SERMON: Men With Chests

Ezekiel’s Search for a Man Who Would Stand in the Gap

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church Podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon, and we pray that as we declare the Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

And may you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you. When God looked down upon a dying nation in the former days of the prophet Ezekiel, He didn't say that the walls were too broken to rebuild them.

He also didn't say that the enemy was far too powerful to resist them. This is what God said, I searched for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before me for the land so that I would not destroy it, but I found no one.

Did you hear what God just said? The Almighty said that He went down to the people of Israel and He walked the length of the city, the ruined wall, and He was searching among the leaders of this collapsing nation looking for one man.

One man who would stand in the breach of the wall. One man who would rebuild what was broken. One man who would safeguard His people from destruction. One man who would fear God above His petty fears, and God found no one.

He found a gaggle of priests. He found a religious establishment. He found some weak-kneed princes and officers. He found some yellow-bellied officials apparently and a corrupted class of union workers.

He found human males with titles, males with offices, males with influences, males with fully functioning Y-chromosomed bodies, but He didn't find men. And because the men were so compromised, God promised destruction.

This is one of those if-thens. If there are no men, then the people will be destroyed. Do you see that? God was looking for just one man, and He would not destroy the people, but He found no one, which means that in the course of history, just after Ezekiel prophesied, the walls came down, the city fell, the city and the temple were set on fire by the Babylonians, and the people were destroyed and went off into exile because there were no men.

The World Turned Upside Down in Acts 17

Now hold that in your mind for a second. That's what destroys a country. That's a nation-killing offense, to have no real men. But look at what the book of Acts says just centuries later. We get a picture of what God does when there are just a handful of men.

In Ezekiel, God searched all throughout a dying city, and He found no men. In the book of Acts, chapter 17, a handful of men are found with the courage of thousands inside their chest, and suddenly the entire city that was standing against them fell.

When God found no men in Ezekiel, their nation fell. When God found a few men in the book of Acts, the other nation fell. This is what the Christians in the book of Acts 17, it's what it said of them.

This is the accusation that was brought against them. This is what stirred the entire city up. These men who are preaching Christ, who have turned the world upside down, have come here also. Ezekiel shows us that hollow men bring calamity upon a nation.

Acts shows us that real men build the kingdom of God. Ezekiel shows us how God's people collapse because of the downgrade of men. Acts shows us how the world collapses when God upgrades men, when Christ upgrades men.

Israel collapsed because there was no man standing in the gap. Rome actually eventually collapsed because a few Christian men stood up for Christ. This is what I'm going to be talking about this morning.

Apparently not the education series. I'm going to be talking about what kind of men is God going to use to turn the world upside down, and how do we start making those type of men again? Because Scripture teaches us that when men go soft, the collapse is not far behind.

It spreads outward like gangrene. It reaches the home, it infects the church, and it consumes the nation, plunging an entire people into ruin. Isaiah described this as a curse. This is what he says, Oh, my people, their oppressors are children, and the women rule over them.

Look at who the passive party is in the curse. And Isaiah is not attacking faithful women. He's describing a world in which the entire created order has been turned upside down. But why? Because the men who were appointed to bear responsibility, to bear the burden, to bear up people, have abandoned their post.

And when men abandon their post, children become tyrants. And when men abandon their post, women are forced to rule. And when men sit idly by, their houses, their homes, and their nations are burned around them as they sit by and watch.

When men abdicate, the entire created order is tipped upside down. And this happens to a family when a man abdicates in his home. This happens to a church when a man abdicates behind the pulpit. And this happens in a nation whenever their leaders are abdicating.

When the men who were supposed to be stationed at the gates disappear from their post, it's not long before the people who actually depend upon them go barreling over the cliff. It's not only true in Ezekiel's day, in Isaiah's day, it is true in our day.

And because it's true, you can find out the state of our nation very quickly. And you can find out what hour on the clock we're in. And you can find out how many grains of sand are left in our country's hourglass by simply looking at the condition of our nation's men.

Look at what they love. Look at what they honor. Do they love honor? Do they love courage? Do they love valor? Or are we producing a man who wastes their life away on porn sites and video games? Men want mission.

We need real mission. You look at what men fear. Do they fear God? Or do they fear everything else? Look at what men build. Do they build institutions that are going to last for generations? Do they build inheritance for their children?

Do they build a culture of discipleship in their home and a culture of worship where their king is magnified and the kingdom of God is spreading through their ambition, through their godly ambition, boldness, and desire to see the kingdom grow?

Or do they build tabernacles to the God of mammon? Do they build castles for themselves instead of kingdoms for Christ? Look at what men tolerate. Do men today hate evil and love what is true, good, and beautiful?

Or do they tolerate every vice under heaven? Under some polluted interpretation of being reasonable, being nice? Look at whether men can govern their appetites. Look at whether men can keep their promises.

