Prayer Partners

James 5:16

Mathew 18:20

Most men act as lone wolves when it comes to spiritual leadership.

James 5 shows us the importance of having others in our lives and the power of praying together. Outside of praying with their spouse, a leader will seek out other men to pray with regularly. This is a practice that most men are uncomfortable with and quite frankly, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Having a prayer partner could be a simple phone call each week, connecting after a workout, or staying a few minutes after a church service together. The key is to find a man that cares about you as a person and have the courage to ask them to pray with you each week.

Full disclosure - It may be awkward at first, but like everything else in life, it gets easier. This is something you must commit to doing weekly. Hold each other accountable and if you miss more than 2 weeks in a row, draw a line in the sand and say this is not going to keep happening. Truly listen to what your prayer partner has on their mind and if you need to write it down, take notes! You will find this time uplifting and strengthening as you share your burdens together.

You will also find comfort in knowing that a fellow brother in Christ knows your specific details that are impacting your life as seasons come and go. Finally, commit to praying for your partner outside of your set prayer time together. Lift them up daily and fully rely on God to lead you both through this amazing journey together.

Question to Consider

What would be the hardest part in finding a prayer partner?

Who could be a prayer partner that you want to approach this week?

What actions will you commit to today to be the leader God intends you to be?

Family Bible Study

Deut.11:18-19

For many Christian men, there is nothing more intimidating than leading a family Bible study.

For that reason alone, many families miss out on the opportunity to grow in their faith together. Why are so many men afraid to do this? Spiritual insecurity and not feeling they know enough about the Bible are the most common causes.

Deuteronomy 11:19 instructs parents to teach their children God’s Word, and it doesn’t say you have to be biblical theologians to do so. Remember this – God doesn’t call the qualified; He qualifies the called. You are called to lead your family spiritually and whatever Bible knowledge you have RIGHT NOW is enough to start sharing with your family. Being intentional about leading your family through a Bible study every week demonstrates that you are taking being a spiritual leader seriously. It will also encourage them to stay in the Word more.

If you do not know where to start, begin with the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Slowly work through each of them and see what stands out to your family as you read. Take a few minutes before you lead the study to formulate 1-2 questions that you want to talk about as you do the study.

As you grow in your walk, you can add more elements to the study, but to get started stick with the basics.

There are resources available that will help with this process. Devotions and bible study resources that are vetted from trusted sources are great items to utilize. Remember to keep it simple to start with. Read through a book of the Bible one passage at a time and see what the Holy Spirit can do with this sacred time as a family. Lean into this practice and trust that you can do this!

Question to Consider

Would your family find you guilty of being a Christian?

How can we get uncomfortable and rely on Christ more as we lead our families in studying His Word?

What actions will you commit to today to be the leader God intends you to be?

Prayer

Mathew 6:5-15

Prayer is our direct line to God.

Matthew 6 lays out the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus taught that as a model of how to commune with our Father. Store it in your heart. Repeat it daily. Say it out loud.

As you think about your prayer life, start examining when you are most likely to pray. For many men, it is when they have done all they can do, and they find themselves against the wall or unable to figure something out. Prayer often feels like a last resort from a sort of, “Well, there is nothing left to do but pray,” attitude. This is not how you should view prayer. Talking with God daily is how we grow in our faith.

God wants to be involved in every part of your life and you should take the time to let Him in. He is not a 9-1-1 dispatcher or phone-a-friend option on a game show. He is your Father, and He wants to talk to His child regularly. Open the door for God each day and you will begin to see your life change for the better.

Question to Consider

How do you make time to pray every day?

How could utilizing the Lord’s Prayer improve your prayer life?

What actions will you commit to today to be the leader God intends you to be?

Daily Habits

Mark 1:35

Eph 6:17

1 Tess.5:17

Creating solid daily habits to grow as a spiritual leader is important.

Scripture gives many examples, like we see in Mark 1:35 of Jesus isolating himself for prayer. We all have different schedules and routines. There is no one right path. However, there are good habits.

Whenever your day starts, one of the first items that should come to mind is praise. Simply thank God for another day to lead your family. Every day is a gift and an opportunity to make a significant impact on the kingdom.

