as sons of Adam. We accede to the
junk culture and our flesh often rules.
Men, like Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, there is a better way. There’s a higher calling. I trust you’re prepared to move in that direction.
Let’s talk about The prospect of that higher calling.
The apostle Paul wrote to his son in the faith, Timothy and said,
But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. (1 Timothy 6:11, 12)
For the balance of our time, this morning, let me challenge you with three components I’ve got italicized in those words of Paul to a younger protégé.
First Paul calls him, man of God. Men, Settle your identity. Understand this first, last and always -- if you’re a Christian, then by God’s grace, you’re God‘s man, a man of God.
You have to get this guys: if you have come to know Jesus Christ by faith, you’ve been transformed -- you don’t belong to yourself any longer -- you certainly don’t belong to the culture which you happen to inhabit. When you know who you are in Jesus Christ, you can risk everything to live all out for Him.
Paul knew the most effective way to pull greatness out of Timothy was to remind him of who he was in Jesus Christ. As men we stare down temptations every day to pretend to be something or someone we’re not. Those temptations run the gamut between some
hyper-sexual “studly” man all the way to a soft understanding velvet-covered dude.
The culture offers us choices of “real men” from Arnold the Terminator to metro-sexual sweet guys in touch with their feminine side.
I’m here to tell you guys, real masculinity is never a product of our contemporary culture. You’ll never find it there. Courageous men stop looking for it there. Scripture says you’re a man of God. That’s your identity. We have to begin with that understanding.
If you’ve either never come to know Christ in a person way, or if you’ve never understood the whole issue of God’s free grace and your new identity in Christ, let me or someone here today help you with that. Don’t careen into life and into marriage or another relationship without getting your identity settled.
The second observation in these verses comes from those words, fight the good fight of faith.
What Paul calls Timothy to -- what God calls us to, is to sacrifice like Christ. The more you walk with Jesus Christ as His man the more you will hear and respond to His call to give up in order to gain. He will say to you take up your cross and follow Me; you’ll hear him call you like He did in Matthew 6:33, to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. There comes a point in every godly man’s life when he must finally choose to stop caring about earthly life so he can invest in populating and investing in eternity.
You probably won’t forfeit physical life to be God’s man, but you will get a summons
to forfeit your will, and your wealth, and your recognition -- certainly your carnal appetites and your small, selfish dreams -- in order to be and to do all God has in mind for you as His man in this generation.
A little over a week ago, Marty Everding invited Trinity’s men to his home, to talk about what you’re discuss later today -- the battle for sexual purity. One of the men read a passage that so well spells out what God wants to see in us as men: Hebrews 2:10-11. The writer says
In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the One who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. (Hebrews 2:10-11)
Men, if you’ve never gotten there, today is the day -- today is the day to lay it on the line for Jesus Christ. Otherwise, everything else we talk about today will be moot. I need to tell
you right up front -- you cannot be His man, you cannot be a godly leader, you cannot be sexually pure and follow in Christ’s ways, if you’re still gripping life your way -- if you’re not laying it down for Him and to Him. Take hold of eternal life. Look for His higher rewards. Keep before your eyes the vision of the day you will stand before Him and He’s not ashamed to call you His brother.
The third thing in Paul’s words: take hold of eternal life. Part of what he says to us is
Invest in the Kingdom. When your view of God and your view of yourself is right --
when you’re willing to sacrifice your agenda to Christ’s -- it’s time to build something that you can’t take with you but that will go ahead of you into eternity. It’s time to start investing in building the kingdom of Christ right where you are -- your dorm, your house, your neighborhood, your job, your church, your world.
It’s time to think outside the box -- to dream big dreams for God. The last thing the Church and the Kingdom need are more religious guys. Like we’ll talk about later today, the very last thing Christianity needs is more good, passive, nice guys. I’ll go one step beyond that.
Passive guys are helping hasten the death of the American Church.
Men what we need are big, hairy audacious dreamers.
Do you understand that we didn’t draw the battle lines. We’re just occupants of the current generation. Those lines were laid out long ago.
The questions today are for you as a man who wants to be God‘s man is this generation: Where will you stand while the battle rages for the souls of our generation? Where will you stand when people right around you wrestle with the Truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Where will you be as Jesus Christ the Lord, does His magnificent work of building the Church in our time?
Adam has his assignment. He failed. The powerful Truth is, the NT tells us we don’t have to follow the first Adam any longer. A second Adam has come. It’s Christ. Real men follow Him. You’ve got a new inheritance. Pick it up. Use it. Depend on it. If you need help, grab one of the leaders here today and ask for it. Do whatever you need, but get started.
Scrap what you’ve learned from the culture. Arise and follow Him -- and be the man God always intended you to be.
