Church
Inspiring Men With Courage
by on Oct 26th, 2009 at 8:42 am
When did you last gather among other believers with a purpose to bring courage to a brother or sister? Have you ever gone to church thinking about how you were going to search out brothers in Christ and offer them motivation for keeping on in their fight of faith?
These questions have been weighing heavily upon me over the past few weeks as I have been studying and teaching Hebrews 10:19-25. Within this text, we have a clear command to strategically and actively set our efforts on provoking one another to love and good works for God’s glory. We have a mandate to inspire courage within one another, but I have been neglecting this command for far too long.
When it comes to encouragement, I am a blatant hypocrite. I value the instillation of courage very highly on a personal level. Some of the most pivotal and life-shaping moments have the common thread of receiving a crucial bit of encouragement from someone that I respect. As a teacher, I sometimes struggle with spending dozens of hours on a lesson only to think that the preparation was a waste after class. A time has not yet gone by where God did not send someone from that class my way to say a kind word. Those encouragers did not know how much they impacted me and gave me the shot in the arm that I needed to get back to the hard work of preparing the next lesson, but the giving of courage worked.
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Inspiring Courage Through Personal Example
by on Oct 27th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Your personal example serves as the currency for your leadership influence. If you practice what you preach, you will gain credibility from those around you. Your words will then carry more weight, and the recipients of your words will be more likely to take them to heart. If you are a hypocrite, you will lose credibility and your words will ring hollow in the ears of those you are trying to encourage.
This principle is a key reason as to why motivational posters, written by unknown authors in a cubicle, motivate men far less than the words of a seasoned veteran. We might take a little courage from nice words written or spoken by strangers, but when they come from a person we profoundly respect, we graft them into our souls for the rest of our lives.
There is no one on this earth who can claim to be a perfect example at all times. I’m not suggesting that we project ourselves as perfect examples to the men around us. In fact, as a leader, I have actually learned that more respect can often be gained in how I demonstrate a response to utter failure than in maintaining consistency. What I am saying is that we would better learn how to instill courage in one another if we backed any of our words or gestures with an active example of faithfulness to Christ. After all, the author of the command to encourage one another followed this command with a lengthy description of men and women of God whose examples serve as inspiration for us today (see Hebrews 11).
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Inspiring Courage Through Personal Presence
by on Nov 10th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
With men, the strong bonds of friendship are rarely formed in small groups or settings where we sit together and share our feelings. Men are grafted together in friendship when they endure storms together. Usually, the most dangerous, uncertain, embarrassing, and intense moments of life prove to be the grounds on which men earn each other’s trust, which leads to deeper understanding and profound appreciation for one another.
The key element to forming these types of friendships is personal presence. We would much prefer to walk through life with a few trustworthy blood brothers than to wander through it alone, but blood brothers are only formed when we are there for someone in an hour of danger or need.
In my own life, this principle has proven to be true. The closest and strongest friendships I have were not born from spending time in small groups, church services, or just hanging out and wasting time. They were formed when my life was rocked by some trauma and these men refused to leave me to go through the situation on my own. Very few words were spoken in those dark moments, but the power of a friend’s presence was priceless. I knew that I could count on them and only hope that my presence was found when they needed me.
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Inspiring Courage With Powerful Words
by on Nov 10th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
I hate cheesiness. I love sarcasm. This makes me dangerous.
Cheesiness is stupid because it is exaggerated fakery, and its targets are more like victims than benefactors. Have you ever been forced to play the game, “Let’s have (insert name) sit in the center of the room and everybody say something nice about him/her?” That is cheesiness. Have you ever been in a small group that, as an exercise, pulls out the “encouragement cards” and then everyone rights an encouragement for someone else in the room? Borderline cheesiness. Forced emotion is not my thing.
Sarcasm is my comfort zone. I grew up around friends that would give you the very shirt off of their backs if you truly needed it, but in the meantime, they would test your mettle with biting comments and sarcastic wit. You were loved when you were prodded and you were respected when you could give out sarcasm as well as you could take it. This sarcastic culture got me in a lot of trouble when I moved to college and found out people had these things called, “sensitivities.” See? There goes my sarcasm again.
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Manhood & Abortion
by on Jan 27th, 2010 at 12:58 am
The first time I ever saw my son, he was no bigger than a single grain of rice. Just a few millimeters long, my wife and I watched in astonishment as this little being’s heart was already beating at a rapid pace. Seven weeks later, we volunteered ourselves to let a pregnancy clinic train their nurses by performing fetal measurements on my wife through ultrasound.