Another daily habit should be to spend time in God’s Word. Dedicating 5-10 minutes to God to read His Word each day should not feel like a sacrifice. This is when you learn to use the “Sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17), the Christian soldier’s most trusted weapon. As a warrior prepares for a physical battle; you must be intentional about consuming His Word to always be ready for the day’s spiritual battles that are guaranteed to come.

A final habit that should be incorporated is prayer. Being consistent about talking with God is something every leader recognizes as vital. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says to pray without ceasing. God wants to always communicate with you. Unfortunately, many men are too proud or “busy” to give God the time He deserves. Creating the habits of praise, Scripture reading, and prayer will set you up to grow as the strong spiritual leader your family desperately needs you to be.

Questions to Consider

How much time do you spend in God’s Word each day?

How could you increase it tomorrow?

What does pray without ceasing mean to you?

What actions will you commit to today to be the leader God intends you to be?

Humbleness

Col.3:12

James 4:10

The most important aspect of being humble isn’t that we feel a certain set of emotions. The most important matter is that we humble ourselves—do deeds of humility—as a lifestyle, trusting that genuine humility will come from the “outside in” as the Holy Spirit honors our obedience.

So this is what striving for humility looks like in my life. I defer to other men. I submit to my elders. I try not to praise myself to others. I fail. I repent. I confess. I fast, in part, to live fully aware of my own weakness. I open my heart to rebuke when friends and leaders see something amiss in my life. I also submit to my wife, not only because the apostle Paul urged mutual submission of husbands and wives in his letter to the Ephesians, but also because I recognize her superior gifts. I try to see myself as small in my own eyes. I give up certain rights. All these things I do in pursuit of humility no matter how I feel at the time. Frankly, I do not often “feel humble.” I have, though, been making progress in humility by humbling myself—that is, doing deeds of humility.

This approach gets closer to the heart of a man. He is made to do first. Feelings come later—if at all. And thank God for it. Where would we be if the men who have shaped our world waited to feel before they acted?

Certainly, a man who is whole is able to feel and he should hope to have a rich emotional life. Yet a man who is whole also does not regard feelings as a mandate for action. He acts as a mandate for feeling.

Challenge: Take note of the areas of your life in which you’ve been trying to perfect virtue by managing your emotions rather than by acting, by doing something that needs to be done. How has this hindered you? What actions can you take to begin doing humility that you hadn’t thought of before?

Sacrifice

1 Cor.13:1-3

Eph.5:25

Phil.2;3-4

We have come far enough in this exploration of manhood for you to form one of the most important conclusions about your life as a man. You are called to sacrifice. There just isn’t a way to say it any more clearly. Genuine manhood, manly manhood, true manhood—is sacrifice. To do manly things, tend your field, make manly men, and live to the glory of God—in other words, to fulfill all the Manly Maxims—you have to sacrifice.

Sacrifice what? Everything. Anything. Not your integrity or morality or commitments to God, but certainly your comforts, your rights, your time, your money, your attention, and your energy. You have to sacrifice the priority of yourself...

We will likely never be asked to have ourselves imprisoned. Most of us will never join a guerrilla movement during a war. We may never be asked to risk our lives.

Simply through the mandate of being men, though, we are asked to surrender our rights and comforts for a higher cause—the responsibility for all we are given as men. Our rights come after the requirements of God, of course, but they also come after whatever is required to serve our wives, to invest in the lives of our children, to stand for righteousness in our communities, or to tend anything else that is within the field assigned to us.

Being a man is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is a surrender of our priority. It is a laying down of our lives, not physically but inwardly—our preferences, our pleasures, sometimes even our dreams...

This is what it means to be a man.

Challenge: Drill more deeply into the example of Jesus and his surrender of his life, not just through his death but also in his surrender of privilege and rank. What examples are there for you in this? How can this example empower you to the sacrifices you are called to make?

A work in progress

Jer.29:11-14

John 16:33

2 Cor.12:9

Gentlemen, let me free you from a burden, the burden of the history you think you know.

We have all been done a great disservice. We have been taught what I call the statue version of history. By this I mean that we have been taught a version of history that presents the heroes of the past as moral giants who fell flawless from the womb, who achieved fame almost effortlessly. It hasn’t served us well.

No one meant to do damage. Our history teachers probably thought they were simply honoring the great men and women of our past. Yet most of them gave us statues rather than human beings, unscarred giants who achieved and conquered as though there was never any question of their destiny.

