Men, we have a perception problem. Many people have come to think of all of us as somewhat lazy, obsessed with superficiality, unintelligent, self-centered, uncaring, and, in many ways, more trouble than we’re worth. It’s kind of like the little girl who asked her mother: "Mommy, if Santa Claus brings our presents, and God gives us our daily bread, and Uncle Sam gives us Social Security, why do we keep daddy around?"

This perception of men has caused us to surrender our spiritual leadership roles. We’ve come to think of religion and church as areas where women lead when the Bible clearly says that leadership is our responsibility and our burden to bear. And although we’re not innocent of many of these charges, to be blamed for all of them has seemingly allowed some men to adopt much of this bad behavior that we’re accused of. The reasoning appears to be that since we’re getting blamed for it anyway, we might as well do it. Additionally, this perception of men as basically flawed has allowed people to think of our boys as abnormal if they act like boys traditionally act, and not just as male versions of little girls.

Now, we men are not going whine about it this: "Look, there’s an unfair stereotype of men on the TV — call the FCC! I’m going to sue!" Being men, one of things that we absolutely cannot stomach is being thought of as whiners. And very few of us are going to be mean to the women in our lives as a way of reacting to this stereotype. Most of us instinctively know and obey Peter’s admonition in Scripture to "be considerate" as we live with our wives because they are the physically weaker partner, as a general rule. We’re not going to hold protests or march in the streets. And, we’re going to continue to watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" and all those other shows because we can laugh at ourselves.

However, we do need to work at regaining a biblical view of manhood and strive to make our lives conform to what the Bible says it means to be a good father, husband, provider and servant of God. That, of course, is a lifetime job and can seem almost overwhelming; but let me just point us in the right direction in three basic areas and hopefully we’ll all be reminded of what God wants us men to be. Now, you women, I’m not going to ignore you. In fact, you can be thinking about the men in your lives — your husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, etc. — and the ways that you can encourage them in this and help them to not fit into those negative stereotypes of men that are so prevalent in our culture, but to truly become the men God would have them be.

As I said, the Bible lays the burden of leadership in spiritual matters to men, generally speaking. In Ephesians 5, Paul makes it clear that the husband is the "head" of the family; but he’s supposed to emulate Jesus in this and Jesus gave Himself up for His bride. In the church, we’re instructed to follow the elders, or shepherds, and they are to be spiritually mature men. Now, there are exceptions in the Bible and no one is saying that women don’t have what it takes, but the Bible makes it pretty clear that in the family, in the church, men are supposed to be the spiritual foundation, the bedrock and to lead by example. Most women, in my experience, don’t have a problem following their husband’s lead in spiritual matters — they have a problem when he won’t step up to the plate and do what God has commanded of him.

There is a great passage in the Old Testament, in the book of Joshua, that tells of what happened immediately after the Israelites conquered the majority of the Promised Land. You’ll probably recall that several of the tribes were allotted land on the eastern side of the Jordan River, but they crossed over and helped the other tribes drive out the people who lived on their allotted land west of the Jordan. Joshua, the leader of the people of Israel at the time, belonged to a tribe that lived on the eastern side, so after the job of subduing the land was done, he was going to head home to his tribe’s land on the eastern side of the Jordan. So, he assembled the tribes and gave them a farewell speech. Then he finished his talk with this rousing challenge …

We often think of leadership as having do primarily with knowledge. A man will say, "I can’t be leader because I don’t have enough Bible knowledge." Well, that’s important, but more often than not, leadership has less to do with knowledge than it does with being able to stand up and say, regardless of how well its going be received, "You all can do what want, but as for me and my family, we’re going do what God says is right — whether the rest of the world likes it or not."

The essence of leadership is character and the essence of character is the courage to do the right thing whether or not others understand, agree, or follow. And sometimes leadership means you do what you know is right even when you would rather not do it. But, you’ve made a commitment to strive to be a godly man; so you buck up, you don’t whine and you do what you know God wants you to do.

The other day, I read an article about David Robinson, who played basketball with the San Antonio Spurs. Robinson retired last year after a 14-year career that included two NBA championships, an MVP season, a Rookie of the Year Award, a scoring title, two Olympic gold medals, and ten All-Star selections. He still believes basketball is a team sport that is played best by people willing to work together for extraordinary outcomes. His coach, Gregg Popovich, points to his unselfishness in welcoming and mentoring his own superstar replacement. Since Tim Duncan was drafted in 1997, "The Admiral" has been moved out of the spotlight for the sake of Duncan's role with the team.

In a Sports Illustrated article a few years back, Robinson explained how his faith helped him handle his role without resentment or demanding to be traded:

"I can’t overstate how important my faith has been to me as an athlete and as a person. It’s helped me deal with so many things, including matters of ego and pride. For instance, I can’t deny that it felt weird to see Tim standing on the podium with the Finals MVP trophy. I was thinking, Man, never have I come to the end of a tournament and not been the one holding up that trophy. It was hard.

"But I thought about the Bible story of David and Goliath. David helped King Saul win a battle, but the king wasn’t happy because he had killed thousands of men while David had killed tens of thousands. So King Saul couldn’t enjoy the victory because he was thinking about David’s getting more credit than he was.

"I’m blessed that God has given me the ability to just enjoy the victory. So Tim has killed the tens of thousands. That’s great. I’m happy for him."

You know what? David Robinson is a spiritual leader. When all of his peers seem these days to be more concerned with their fame and fortune than they are about their team winning games, he’s a person who stands up for principle — in this case, the principle is that it’s the team, not the individual player, who is most important. That takes guts, godliness and leadership. "As for me & my family, we’re going do what’s right and we don’t care what anyone else thinks." God wants us men to step up and be spiritual leaders.

