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.
Read More
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).
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.