It isn’t so. Hear me. It is a lie.

The great heroes of the past you’ve grown to admire were all pitiful human beings whom we remember only because they declared war on some part of their pitifulness. If we don’t know this, we are left to believe that some people are destined to be great but most of us aren’t, and those of us who aren’t should just settle down to our duties and shelve whatever dreams make our hearts race.

I’ll say it again. It’s a lie.

God sets destinies in heaven, but those destinies have to be hammered out on earth one arduous minute at a time. We strain. We bleed. We grieve. We have to conquer each step. No one gets a pass. No one moves to the head of the line, even if he gets a statue. Everyone is flawed...

Manly men know themselves, work to understand their God-ordained uniqueness and their unique brand of damage, and accept they will always be a work in progress, always be a one-man construction project that is never quite finished in this life. They don’t despair. They don’t settle. They don’t expect perfection of themselves. They understand that destiny is in the hand of God. They also understand that these destinies are fashioned in a man’s struggle against the enemies of his soul.

Challenge: In counsel with friends and pastors, make an action plan. Declare war on your weaknesses and the imperfections in your life. Most of us have too many defects to attack all at one time, but by identifying the ones that most undermine your progress toward being a genuine man, you will have established the target of your battle plan.

Forgiveness

Eph.4;31-34

Col.3:13

Mathew 6:14-15

Men hold on to the wrongs done them, rehearse those wrongs, make excuses for failure out of  those wrongs, and frequently poison their lives with the bitterness they keep circulating through their hearts and minds. It makes them small, blaming, angry souls rather than the large-hearted beings they are called to be. It damages everything they do and makes them wound those they are supposed to protect—wives, sons, daughters, and friends.

The keys to forgiveness are simple but costly, given our pride and self-pity. Someone wrongs us. It hurts. We work against our lesser nature and try to find the hook of compassion. John didn’t hurt me because he hates me; he’s feeling threatened. Or Jenny lashed out but I should remember her background. Or those kids stole from me, but crime is all they know, all they’ve seen in the culture around them.

There are other reasons to forgive. We should cling to any of them that move us to do the right thing. It helps to remember we are sinners and have done a fair amount of damage ourselves. Frankly, it should scare us that God himself will not forgive those who do not forgive others. There is also the negative example of those who have made bitterness their life’s work. Are they what we want to be? Small, angry, at war with life, at war with God, anchored to the past, and apart from the Holy Spirit?

No.

So we forgive. We send away the wrongs done to us. We let people out of the little cages we keep them in while we enjoy our feelings of moral superiority. We hand the feelings of wrong to God and refuse to ever take them back. Then we shut up and never mention the matter again. When the time comes, we put our arm around the offender and we ask him how he is. Usually a hearty meal together helps the process along, particularly if the offender is a he.

This is what it means to be clean of soul, to be a Christian, and to be a man. Anything less and it is the same as setting our manly hopes on fire and living with the ashes.

Challenge: Make a list of those you have not forgiven. Be brutally honest. Ask those close enough to you to know where there is unforgiveness. Then get busy. Forgiveness is not a process of managing emotions. It is an act. You forgive.

Tend to your field

*Tend to your field!!* 

Prov.18:15

Prov.19:2

Prov.24:5

Rom.12:2

This is a good moment to remember one of Mansfield’s Manly Maxims: “Manly men tend their fields.” It means that we take care of the lives and property entrusted to us. It means that we take responsibility for everything in the “field assigned to us.”

We cannot do this without knowledge. We cannot do it if we are ignorant of our times, blind to the trends shaping our lives, and oblivious to the basic knowledge that allows us to do what we are called to do as men. We must know enough about law, health, science, economics, politics, and technology to fulfill our roles. We should also know enough about our faith to stand our ground in a secular age, resist heresies, and teach our families. We also shouldn’t be without the benefits of literature and poetry, of good novels and stirring stories, all of which make us more relevant and more effective.

We need all of this, and no one is going to force it upon us. Nor will we acquire what we need from a degree program or a study group alone, as valuable as these can be. The truth is that men who aspire to be genuine men and serve well have no choice: they must devote themselves to an aggressive program of self-education. They have to read books, stay current with websites and periodicals, consult experts, and put themselves in a position to know.

