“The world cries for men who are strong; strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer,” says Elizabeth Elliot in her book, The Mark of a Man.
This is a painful yet encouraging truth.
When men come of age, they reach a turning point when they want to be identified by characteristics unique of men. They want to be independent, telling people they don’t need anybody else. No more going out with mom. “No more packed lunch mom, please”! “I want to have my own room now, dad.” Men want to be identified unique and superior.
In the book The Mark of a Man, Elizabeth Elliot says men and women were created equal. All we know from the first chapter of Genesis about the man and woman God made would indicate equal, apart from the interesting detail of sexual differentiation, which gets only passing mention (“male and female He created them”), they were created equal with regard to certain particulars.
The first of these is that they were both created. We could say, then, that they are equal in having been made.
She goes on to say that men and women were equal in image. Yes. We’re made in the image of God. “But I thought God was spirit? How can He be represented by human image”? The Bible doesn’t explain the how and why of our being made in God’s image. It simply tells us we are. It’s a mystery.
She says that men and women are equal in moral responsibility. Men and women were given by God a command for which both were responsible and which neither could fulfill without the other: be fruitful and multiply. It takes two to tango. It takes the sexual distinction to make it work. Two creatures amazingly alike and wondrously different.
So what then is a man’s essence? What really makes him separate from the rest of God’s creation?
Come along with me and let’s discover together what makes you and I different from the rest; I mean, really different from the male population.
Our lives now as we know it, are dominated by constant struggle to prevail in our beliefs and ideas, opinions and viewpoints. Look around you and you find sexist, feminists, racists; the radicals go on and on. Feminists defend their equal rights with men. Gay and lesbian organizations endlessly fought for social recognition of same sex relationship. They want respect and freedom for their sex preferences.
One instance, Elizabeth Elliot and a hundred men and women met at a Harvard Divinity School for the Second Lesbian and Gay Seminarians’ Conference. One Brian McNaught told the story of his water fast, an attempt to get his Bishop at least to admit the “equality of homosexuals as God’s children,” if not to ordain them.
“We would agree that included in the company of God’s children are homosexuals as well as all other varieties of sinners—Paul gives quite a list in 1Cor 6: the impure, the idolater, the adulterer, the effeminate, the pervert, the thief, the swindler, the drunkard, the foul-mouthed, the rapacious. ‘And such men remember, were some of you! But you have cleansed yourselves from all that…’ There’s the condition. Surely, neither McNaught’s bishop or any other good Christian would exclude the homosexual from the priesthood once he had been cleansed and ‘…made whole in spirit…justified…in the Name of the Lord Jesus and in His very Spirit.’ But what the seminarians were asking for was acceptance and equality for practicing homosexuals, with our without repentance,” Elizabeth explains.
Now, you don’t want to be identified in that, do you?
Besides the structural design of masculinity, men are distinct in that they know how to accept responsibility. Men generally want to take charge. But taking charge and taking responsibility are altogether different. To take charge is to oversee. To take responsibility is to make sure everyone is taken cared of, respected and compensated: recognized in his humanity and needs.
Real men know how to forgive. There are many instances in a man’s life when he experiences wounds that he brings all his life. And these wounds can pierce through him that he becomes unconsciously lost in imaginary self he tends to create in order to hide them.
Many successful people we don’t know might just crawl under his blanket and explode in tears and go out of his door a different man.
Fears tend to drive men to do things to hide their wounds. And unless you are courageous enough to accept the wound and take on the process of forgiveness and healing, you will never find yourself distinct among men.
“The whole false self, our lifestyle, is an elaborate defense against entering our wounded heart. It is a chosen blindness. Our false self stubbornly blinds each of us to the light and the truth of our own emptiness and hollowness.” Says Manning in the book Wild at Heart by John Eldredge.
We need to identify that in our selves and come to terms to strip us of it.
Masculinity is obedience. It is obedience to the perfect will and design of God. You cannot bargain with God. What He has declared He has declared. When He said you are a “man”, you are a man. Designed in His likeness and image, set apart from all creation to rule over it.
Endurance is not something of physical when it comes to manliness. Endurance is of inner self. And only when you recognize yourself in God’s image and dependence on Him will you endure the hardships of life.
“Real men longs for adventure and danger. Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of a man. The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, notfat, zip lock, franchised, on-line, microwavable. Where there are not deadline, no phone calls, or committee meetings, where there is room for the soul,” explains John Eldredge.
A man understands a woman. Many men complain women are hard to understand. They say women are too complicated emotionally and demanding of their time. True, women are complicated because we made them so. They become complicated because in the first place, they become confused of what we want of them. Women are demanding of our time because we made them crave for our attention. Why is that? It is because we want freedom from the “clutches” of women. We want to do anything we want without women intervening. We want to go anywhere without women asking our whereabouts. We deprive them of our time.
A man knows a woman’s needs; what she longs for. A man is patient with a woman. And man should learn to live with that because whether he likes it or not, he longs for a beauty—a woman to love and to rescue from the ruggedness of life. Real men respect women and cherish them. When a man comes to age, he establishes a family. And it is in this chosen life that he encompasses his image as a man: a provider, protector, and lover. And how he makes this life boils down again to how he identifies himself with his creator.
A real man is a father to his children.
Why is our society producing few fathers? It is because there are few fathers ahead of us. A real father rears a real father. When a child grows up living with a man he could hardly call “father,” this child will grow up a lost man.
A real man knows his purpose. Unless he knows and understand what he is made for, he won’t be able shout at the peak of the tallest mountain of the world that he is a “man.” God created woman because it was not good for the man to be alone. God created man because He wants man to rule over all His creations. And ultimately, God created man for His glory. A real man can only glorify God if he has embraced God’s purpose for him.
A real man leaves legacy to the society. How would you want to be remembered when the time comes that you can no longer utter words to explain yourself and elaborate what you have done?
Just because a man cries in front of people doesn’t mean he is weak and not a man. The truth is, he is able to accept the realities of brokenness and recognizes the pain of humanity.
The measure of a man is not determined by his preferences and how the culture sees it fit. The measure of a man is determined by how he identifies himself in the image of his Creator and the design bestowed on him. Most of all, a man measures his masculinity on how he embraces the commands of his Creator and obeys Him wholeheartedly.
