So hey, good morning and welcome to this place that we call DCC. It is so good to have you with us this morning, especially if you are here for the very first time. If that is you we really think that it is important that you know that you have walked into a place today that happens to be full of people just like you. We have all made mistakes, hurt people, been hurt by people, have parts of our lives that we wish we could change and do-over, have lots of questions, and not all of the answers. Every single one of us here today is here chasing after a better way to live. Most of us here believe that Jesus offers that, but the good news is this, you don’t even have to believe that to belong right here with us. We are excited that you are here. So a special thanks and shout out to you and to all of our friends who are tuned in watching right now too.
ILLUST> So, our family has formed a tradition over the past few years of going out to see a movie on Christmas night. Last year it was Unbroken and this year it was Creed. So I am sitting there Stacy and all of my girls and my son-in-law watching the movie which felt a lot like the story line of the early Rocky movies which I expected. But then all of a sudden in the midst of the expected, I was hit with the totally unexpected. All of a sudden it hit me and I start to tear up. See, that’s what happens when something in someone else’s story touches something in ours. There is just something powerful in the stories that stir and move us, the stories we love and Braveheart, the story that we started with today, the story of William Wallace has always been one of those for me.
So we are in a series called Ransomed Heart that we started last week, a series that will definitely give all of us a better understanding of what we are really about in this place that we call DCC, but more importantly a series that is designed to address the voice of our heart that continues to speak to us throughout the course of our lives. A voice that seems to suggest to us that there is something still missing in our lives, that we were made for so much more than this and we know it. A voice that remains a mystery to us, a voice that even our church and very religious routines, activities, and experiences don’t’ seem to silence. So what is this voice speaking to? What are we still missing? We are on journey together to find that.
So we started with the movie Braveheart today because I think it really does capture the essence of what it is that I want us to talk about today, the masculine heart. Now, let me say a few things about that before we jump into this. First, ladies, don’t feel left out, the feminine heart is next week. Besides that we all have a husband, son, brother, dad, co-worker that this relates to. In many ways, I believe that the best thing I can possibly do for you is to help you better understand the masculine heart. Second, there is no way to cover this in one message. When men jump into Wild at Heart here at DCC they commit to a journey of at least 8 weeks. Even that is simply the trailhead, the beginning of a journey toward the life we’ve been chasing our whole lives. This Wild at Heart thing is not just another church study, it is a way of life. Last, this is not about you being an elk hunter, a rugged outdoors guy, your ability to grow a beard, how much body hair you have, the size of your bicepts or your ability to talk cars and motors. If your favorite weapon is your keyboard and you happen to like the movie the Notebook better than Gladiator what we are talking about today is for you. So, William Wallace nails it…every man dies, not every man really lives and I think we need to talk about that. So here we go…
If you have a Bible we are going to be in Genesis chapter 1 today. If you don’t have a Bible we would love to give you one. They are back on the back tables that you can grab right now if you would like if you close or on you can always grab one on your way out. As always you can hit our app or the You Version app too. Or you can ignore all of that and read along with me on the screens. So, here we go let’s start in Genesis chapter 1 beginning with verse 26, just a few verses to get us started.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
So God creates Adam and Eve in his image. Get this now, before the story ever involves sin, Adam is created with strength, dignity, glory and a purpose…to rule over, to have dominion over all of creation. See, as a kid growing up I kind of missed that. I always thought of Adam as glorified gardener who made a big mistake. God simply dropped him into the Garden to care for it. I have never had a green thumb, so the whole gardener thing didn’t have much appeal to me. I really missed the significance of this moment. God uniquely created Adam in his image for a unique place in the incredible and large story that he was telling. He was dropping Adam into something that directly lined up with the core desires of his masculine heart, specifically his desire for…
AN ADVENTURE TO LIVE
Adam had it and we do too. If you don’t believe that all you have to do is pay attention to little boys, the things that they do, and the games that they play. Whenever you get a bunch of guys talking about all the stupid things that they did growing up through their teenage years and even sometimes into their twenties and thirties it is not only to see this core desire but also to wonder how any of us are still alive. We do stupid things in pursuit of an adventure to live. Our problem is that these adventures are temporary, they are short term, and so is the satisfaction that we find in them. What our masculine heart really desires is an adventure much like the one that Adam is dropped into, but I don’t think we have done a very good job of helping guys find that in the church.
ILLUST> Question. Do you really want to be like most of the guys you know who are most serious about church? Don’t answer out loud, he’s sitting next to you. See, that’s the problem I ran into as a kid growing up in church. If you have a choice which group would you rather watch a game with, your churched or your unchurched friends? I don’t blame you. Let’s face it. If you come to church looking for an adventure to live most the time the answer we give you is that if you really want to live on the edge you need to become an usher. Nothing wrong with being an usher, we have some manly men as ushers in this place, I wouldn’t mess with them. They tell you to sit there, I would just do it but is that it…that’s the adventure? See church teaches us to be nice guys, stop cussing, sin less, stop drinking, read more, study more, quote more, pray more, memorize this, do this, don’t do that and the core desires of our masculine hearts are never really addressed. As a result most men in most churches today feel neutered, dutiful, bored and totally disconnected from their hearts.