Look at whether men protect the vulnerable or protect themselves. Look at where men, or do they confront evil? Do they endure hardship? Do they remain at their post? When the price of faithfulness would require discomfort, social pariah-ness, and even death.

And I want you to look especially to the pastors and the pulpits across this country. Because where the men in the pulpits go soft, should we be surprised when the church is filled with cowards? Cowardly churches do not produce courageous and holy citizens.

And for more than a century, the church has existed in a world that has waged open and deliberate war on masculinity and has done almost nothing. To her great shame, the church in America, which was appointed by Jesus Christ to be the pillar of truth and buttress of truth on earth in our land, has failed to resist the rising tide of feminism and the rising hatred against masculinity.

The Church’s Failure to Answer the War on Masculinity

When the world came to hate and reimagine manhood, the church, instead of holding the gate, abandoned it. Instead of answering the lies, she accepted them. Instead of presenting a biblical vision for what manhood is, she ignored and simply baptized a caricature.

Without so much as uttering the question, what saith the Lord? Yeah, our culture has spent generations teaching men, your strength, your ambition is dangerous. Your authority is oppression. Your desire to conquer is pathology.

Your willingness to fight is something that needs to be medicated, managed or apologized for. In school, just because you have godly masculine energy that needs to be discipled and bridled, no, no, no, you need Ritalin.

That message has come from every single direction. That onslaught has come from every direction. That arrow has flown in our society from every single direction. From the schools, from the universities, from our television screens, corporations, entertainment industry and the therapeutic establishment, all of them screaming the same thing, men are the problem.

Turn on your television in the past 50 years. How often do you see a man portrayed as a noble man, a wise man, a courageous man, versus how often do you see him portrayed as a bumbling idiot? A clueless, overgrown child that must be constantly rescued by his wife and his children and his male children who have the extreme benefit of not having become men yet, which is when apparently they become idiots.

Turn on the news. Men are presented as a permanent suspect, a latent predator, an oppressive force, a danger that must be quarantined and restrained. Lay down on the therapist's couch and manhood becomes a disorder to be diagnosed.

Testosterone becomes a chemical problem to be chemically fixed. His desire to protect needs to be confronted as aggressive, toxic masculinity. His willingness to lead becomes a kind of manipulation and control.

His instinct to fight is what makes him so toxic. And when all the pummeling accusations have came knocking at the doors of the church, should we have expected that the world would think any differently?

They have not the spirit of God. They have not truth. Should we have expected that they would have brought truth to the doors of the church? No, but what should we have done? Did the church reject those lies?

Did they answer from the word of God? Did they put forward Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Daniel, Nehemiah, Paul, Peter, Stephen, Jesus Christ, as the picture of masculinity? No, we didn't. No, we didn't.

We feathered Jesus' hair, and we turned him into a rosy-cheeked emo king who looks both effeminate and gay. Look at most of the posters of Jesus. He looks effeminate and gay, despite the fact that it's a Second Commandment violation.

Did the church meet the litany of accusations calling men to responsibility, to sacrifice, to courage, to dominion, to righteous warfare against the enemies of God, to pray the imprecatory prayers, to sing the Psalms, to become men?

Far too often, they have not. Because the culture hated men, the church responded by gelding them. In the church, not ours, but in many churches across the land, masculinity has become something that needs to be sanctified, not discipled.

Boldness has become an embarrassment. Authority has become something to apologize for. Confrontation has become inherently unloving in the church. Leadership is stripped of its holy danger, and it's replaced with a toothy smile of a milquetoast-vanilla eunuch on stage, a Pinocchio pretending to be a real man.

Men were emotionally, spiritually, and mentally castrated in the society we live in and in the church. What God intended to be lions was transformed into nursing kittens under the watch of many pastors.

And then, we have the audacity to stand aghast, wondering why men stopped going to church, why the church in America is overwhelmingly female. Ask yourself the question, why would men come? Why would a man enter into a place that's embarrassed by him, that shames him, that's suspicious of his godly instincts, hostile towards his desire for authority, terrified of him saying something that would lead to controversy, completely uninterested in giving him a mission that's worth living for and important enough to die for?

As soon as most men walk into the church, they scan the room, because that's what we do, and they see men who are utterly emasculated, Ned Flanders types. They hear hollowed-out, baritone singing about Jesus is my boyfriend in the latest Bethel ballad.

They watch the worship leaders, who are so sickly they can barely lift their guitar, closing his eyes in some emotive, mesmerized trance where he joins the women in swaying his hips. He looks for anyone, anyone at all that he could fight, anyone at all that he could do war with, anyone at all who would be in the foxhole with him, anyone at all who could help him build something for his generations, extend dominion, conquer evil.

And far too often, the man who comes does not find onward Christian soldiers marching unto war. He finds a brigade of brittle egos looking for moral, therapeutic deism. So that man turns around, and that man walks away, and that man does not come back.