My wife has a pen pal friend who lives in Alabama. Recently, she and her husband, who have two children together, got divorced. This is a very sad thing, of course, but there are some things that are worse. In her last e-mail she mentioned that her ex-husband pays his child support faithfully (which is something, at least), but he makes up all sorts of excuses to not see his daughters. When she asked if he wanted to spend time with them on Father’s Day, he declined.

Non-involvement and the failure to discipline, teach, and set an example for a child will cause enormous emotional and psychological damage. When a parent doesn’t say and show and teach a child the difference between right and wrong, then it seems that very often some basic understanding of these issues goes unlearned. This seems to be especially true of the father-son relationship.

In the Bible, David is called a "man after God’s own heart." That is an amazing compliment, but we should not take it to mean he was anywhere near perfect. David had several wives and many, many children. One time, one of David’s sons, Amnon, became infatuated with his half-sister, Tamar, a daughter of David’s by another wife. In his infatuation, he did what to us would seem unthinkable and lured her into his bedroom and there he raped her.

When David found out, what do you suppose he did? All that Scripture says is that, "When King David heard of all this, he was furious." No justice, no punishment, apparently not even any admonition. Maybe he figured it was better to ignore the whole sordid affair and pretend it never happened. Bad move. Two years later, Tamar’s full brother, Absalom, killed Amnon in revenge for raping his sister. So David had one son murder another and that led to open rebellion against the king by his son.

I think that story shows us some of the insanity of polygamy. You know how crazy your house can be at times; would you like to add another spouse or two into the mix along with all those extra children? That’s crazy talk. But, the real lesson to be learned is that David’s failure to parent, to act as a father and king should, led to bloodshed within his own family.

I don’t hold myself up as the best example of an involved father — some of you other men here probably do or did a better job than me — but if we don’t take seriously our children’s need for us to be involved in their lives, then we’re robbing them of their futures, in some cases.

In The Effective Father, Gordon MacDonald wrote: "It is said of Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, that he often referred to a special day in his childhood when his father took him fishing. The day was fixed in his mind, and he often reflected upon many things his father had taught him in the course of their fishing experience together. After having heard of that particular excursion so often, it occurred to someone much later to check the journal that Boswell’s father kept and determine what had been said about the fishing trip from the parental perspective. Turning to that date, the reader found only one sentence entered: ‘Gone fishing today with my son; a day wasted.’"

The truth of that story is sometimes difficult for us fathers to get a grip on — it is that some of the things we think of as trivial are incredibly important to our children. And we fathers can be the absolute best providers for our children — we can give them every advantage that money can provide — but if we then view our time with them and our involvement in their lives as wasted time and energy, we’re not being the men God would have us be.

This is really a whole other sermon and we’ve talked about it before, so I won’t spend much time on it; but I do want to look at one passage of Scripture that addresses the marital relationship. In 1 Peter, chapter 3, Peter writes in the first 7 verses …

This is one of those passages that is often misunderstood and quite frequently taken out of context. Most men like to read verses 1–6 in the presence of their wives, but stop there. However, to get the full truth, we need to read all seven verses together. Peter’s instructing women to make sure that they concentrate on the things that are truly important and not merely worry about their looks. He says their primary concern should be being beautiful on the inside. We’ve all known people who looked good on the outside, but once you got to know them, you quickly realized that inside they were less than attractive.

Peter also tells wives to be respectful and submissive to their husbands. Some women back then were apparently taking advantage of their new-found freedom in Christ and so were bringing shame upon the name of Jesus by their actions. But notice that neither here nor anywhere else in the Bible is a man instructed to make his wife submit to him. The wife is always told to be respectful and submissive (which is not necessarily the same thing as being completely obedient) but men are never told to worry about their wives’ obedience.

No, men, our job in marriage is really more difficult than the woman’s job. We’re to be worthy of their respect and submission. Here, Peter says be considerate of your wives, treat them with respect, remember who they are. Paul, in Ephesians 5:28 says, "… husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself."

We men sometimes want to talk about our wives "submitting," but the truth is that the greater burden — that of being worthy of being submitted to — is placed upon us. Whenever I hear of a couple where the man is worried and bothered about his wife’s seeming lack of submission to him, I can tell you that this couple has some basic misunderstanding of how God wants things to work in marriage. One commentator said, "…focusing on submission is almost surely an indicator that one’s priorities are messed up." You say your wife’s needs to submit to you, I’m going ask you: Are you working hard at being worthy of her trust, her submission, her love? The truth is that most of Christian women I know are more than happy to submit to their husbands when the men are being the devoted husbands that God wants them to be.

Men, the answer to the problem of men being made fun of and being the butt of jokes and negative stereotypes is not, as I said, to whine about it, nor to protest it in court or in the streets. The answer, the solution, the remedy is to be the kind of men God would have us be so that when someone makes a derogatory comment about men in general, our wives will pipe up and say, "My husband doesn’t do that! He’s not lazy, self-centered, or a pig. He’s a good man, so watch what you’re saying."

When someone speaks about how parents always mess up their children’s lives, wouldn’t it be great if our children would stick up for us and say, "My dad wasn’t perfect, but he tried hard to be a good father to me and a good husband to my mom. When he made a mistake, he owned up to it and moved on. Your dad may have ruined your life, but I’m grateful for mine!"

And again, wouldn’t it be great if, when someone is lamenting that no one seems to want to stand for anything these days, someone says of you, "I know many people are like that, but I know one fellow who’s not afraid to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. He stands for God’s truth and while he’s not perfect, he obviously cares what God thinks."

I hope that we’ll all be challenged to be the kind of men whose faith, words and actions are our own defense.

Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

 

The author of this sermon, Derek Helt,  may be reached at: derek-nfcc@charter.net

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