It isn’t as hard as it sounds, particularly in our Internet age. Much of what a man needs to know can land in his iPad while he is sleeping, but he has to know enough to value this power in the first place.

Challenge: Take inventory of your life and determine areas of knowledge in which you are weak. Identify teachers, websites, books, video series—anything that will help you learn. Don’t be too proud to use books like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Accounting. Series like these are wonderfully helpful. Get the knowledge you need. Don’t be ashamed.

Sense of Huour

Job.8:21

Ps.126:2

Prov.17;22

Laughing, joking, teasing, and storytelling are some of the best experiences in life. They enrich our days, bind us to others, teach us, and make life sweet and endurable. They are gifts from God and fruits of humility and wonder, since they are only possible when we see the flaws of the world but content ourselves with the knowledge that even flaws have purpose in the plan of God. We can relax then and laugh, crack the joke, or tell the funny story because we know our seriousness changes nothing. God rules, and we are free to delight in this fact and use humor to endure the way things are while we await the perfection that is coming.

Genuine men understand the power and meaning of humor. Some have greater gifts for joking and storytelling than others, but all can at least understand why humor is important, what it does for the soul of the fearful and hurting, and why it is so essential to what a man is made to do. Humor allows us to lighten the heart, encourage our children when they fail, ease stress from our wives, motivate younger men, and unify friends. Humor also allows us to drain the terror from our souls before battle.

It can also be a tool for seizing the moment for a greater good.

Challenge: Take stock of your own sense of humor for a moment. Have you put this valuable gift in the service of anger, bitterness, and hate? Do you use humor only to wound and control? If so, clean it up. Repent before God, apologize to those you’ve damaged, and begin putting your gift for humor in the service of nobler ends.

Are you a Turkey?

Job.12-7-10

Ps.1611

If you are a hunter, you may already know why some of our founding fathers wanted the national symbol to be the turkey rather than the eagle. As beautiful as they are, eagles are scavengers. The founding fathers were men still taming a wilderness, and they knew this. They weren’t easily impressed, but they were impressed with the turkey. If you have ever hunted turkeys, you were probably impressed too.

They are unbelievably fast creatures, capable of running twenty-five miles per hour and flying at speeds up to fifty-five miles per hour. They are also smart and constantly on the alert. Hunters like to say a deer thinks every hunter is a tree stump but a turkey thinks every tree stump is a hunter. They can be hard to find, harder to kill, and then, just to be ornery, turkeys make themselves hard to clean after they’re dead. There are as many as fifty-five hundred feathers on an adult turkey.

This is the wild turkey, though. The domesticated turkey is another story. They are idiots, perhaps the dumbest animals alive. Domesticated turkeys will eat themselves to death unless someone stops them. If thunder frightens them, they will often bunch up in one corner of their pen and suffocate each other.

Interesting, isn’t it? In the wild, turkeys are amazing. When domesticated, turkeys are so stupid they have to be kept from accidentally killing themselves a dozen different ways.

Gentlemen, let’s admit it: most of us are tragically over-domesticated. We have hardly any connection to the wild or our wilder selves. Words like adventure, exploit, and quest no longer apply to us. It is why we are soft, whiney, and bored...

Men need to bark at the moon. Men need to blow something up. Men need to push themselves into a zone they don’t control—that in fact isn’t actually a zone.

Men need to go in pursuit. They need a quest.

Challenge: Remember the last time your heart raced, you sweated like a pig, you thought you might die, you conquered something, and you bored your band of brothers to death by describing it over and over again? Go do something like it again. Just don’t get arrested.

6 Sep 2023

Judges 2:10

Ps.78:2-4

Prov.13:22

2 Cor.6:18

For centuries, men spoke of death as being “gathered to their fathers.” This created a sense of accountability to those who had come before them. Sons would think of themselves as carrying on the purposes of their fathers while also believing they would answer to their fathers at death. They didn’t take this as bondage or an oppressive set of demands from the dead. Instead, they lived more gallant and useful lives inspired by the hopes that rested upon them.

For most men today, there is sadness in knowing this. I’ve felt it many times. Our broken families, generation gaps, and absentee or unengaged fathers leave men longing for blessing and connection to the past but seldom knowing where to find it. We feel like generational orphans, like men without the fathers who might have laid one hand on us and another upon the past. We hunger for affirmation, impartation, and purpose. We want the blessing.