For an hour, we watched our son, still less than a trimester old, jump, kick, raise his arm, and fidget whenever we pushed on my wife’s stomach. I counted all ten toes and fingers, studied his nose, viewed his heart beat through his skin while my own heart danced. The whole time, I was internally rejoicing and yet I felt as though we had intruded upon a most sacred space: the womb in which God worked His most profound creative act. David said he was fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13-16), but I watched with fear and wonder what he could only see in the mind’s eye. God made a human and then spent nine months giving him a functioning body.
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Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Aug 26th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Book: The Masculine Mandate: God’s Calling to Men
Author: Richard D. Phillips
“That is the Masculine Mandate: to be spiritual men placed in real-world, God-defined relationships, as lords and servants under God, to bear God’s fruit by serving and leading.” p. 9
Many Christian books on manhood will offer descriptions of what real men are supposed to do, but they fail to construct a prescriptive idea of who a man is supposed to be. Readers are given a treatment on rules, regulations, and behaviors without a proper understanding of why these rules, regulations, and behaviors should even exist and how they work together to form a man.
Fortunately, Richard D. Phillips attempts to avoid this mistake by concentrating on the reasons for man and the elements that form him. In this book, Phillips bases his definition of manhood on the first man, Adam, and the initial mandate that God gave to this initially sinless person. His reason for existence is directly linked to the fact that he bears the image of God. Man is, therefore, to rule over the world and cultivate its resources in a way that would demonstrate who God is to this same world.
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New Links For The Making Of Men
by on Aug 31st, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Since taking a break in February, I have added many new web sites to my daily list of online reading. They will be added to our site in smaller bits instead of giving you one great data dump.
These links are being listed not because we agree with everything they write or because they concentrate entirely on the issue of manhood, but because they offer challenging thoughts to important ideas about life and occasionally, they discuss issues related to manhood.
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Meet Lee Caterson
by on Sep 1st, 2010 at 10:45 pm
About four years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Lee Caterson when he came to live as a freshman college student in one of my dorms. Though he was a well-respected person in our community from the beginning, the trials that were about to come upon Lee’s life and college career would cause us to esteem him highly.
I have asked Lee to join the Making of Men writing team for a number of reasons:
First, he is a young Christian man who wants to pursue God-honoring manhood for the rest of his life.
Second, he has refused to join many of his Christian and non-Christian peers in prolonging (or even entering) adolescence.
Third, I want to have peers speaking to one another through this site and Lee is a leader among his peers.
Fourth, I have personally watched Lee live under great stress, the kind that even adults would fear, and he has shown me that his trust in God is real. I have learned from him what confidence in the Lord means in the midst of trials.
Fifth, I believe that Lee needs an opportunity to be stretched and mentored. This ministry of writing will allow him to grow as a communicator to his generation.
Sixth, he actually has something to say.
Seventh, he would be embarrassed at this list, which is an indication of his humility.
So, in the months (and hopefully years) to come, Lee will be offering occasional thoughts about life as a young man in this culture. Hopefully, you will find that you are not alone in trying to pursue manhood. I’m praying that God will grow Lee through this experience and that his words will encourage you. So, let’s meet him!
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Leadership Library Spotlight
by on Sep 2nd, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Book: The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life
Author: A. W. Tozer
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us” p. 1
“Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.” p. 2
One of my favorite authors is A. W. Tozer because he had a gift for clearly and simply explaining hard-to-grasp issues in a way that was memorable and challenging. The more I read biblical and scholarly literature, the more thankful I am for a man who could get down to the heart of a matter, address it, and move on. While scholarship has its important place, this resource is among the finer works to be submitted in the twentieth century, and the message still demands our attention. Dated it is not.
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Watch Football But Don't Worship The Game
by on Sep 14th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
America is still a nation of devout men. Hundreds of thousands still gather every Sunday, especially in the fall and early winter, to worship and celebrate the object of their heart’s affection. They enter brilliantly designed and tremendously expensive cathedrals in many of the country’s major cities, and now the country’s schools allow for the construction of smaller, but still glorious chapels for worship on a smaller or more local scale. We might even argue that America has increased its devotion to gathering for worship. Instead of the old church format of Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night services, we take an entire weekend to complete the process: youth services are held on Friday nights, college groups gather all throughout Saturday, the adults have three services on Sunday, and all of this culminates in a Monday night service. Yes, the football season has arrived.