a word before we begin

This booklet is for men, and it is about a thing men have been lied to about from two directions at once: what a man is supposed to do with what he feels.

From one side you were handed the stone-faced man, the man who feels nothing, or who has trained himself so hard that he no longer knows what he feels; the man for whom strength means a flat and unmoved face, no matter what is happening underneath. From the other side, in reaction, you were handed his opposite, the man who lets it all out, who follows his heart wherever it drags him, who treats every feeling as a truth to be obeyed. Both of these are lies, and they are lies about the very core of you. A man was made to feel, deeply, the whole range of it, because the God who made him feels. And a man was made to govern what he feels, to rule it rather than be ruled by it, by the strength the Spirit of God supplies. Not the dead man. Not the man run by his own gut. A third man, and the best of the three, and the one we are going to go and find.

And I will tell you the mercy of it at the very start, so you do not read this as a whip: this is the standard, not a scorecard your worth hangs on. You are a fallen and simple man, and you will fail at it, and get ruled by something you should have ruled, and have to get back up. That is not a special failure of yours; it is just being a man. So come at this as a target to aim at under grace, not a bar you are about to be beaten with.

chapter one

two lies about a man’s heart

The two lies belong side by side, plainly, because most men are being crushed between them without ever seeing either one clearly, and you cannot fight what you cannot name.

The first lie is the old one, and it is the one most men were raised on: that a real man does not feel, or if he feels, he never shows it. Boys are told not to cry almost before they can talk. Men learn to bury grief, to swallow fear, to wall off tenderness, to show the world one flat and unmoved face no matter what is happening underneath. And a great many men have gotten so good at it that they can no longer find their own hearts even when they go looking; they have stuffed everything down for so long that they have gone numb, and they call the numbness strength. It is not strength. It is a man slowly suffocating his own soul and calling the silence manhood.

He has stuffed everything down for so long that he has gone numb, and he calls the numbness strength.

The second lie came later, in reaction against the first, and it looks like the cure but is only the opposite ditch. It says: since bottling it all up is so plainly killing men, then let it all out, feel everything, follow your heart, honor every emotion, and never deny what you feel. And so the pendulum swings from the man who feels nothing to the man who is run entirely by his feelings, who does whatever his anger or his fear or his desire tells him to do in the moment and calls it being authentic. This is no better than the first; it is worse in some ways, because a man ruled by his feelings is a man with no hand on the wheel, and the Scripture has a hard word for him that we will come to.

Both lies share one buried assumption, and here is where they are both wrong at the root: they both assume that feeling deeply and ruling yourself are opposites, that you must either kill the feeling to keep control or surrender the control to have the feeling. That is false. It is the great false thing under both ditches. The truth, the third man, feels everything the first man buries and rules everything the second man obeys, and there is no contradiction in it at all. Deep feeling and iron control are not enemies. They were always meant to live in the same man.

the god who feels

is waiting for you

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sources & notes

  1. Zephaniah 3:17 (the LORD rejoicing over His people “with singing”), with Genesis 6:6 (“it repented the LORD... and it grieved him at his heart”), Isaiah 49:15 (love fiercer than a nursing mother’s), and Exodus 34:14 (“the LORD, whose name is Jealous”), on the God of Scripture as one who genuinely feels. On the contrast with the “unmoved” deity of the philosophers, see A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (1961), on the attributes of God; the Christian tradition affirms God’s emotional life while denying that He is overpowered by it.
  2. John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”) at the grave of Lazarus (John 11:33–36); with Matthew 9:36 (moved with compassion), Mark 10:16 and 10:21 (the children; loving the rich young ruler), John 2:14–17 (the whip of cords and the cleansing of the temple), Matthew 23 (“generation of vipers”), and Luke 22:44 with Matthew 26:38 (Gethsemane, “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death”). “Be ye angry, and sin not” is Ephesians 4:26.
  3. 2 Samuel 6:14–16 (David dancing “with all his might” before the LORD) and the Psalms (e.g. Psalm 6; 42; 51), with 1 Samuel 13:14 / Acts 13:22 (“a man after his own heart”), on David’s full emotional range; with Jeremiah 9:1 (the “weeping prophet”) and Acts 20:19, 31 (Paul serving “with many tears”). Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on 1 and 2 Samuel.
  4. Stoic apatheia (Greek ἀπάθεια, from a-, “without,” and pathos, “passion”) meant freedom from being ruled by the destructive, irrational passions, not the absence of all feeling, and is regularly distinguished from the modern English “apathy” (indifference/numbness). See the standard treatments of Stoic ethics in Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Notably the Christian ascetic tradition even spoke of “the fire of dispassion” (Diadochus of Photikē), underscoring that it was never emotional deadness.
  5. Galatians 5:22–23, the fruit of the Spirit, ending with enkrateia (ἐγκράτεια, KJV “temperance”), meaning self-mastery or self-control, strength held under the reins rather than the killing of the passions. See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Temperance, Temperate.” That it is a fruit of the Spirit, not a work of willpower, is the point pressed here.
  6. Homer, Iliad, Book 18 (Achilles’ open grief over Patroclus); on Alexander’s mourning for Hephaestion, Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 7.14, and Plutarch, Life of Alexander 72; and Augustine, Confessions, Book IV.4–9, his grief over a dead friend, whom he calls (echoing Horace) the “half of his soul” and their friendship one soul in two bodies. These are offered as illustrations that pre-modern cultures did not equate manly strength with the suppression of feeling.
  7. Genesis 45:1–2 (Joseph weeping aloud so “the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard”); Nehemiah 1:4 (Nehemiah weeping and mourning “certain days” over Jerusalem); with Job, Jeremiah, and Paul as further examples of hard men of deep feeling. Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 45 and Nehemiah 1.
  8. Proverbs 25:28 (“He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls”), on self-government pictured as a city’s walls. Cf. Charles Bridges, An Exposition of the Book of Proverbs (1846), and Matthew Henry on Proverbs 25.
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