With every passing generation, men become weaker and more confused. This is not only because of dropping testosterone levels across the board, but also because men have few – if any – strong role models in modern America. More and more young boys are raised by single mothers or in female-dominant homes, and then they go off to public school… where their instruction and discipline is performed almost entirely by women. What’s a young boy to do?
Eventually, in the modern age, he finds his way to the Internet. Faced with an unprecedented plethora of choices, he must wisely navigate the endless sea of public figures who claim to teach “true masculinity.” Nowadays the masculinity sphere has been largely supplanted by the more general “male self-improvement,” which always teaches how to indulge in one’s material temptations more successfully. More money, more cars, more of everything he wants…all while maturing as little as possible. This, they’ll tell you, is what it means to be a man: getting more of what you want while suffering as little as possible.
To those of you more philosophically-inclined, this is simply the reiteration of ancient Epicureanism: a materialist outlook seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Is this truly the epitome of what a man can achieve? I think not.
What good can be found in secular sources can be found in better, fuller, and holier form from Christian sources – and without all the soul-killing baggage.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of instruction for how men ought to look, behave, and conduct themselves in the writings of Holy Scripture. Therefore, I’d like to present you with three aspects of manhood that God considered important enough to place in His Word.
Appearance
You may be thinking to yourself that men ought to have no concern for their appearance. In a certain sense, you’re right; a man should not spend inordinate amounts of time admiring himself in the mirror, seeking out and purchasing the latest trendy and fashionable clothes, or taking hours of each day making sure that he presents himself in such a way to attain validation from others. Some women do too much of that already.
On the other hand, the notion of how a Christian man should look was important enough to be mentioned in both the Old and New Testaments. Starting at the beginning, we read in Deuteronomy 22:5,
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.”
The New Testament, as you might expect, is perfectly aligned with the Old Testament and its sentiments. God is the God described in both Testaments, Who interacts with humanity in each of them and through Whose inspiration both texts were written. Christians are not Marcionites; we do not believe there is any tension or disagreement between the Old and New Testaments.
Therefore, we should not be surprised to discover that Paul reiterates what you read above, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10,
“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, not idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, not drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
God’s Word teaches that an effeminate man is as much an abomination as a fornicator, an idolater, or an adulterer. In practical terms, this means not dressing in such a way as to feminize your appearance or behaving like a woman. No sissy earrings, no eyeliner, no painted nails, no “unisex” clothing, and certainly no “transgenderism.”
Since the same Holy Spirit speaks through both the Bible and the Church, we should expect to find – and do – this same sentiment passed down through the centuries.
In his Exposition on Psalm 133, Augustine of Hippo wrote,
“The beard signifies the courageous; the beard distinguishes the grown men, the earnest, the active, the vigorous. So that when we describe such, we say, he is a bearded man.”
From the time of Moses up until the present day, the community of God has explicitly declared that a man should look like a man. A beard and body hair distinguish you from women and children; this is part of the design that God created us to have. There are other distinguishing characteristics of men, too. A Godly man is both tough and tender, learning when to be which.
Yet there is far more to being a man than just how you look. If you look the part – but act weak or womanly – you are failing just as much. On that note, let’s continue to the next point of Christian masculinity.
Behavior
The way you behave is even more important than the way you look. For a good example of what I mean, consider any mainstream “rap” video; half the time, the men in these videos are wearing a cross. And yet what do they “rap” about? Always the same topics: money, sex, power, drugs, killing, and Luciferian exaltation of the self. Every song is about me, me, me. This is the false image of masculinity exported to the populace by wicked, deceptive agents of Satan who want to separate man from God.
Read any self-help book on the shelves today, and you will discover there a version, whether watered-down or full-fledged, of the Nietzschean will-to-power. The male self-help niche is absolutely saturated with the worship of individuality, the assertion of dominance, and the encouragement to conquer.
The irony of pretending these images are of “powerful men” is that there is nobody weaker, nobody more enslaved, than a man who throws himself into every sinful temptation he feels. I offer Samson as exhibit A. You can have all the money, power, and women you want…the absolute zenith of “male self-help”…yet if you succumb to temptation left-and-right, you remain a slave to your own impulses and will never be truly free.
Now the concepts of individuality and dominance can, and do, have a Christian counterpart. On the topic of individuality, for example, the secular world may tell you that there is nothing more important than you. But in the Christian context, individuality is only truly realized in obedience to, and likeness of, Christ Himself. We are not Buddhists seeking to dissolve our personhood into a great nothingness. We do not seek the destruction of the self the way some esoteric, non-Christian belief systems do. Rather, we seek fullness and transfiguration through recreation. Becoming a man means aligning our person with the ultimate Person, our manhood with that of the ultimate Man. In that context, our individuality is not erased; it is established, it blossoms, and it flourishes. This is achieved specifically by denying ourselves, overcoming our greed and our passions.
Likewise, there is nothing wrong with the idea of dominance – it depends on the meaning.
In the secular sphere, dominance often means never backing down, asserting yourself against and above everyone around you. It is about making yourself bigger by making others smaller, diminishing them to inflate your own sense of superiority. In the Christian sphere, dominance has two specific contexts: rulership of your family and, whether you have a family or not, rulership over your passions. A man who is moved by his emotions is weak; a man who cannot resist temptation is useless. Look at the world around you, at the politicians and media moguls. They are, largely, sin-sick men who succumb to their every desire and, being easily corrupted, are likewise easily owned. The Christian life is a battle with the passions, and in this warfare you must dominate. You must rule. You must conquer. Your love for God must be dominant.