We tell them that the goal is to be more like Jesus. Which is true and is an answer that we can never go wrong with but even that can be confusing too. Let’s see if we can get a little clarity on that. So we, like Adam are made in the image of God. Sometimes I don’t think we clearly understand what that means. Check this out Exodus chapter 15 verse 4…
Exodus 15:3…The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name.
It’s pretty simple math when you really break it down. You are I were created in the image of God and God is a warrior, so that means that we were created to be warriors too, like William Wallace kind of warriors. Exactly. One would think that, but…but what? We are also told that the end game as a Christian man is to be as much as possible like Jesus. That’s true too but it creates a dilemma for us. Because when push comes to shove based upon our experience with the church and with the men we have known in the church Jesus seems to look more like this…
********ROLL MR. ROGERS VIDEO******************
There is quite a contrast between William Wallace and Mister Rogers. We are taught in the church to be like Jesus. Which Jesus? See, I think we have been sold a bad version of Jesus. Jesus is and was a warrior on a search and rescue mission. We were made in his image and just like Adam, dropped into a huge dangerous story full of adventure with a unique role to play in it. CS Lewis said if we don’t find the adventure in life with God, we will ultimately find it somewhere else in things like affairs, addictions, and pornography. That is the story of so many men I know who are trying their best to follow Jesus. Don’t ignore the desire of your heart. Don’t miss this, deep inside of every masculine heart created since Adam is the deep desire for an adventure to live. It’s Adam’s story, William Wallace’s story, your story and my story too. But Adventure alone is not enough. God knows that, He says something is still missing, chapter 2 verse 21. Watch this…
21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. 23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’for she was taken out of man.” 24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
There it is, the very essence of adventure, married, naked, and feeling no shame. It doesn’t get any better than that. So God drops Adam into a great adventure but still sees a gap that needs to be addressed. It is not good for Adam to be alone. So he creates Eve, her, woman. God creates someone that has the ability to uniquely speak into another core desire that he has placed in Adam’s masculine heart. Deep within every masculine heart lies a deep desire, just like Adam’s for…
A BEAUTY TO RESCUE I really don’t have to convince anybody in the room that this is true. This core desire alone could be a whole series. When I have taught Wild at Heart, I have spent two weeks talking about this. Let’s get real. Ladies, your beauty slays him. God created something absolutely breath-taking and stunning when he created you. We will talk about that more next week.
ILLUST> I remember John and Stasi Eldredge talking about a time the conversation that they had after spending hours together in a few art galaries. After hours of looking they couldn’t recall seeing one painting of a naked man but there were hundreds of paintings of naked women. Men get that. We look in the mirror every day. It’s not even close.
She, Eve is beautiful and nothing, absolutely nothing seems to speak to the masculine heart like her beauty. No one seems to answer the question that each of us carry as men and as boys, do I really have what it takes to be a man, like she does. To have a beautiful woman tell you that you are amazing is about as good as it gets. To come through for her is unlike just about anything else that we do.
ILLUST> I try my best to take Monday off and this Monday I did a pretty good job of that. I was pretty beat coming out of the holidays. So Stacy comes home from work and was getting ready to go to the gym. I told her that I was going to take our dog to the park and then come back home. That I really didn’t feel like going anywhere. As I was walking back home I realized that she had pointed out that the lights on the microwave had gone out on Sunday. She uses those lights to help her bread rise. So, I hadn’t planned on going out, but I got home, went to Lowe’s bought some bulbs and replaced them. And then…I spent the next hour or so blowing up her phone making sure that she knew that I had saved the day. I had changed out the bulbs in the microwave…a great rescue.
Now that is ridiculous but there is something to this. Our problem with this beauty thing is that we often forget about the rescue part. We are slayed by her beauty, but the deep desire of our heart is to rescue her, to offer our strength to her not draw our strength from her. It took me a long time to figure out that for most of my life my willingness to rescue her selfishly required her to first be willing and able to validate me. The core desire that God has placed on our masculine hearts is not just for the beauty. It is for a beauty to rescue. We find our strength in God and then take that strength to her. We come to her not out of a position of weakness or need, but one of strength.
ILLUST> It is what we see William Wallace do in Braveheart. He offers his strength. He is a man comfortable in his own skin, who finds his validation and strength outside of her. He comes to her with strength, not out of need. He is tender, he is fierce, he is loving, he is strong, he is kind, he’s a warrior created in the image of God. I am telling you guys, watch that part of the movie. Watch how she responds to that. It is a perfect example of how this core desire that God has placed in each of our masculine hearts is supposed to play out, it is what it is supposed to look like.
