a word before we begin

You may know me by a certain voice from my other work, My Friend, and in a moment I am going to change it, so I want you to know why. This booklet is written for men. Not about men, from a safe distance, and not at men, the way most of the culture talks to them now. For men. So beginning in the next paragraph the tone is going to shift, plainer and harder and more direct than my usual writing, and it will stay that way, because that is how this needs to be said and because a man is owed straight talk and not a long warm-up.

And yes, you have already noticed it, so let me deal with it once and then never belabor it again. A woman wrote this. I know how that looks, and I know the question it raises before you have read a single line: what could she possibly have to tell me about being a man? Here is my answer, plainly. I am not going to pretend to be one of you. That would be a lie, and you would smell it in a paragraph, and you would be right to. I am a woman writing to men, and I will not insult you by playing dress-up or talking like I am in the locker room. But I have spent years studying this, and studying under very wise men, many of whom are already home with the Lord. I learned at the feet of men, the way women have always learned from godly men. And that cuts both ways. It is no stranger for a man to learn a true thing from a woman than for me to have learned nearly everything I know from men. The Scripture does reserve one thing for men, the office of pastor and elder, the governing teaching authority in the church, and I affirm that without a flinch and would not touch it. But that single reservation does not mean a man cannot hear a true word from a woman who has done her homework. Learning runs both directions. So take what is here on its merits, the way a sensible man takes truth wherever he finds it.1

Now here is what this is for, and I will say it as plainly as I can. The world has spent a generation telling men that the very thing they are is a problem, that masculinity is toxic, that a man is something to be managed, medicated, apologized for, or sanded down. The church has too often done its own quieter version, trading the man God made for a harmless fellow who shows up and does not make trouble. I am here to tell you the thing both of them have stopped saying: it is good to be a man. God made the man on purpose, and He was not embarrassed about it. And there is a real definition of what that means, not the world’s caricature and not the church’s tame imitation, a true one, sitting in the Word of God, and we are going to go and find it. No hand-holding. No seven easy steps. The Word of God and the truth about what you actually are. Take it or leave it, but I am going to give it to you straight.

chapter one

the junk pictures

Every man is walking around with a picture in his head of what a man is supposed to be. You did not sit down and choose it. You absorbed it, from your father, or from the hole where your father should have been; from the movies and the screens; from the locker room; from the men you admired and the men you swore you would never become. It got into you young, and it has been running quietly in the background ever since, grading you against itself every single day. And most of those pictures are junk. Let us drag a few of them out and look at them in the light, because you cannot throw out what you will not name.

There is the lone wolf, the man who needs no one, asks for nothing, answers to nobody. It sounds strong, and it is a lie. God Himself said it was not good for the man to be alone, and He said it before sin ever entered the world, when everything else in creation had just been pronounced good. A man was never built to be an island, and the one who prides himself on needing nobody is not strong. He is isolated, and calling it strength.

There is the stoic, the man who feels nothing, or at least shows nothing, because real men supposedly do not. That one is not even true to history, let alone to Scripture. David was the mightiest warrior in Israel, and he wept, and he danced, and he wrote the rawest poems of grief and longing in the entire Bible. The flat, feelingless man is a modern costume, not the genuine article, and a great many men are suffocating quietly inside it.

There is the wallet with legs, the man told his entire worth is the money he brings home, so that if the income goes, the man goes with it. There is the culture’s favorite, the toxic male, guilty until proven harmless, taught from boyhood that the thing he is made of is poison. And then there is the church’s contribution, which is gentler and almost sadder: the tamed man, the nice fellow who shows up, does not cuss, stacks the chairs, and never does anything so dangerous as to lead, or risk, or fight for anything.

Some were lies the world told you to weaken you. Some were lies the church told you to tame you.

Some of these were lies the world told you to weaken you. Some were lies the church told you to tame you. And you have likely been trying to live up to two or three of them at once, which is part of why you are tired and cannot say why. So we are going to throw the whole stack out, every one of them, and start over at the only place a reliable picture has ever come from: the One who invented the man in the first place.

made on purpose, for a purpose

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sources & notes

  1. 1 Timothy 2:12 and 3:1–7 with Titus 1:5–9, on the office of elder and overseer as reserved to qualified men, affirmed here without qualification. That instruction may nonetheless run in both directions is illustrated by Priscilla, who with Aquila “expounded unto” Apollos “the way of God more perfectly” (Acts 18:26). Cf. Warren W. Wiersbe on the Pastoral Epistles.
  2. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Old Testament section), and standard Hebrew lexicons, on the wordplay between adam (man) and adamah (ground, soil), Genesis 2:7; man is formed from the adamah he is charged to work (Genesis 2:5, 15; 3:19, 23). Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Genesis 2.
  3. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, entry “Keep”, on shamar: to keep, guard, watch, preserve; used of guarding the garden (Genesis 2:15), keeping a flock, and standing watch. The paired charge “to dress it and to keep it” (Hebrew abad and shamar) frames cultivation and protection as the twin vocation given the man.
  4. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Temperance” (enkrateia): self-control, the mastery of one’s own desires and impulses, listed among the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:23); from en (in) and kratos (strength, power), hence strength exercised over oneself. Cf. Acts 24:25 and 2 Peter 1:6.
  5. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Meek, Meekness” (praus, prautes): not weakness, but strength and power under control; Vine notes it describes a condition of mind and spirit, and was used of a horse broken and brought under command. See Matthew 5:5 and 11:29 (Christ “meek and lowly in heart”).
  6. Genesis 3:6, “with her” (Hebrew immah): interpreters differ as to whether the phrase places Adam at the woman’s side during the temptation or simply identifies him as her husband present in the garden; the text does not settle it, and the author declines to press it. What is textually clear is that the command was given to the man before the woman was formed (Genesis 2:16–17), and that Scripture reckons the fall through him (Romans 5:12–19; 1 Timothy 2:13–14). Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 3.
  7. 1 Samuel 18:1–3 and 20:16–17, 41–42, with 2 Samuel 1:26 (“thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women”), on the covenant friendship of David and Jonathan, a lament over a fallen brother-in-arms read in its plain sense as loyal covenant friendship. Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on 1 and 2 Samuel.
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