In short, the essence of masculine behavior is self-control. If you do not have the ability to say “no” – whether to others who offer you something you shouldn’t take, or even more importantly, to yourself – then you must get to work developing this ability immediately. You must be able to withstand a sinful impulse and adapt your behavior to that laid out by the Christian path. After all, we read in Revelation 21:8,
“the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
I hope you will heed God’s warning, and do everything in your power to avoid finding yourself in these categories.
One of the many grand paradoxes of Christianity is that your own power and will are utterly incapable of attaining this goal; rather, it is submitting your will to God’s that will bring you the results you’re after. The only power your will has, in these circumstances, is the will to cooperate with God. If you try to brute-force your way into virtue, you will end up the spiritual equivalent of a “dry drunk;” your bad behavior may have improved, but the wounds that led to it will remain unhealed. This is especially difficult for men to accept since our pride wants us to be the victors, wants us to be powerful, wants us to be strong.
In fact, Satan will appeal to your fallen sense of masculinity in order to keep you in his grip: “You got this,” he whispers into the undiscerning ear. “You’re strong enough to handle this yourself.” And yet the truth is precisely the opposite; as quoted in one of my favorite spiritual books,
“The fight that I am to fight is “the good fight of faith,” but the weapons of this warfare are not of the flesh. I do not believe in myself, and therefore I have no confidence in my own power to overcome evil. I hear Him saying to me, “My power is made perfect in weakness,” and so I surrender my whole being to be under His control, allowing Him to work in me “both to will and to work,” and when I act upon the faith that He will do this in the way of victory, He does not disappoint me. By living His life of victory in me, He gives me the victory. This means that I offer my body a living sacrifice; that I must not willfully choose the way of disobedience; and that I will not consent to any known sin. Such a course, which is the life of faith, makes it possible for Him to impart to me the victory that He has won for me” (VICH 18.2).
Such words wound our ego, our pride, our fallen manhood. We cringe at the notion of not being self-reliant; after all, men conquer! Men are strong! Men handle their problems! And we do conquer; we are strong; we do handle our problems – but we do so by submitting ourselves to God to let Him take care of such things with ease, rather than getting lost in the world’s vision of self-esteem.
And yet we are not utterly powerless, as I mentioned above. We have the power to cooperate with God by making wise choices about our behavior. We have the power to feel a temptation and – rather than immediately leap into it – fall to our knees and pray. We can choose to grab our prayer ropes, do our prostrations, say our Jesus Prayers. And these behaviors, so opposite to what the world tells us makes us “strong,” in fact brings us the greatest strength of all: God’s grace and power, against which temptation is nothing.
If you currently have a girlfriend, or a woman you’re dating, I cannot recommend enough that you structure your dates in such a way that the possibility of fornication is cut off from as many angles as possible. This is the kind of leader Christ wants you to be, and it’s the kind of leader to whom a Christian woman will want to submit.
Once you demonstrate, with behavior like this, that submitting to your leadership leads to mutual edification – and not to your selfishly using her as a secular man would attempt to do – she can relax into her obedient role and know that her body and soul are in competent, trustworthy hands. None of this can happen if you, yourself, are still subject to being overthrown by lust…and if you are, exercising this kind of caution and self-restraint will greatly help to free you from those shackles. Every time you overcome a sinful impulse, God will reward you with grace and dispassion.
So what is the key to proper Christian conduct? Obedience to God, to the best of your ability, coupled with sincere repentance if and when you fall short. But there’s more to obedience than what the average Westerner might imagine.
Obedience
To be a man is to believe in order, both within and without. Order in our internal worlds, submitting what is low to what is high within us. Order in our external worlds, submitting ourselves to the authority of God above. Genuine Christians submit on many levels: to God, to the Church, and to each other. By ordering our external behavior in such a way, it cultivates humility – the ultimate weapon of spiritual warfare – and brings our fractured souls into alignment.
Without Christ and His Church, our souls are fragmented. We become compartmentalized, fractured beings with our inner powers in a state of disharmony. This is, as mentioned above, exacerbated at every opportunity by those who seek power and control over us. But by cultivating the virtue of obedience, we bring our dissonant selves into harmony and become whole, complete human beings. But in our world nothing is more difficult – and nothing is more anathema to the secular conception of masculinity – than the notion and practice of obedience.
Most Christian men understand the idea of obedience to God. Depending on what group you belong to, that can manifest itself in different ways; many Protestant men will take the idea to mean reading the Scriptures and doing their best to follow its commands and exhortations. That is certainly a step in the right direction, and will bring much more grace than simply trying to “go your own way” as many modern men do.
Christians do our best to obey the Scriptures, through the Holy Spirit. A good spiritual elder will do his best to teach what is found in the Scriptures. A wise man once said that “There is a wall between us and God, and that wall is called ‘I.’” And the more I have learned to humble myself and obey, the more correct I realize he was.
Our deepest disease is pride. It is the mother of all sins, as humility is the mother of all virtues. And nothing breaks down the prideful self-will as obedience. It is difficult, it will irritate you, and in the end it will prove to be one of the greatest mirrors for your own remaining sin as you attempt to grow in obedience and find such an ocean of resistance within. And yet, if you wish to stand on the Sea of Glass one day, you must first learn to follow Christ. No man can lead until he first learns to follow.
The Lord Jesus Christ Himself, already told us this over 2,000 years ago: “The last shall be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). When we puff ourselves up to an unwarranted position of superiority, we end up harming our spirit in the long run.
If what you find in a Bible passage disagrees with your own conception of Christianity, have the wisdom and humility to recognize that God understands Christianity better than you do. If you submit to the Word of God and obey it, you will find healing in your soul that you never imagined possible.
May God bless, guide, and keep you.
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