So early in the Creation story God gives Adam an opportunity to act on this core desire of his heart and come through for Eve. Let’s finish up with this Genesis chapter 3 verse 4…
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Adventure, Beauty, all in the garden is going well until the enemy shows up. Now, there is an opportunity for Adam to come through, for him to step up and rescue his beauty from the temptation that Satan is putting in front of her. He doesn’t say a word. He allows her to eat the fruit. Her was standing right beside her the whole time. The first moment of opportunity in time for the human masculine heart to come through and rescue the beauty and Adam fails. Adam chose Eve over God and we guys have been doing that exact same thing ever since. It’s bigger than that. In refusing to step up, there is another core desire of the masculine heart that Adam turns away from here. See, every man also has a core desire for a
A BATTLE TO FIGHT That core desire is there. Think about it. If someone got into your house tonight and threatened your wife and kids you would do whatever it takes to stop them. You would stop at nothing to protect them. What we often don’t recognize is that every single day we, the ones we love, the people around us are in a different kind of fight. The context of all of our lives is a war, a spiritual battle that rages every single day and our strength is needed. Every single day, we are faced with Adam moments, opportunites of come through, to offer strength, to fight for the hearts of others and so often we miss them.
ILLUST> This past Monday night at about 10 pm I went to bed. I fell asleep pretty quickly watching Sportscenter only to be awakened by a phone call from my daughter who had a 10:30 curfew and should have been on her way home. My heart jumped when her picture came up on my phone. I answered what’s wrong? She was crying trying to tell me something about a tire and a curb. Finally, I was able to make out I think I hit a curb. I’m like what do you mean you think, I’m on my way. So I get up, get dressed, grab my coat go out in the cold, drive there, change the tire, which had a huge hole in the sidewall, in short I do the dad thing…rescue right. Not so much. I may have rescued her car…did anything but rescue her heart. Honestly, I was frustrated and angry. I had been staring at our finances that day, wondering how the new student loans were going to fit and feeling pressure and now this. Are you kidding me? Why couldn’t she have just been more responsible more careful? It had nothing to do with the tire or her. Even though my anger really had nothing to do with the tire or her as she held her phone flashlight for me as I changed the tire I spent about 5 minutes absolutely ripping her a new one. Awesome dad moment. Her young and beautiful heart was the last thing on my mind. I completely blew it as a dad. I chose the wrong battle. So, I called her the next morning to do everything that I could to make it right.
Every single day we are faced with battles to fight, opportunities to come through, to fight for the hearts of others and we miss them just like Adam did here. He went passive, he did nothing, and then watch what happens next …Back to Genesis 3 where we left off…
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
So Adam hid and we men, have been hiding ever since. We don’t step up and offer our strength because of our failures in the past, because deep inside we really doubt that we have any or that it is enough. We are afraid to fail again. So we hide.
ILLUST> About 10 years ago when I was still in the desert and out of ministry a good friend offered to take me on a pheasant hunt with a group of guys in South Dakota. So we went out for the morning hunt and were in an old school bus, about 25 of us heading back to the lodge for lunch when all of a sudden the bus driver stopped. There was a rooster pheasant right walking down the road. So the driver stops and says who didn’t get one this morning. I started to try and shrink down in my sink. I was one of about 4 that didn’t bag a pheasant yet. Just as I started to slink down in the seat my buddy called out my name. The guys in the bus started chanting my name. So I grabbed my shotgun and got off the bus. There he was. All I had to do was get him in the air and pull the trigger. All of the guys in the bus were watching out the windows. I flushed him up, shot, shot again…and watched him fly away. I will never forget that moment. I failed. I didn’t come through. One of the most painful walks I have ever experienced were the steps back toward that bus. I would rather hide than face that again.
It’s what we do, we learn to be good at hiding. We hide behind our titles, incomes, education, muscle, our level of fitness, personalities, knowledge, our wives, our newspapers, and our Bibles. If we are not absolutely certain that we can win we tend to stay away. We hide out of fear of being exposed and as we do that we continue to die on the inside, we continue to lose heart. Albert Schweitzer says that “the tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he still lives”. That’s too many of our stories, alive on the outside but on the inside we are dying. Something has been assaulted, compromised, wounded, and surrendered in us. Something is still missing. We were made for so much more and we know it. We must fight to get our hearts back. Don’t misunderstand this. This stuff will completely and absolutely change your life, but it will not be easy.
My dream is that there will be a day where 3 words will describe every man in this place restored, alive, and free. There is so much more to this. So men I want to challenge you to read the book Wild at Heart, better yet jump into a Wild at Heart group here at DCC. If you have already done that do it again, or better yet lead one this time. The men that I see living the most alive and free, growing the most, thriving the most, living from the heart the most, and finding the life that they are looking for in this place the most are the men who lead Wild at Heart groups. I have been to at least 4 Ransomed Heart Bootcamps and an advanced camp too. I will go again. This is not a study, it is a new way of life. So, as you are walking out of here today here’s the question. Which best describes your life, battle, adventure, and beauty or hastle, obligation, and duty? Every man dies not every man really lives. It’s time for that to change. Let’s Pray.