We should not despair. There is a God, and he can be a father to the fatherless. He can lead us into fields of honor while assuring the preparation, blessing, and ennobling purpose that others have had. The price may be, though—as with so much else that men of our generation lack—that God may meet us only after we have gone in pursuit.

We should not hesitate to go after this connection to heritage and find it where we can. I have friends who never knew their fathers yet who knelt before elderly veterans to ask their blessing. My friends later said they simply wanted someone who had lived a noble life to ask that God’s grace might be upon them. I know other men who studied their family and ethnic history and crafted their own liturgies in which they asked God together to grant them the spirit of their righteous ancestors. I have one friend who searched for years to find even a distant male relative who might bless him and stand with him in asking God to restore their lost family purpose. All these men were dramatically changed once they stopped lamenting what they did not have and went in pursuit of the best they could have.

We should not think of ourselves as men without heritage or belonging. We have fathers—of faith, of our national life, in our ethnic heritage, and even among extended family. We should work to restore the links to an elevating past wherever we can find them.

Challenge: Who is in a position to bless you? Your father, your tribal leader, the older males in your family, your spiritual mentors, or perhaps other relatives—all are possibilities. Keep in mind that mothers and other women in your life are candidates as well.

The friendless man

Prov.18:24

Eccl.4:9-10

There is a plague of loneliness among men. In truth, the phrase that comes to mind is this: the friendless man.

But friends are the best reflection of a man’s happiness, priorities, and health.

Most men have simply lost touch with the men who mean the most to them. They find themselves awash in a sea of casual relationships. They do work with other men, and they can usually scare up a group of guys to go yell and scream at the sports bar. Yet when asked who they would turn to if they were about to have an affair or if their marriage was coming apart or if they were out of town and needed someone to get their son out of jail, most are at a loss to come up with a name...

What most of us do not have is a band of brothers, a tribe, a posse, a group of guys who know us and are fun to be with but who have no problem challenging us if we need it.

Men, we cannot ascend to our best selves or our God-given purposes if we walk alone or if all we have in common with other men is entertainment or pleasure. Men need friends with whom they share a common spirit, a mutual devotion to each other’s best, and a sacrificial commitment to protect, encourage, and defend.

Hear me well, gentlemen: we will never become the men we are called to be unless we learn the art of friendship and intentionally cultivate deep, meaningful, rowdy relationships with other men.

This is one of the most important things for a man to know.

Challenge: Take stock of your friendships. Are they shallow, temporary, and unfulfilling? Or do they inspire you and make you yearn to be a great man, a manly man?

Mmanly men build manly men

Prov.27:17

1 Peter 5;5

An African bishop described the wonderful things his churches were doing in a difficult part of his country. Hundreds of us listened to him, and we were deeply moved. After he spoke, the bishop took questions. Someone asked what a great many of us wanted to know: Why aren’t things like you describe happening here in our country?

The man wasn’t a diplomat. I liked that about him, and I liked it more after he answered this question. He said, “Here is the reason you do not have such things happening in this country. You Americans study your God. We Africans worship ours. You get smarter. We get changed. And then we change the world around us.”

His next words never left me. “By doing rather than merely studying, we create a culture. Newcomers and the young feed on that culture. They watch. They do. They, too, are changed. Our culture expands. You Americans create a system of thought. The most you ask is that people contemplate new ideas. You might ask them to give or to sometimes attend meetings, but no contagious culture is created. Nothing is offered to newcomers and the young but thoughts. So they think. They don’t do.”

We are changed. We craft a contagious culture. People feed on this culture and change the world.

It is exactly the same with the making of men. We can inspire and teach men with study—with words, books, and classes. We can only make men, though, in the contagious culture created by other genuine men.

The good news is this happens naturally. Put a young, unformed man in the presence of older men, and the process automatically begins. It is simply the outworking of the way men are made. The young man watches. He listens. He ponders. Soon, he becomes what he beholds. He starts patterning himself, almost without intending to, after these impressive older men. This can happen without the older men intentionally teaching a lesson or addressing the younger man directly. It is a result of the contagious power of genuine manhood and the way men intuitively absorb the manly culture around them...

Challenge:

Who are the young men watching you and what kind of example will you be for them?