But do you know where he goes? There's either two places. He will go into some kind of isolation where he tries to do it on his own, and he's now vulnerable to all sorts of attack, or he will go and become radicalized by immoral men, the voices of the manosphere, who will tell him, you're a man, but they will give him an immoral vision of what it looks like.

I don't want to be misunderstood in this, so I want to say it clearly. Faithful women are not the problem. God bless godly women who have prayed, and who have served, and who have endured, and who have taught their children, and who have practiced hospitality, who have honored their husbands, and carried crushing burdens while their men were missing in action.

Praise God for them. God bless them. The problem is not women in our churches. The problem is that we've built churches where biblical masculinity is unwelcome, where men overwhelmingly receive the message, you're the problem.

Why Men With Chests Are Dangerous to the Powers

Now, maybe you're wondering, why has this attack on masculinity become so relentless? Because a real man, with a real chest, who's set on fire by the living God, a man governed by truth and animated with holy affections, is one of the most dangerous creatures under heaven.

A man who cannot be bought with money, a man who cannot be flattered with smooth words, a man who does not abandon his duty when he becomes bored or when he becomes frustrated, a man who is not governed by his lust, a man who is not ruled by comforts or applause or fear, a man who does not participate in his own emasculation, that man is dangerous.

A man who will stand between the serpent and his wife, between the wolf and the sheep, between the tyrant and the innocent, between the lie and the truth, that man's dangerous. A man who knows that Jesus Christ is King, and is prepared to order his entire life around the worship of Christ, that man is dangerous.

That's why they came for you men, because loving Christ, submitting to Christ, ruling through the power of Christ, is dangerous to the hegemony. And you're public enemy number one. And sadly, that's why so many churches have failed you.

It's because they don't have a vision of what men are. C .S. Lewis, almost a century ago, talked about this in one of my favorite quotes in the book called The Abolition of Man. C .S. Lewis, if you're not aware, he's in Boston language, he's a really smart guy, but he's a Christian apologist.

He wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, he wrote Mere Christianity, he wrote The Weight of Glory. He wrote more books, probably, than I will read. But this is what he said about the consequences of destroying masculinity.

He said, in a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. My goal today is not to lament over what was lost. I think I've given you an accurate generalization of what's been going on in the church. I think I've given you an accurate diagnosis of the problem.

Men With Chests in the Home and the Doorway of the Family

But in the rest of today, I want to talk about the solution. I don't want to talk about men without chests, I want to talk about men with chests. How do we make men with chests? By the way, I said I wasn't going to do this, but I'm going to do this very briefly.

That doesn't mean large pecs. That doesn't mean that he can bench-press 375, eight reps, three sets, all day long. That's not what that means. What C .S. Lewis was talking about is the old view of the person, not our view of the person.

Today, we think about the person as head and heart, and then maybe their hands. In the old view, your affections don't come from your heart. They would have never understood in the ancient world, when you say, go follow your heart, what do you mean?

That beating organ in the center of my heart, what does that mean? When their affections were stirred, when their love for something or their hatred of something was stirred, it was in their guts. You ever felt so much emotion that it felt like your guts were in a meat grinder?

The affections were in the belly, in the ancient mind. The seat of reason was in the head. What connects the head to the belly? It's the chest. If you have no chest, it's not that you can't do a thousand push-ups.

If you have no chest, it means your head and your belly have no connection. It means that you are nothing more than a being that has thoughts that are disconnected from passions, and passions that are disconnected from rationality.

You're a beast. You're a hollowed-out man. You have formulas memorized and base emotions that are not formalized. That's what it means to be a man without chest, and that's the kind of man that we want to put to death, and the opposite kind of man who has a chest, who can follow the Lord, who has his head and his belly integrated, that we want to produce.

If you will, join me in a single passage this morning, Acts 17, verses 1 -9. We will not, like normal, fully exegete this passage, but we will use it as a launch pad to discuss what does it mean to make men with chest.

Men with chest in our home, men with chest in our church, men with chest in the world. So let's go. Acts 17, verses 1 -9. Now, when they had traveled through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews.

And according to Paul's custom, he went to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, saying, This Jesus, whom I am proclaiming to you, is the Christ.

And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, along with a large number of God-fearing Greeks and a number of the leading women. But the Jews became jealous, and taking along some wicked men from the marketplace, formed a mob and set the city in an uproar, and attacking the house of Jason.

And they were seeking to bring them out to the people. And when they did not find them, they began dragging Jason and some brethren before the city's authorities, shouting, These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has welcomed them.

And they all act contrary to the degrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus. They stirred up the crowds in the city authorities who heard these things, and when they had received a pledge from Jason and the others, they released them.

Jason’s Door, Adam’s Abdication, and Guarding the Home

Let us pray. Lord, help us to understand today what it means to be a church that participates in, and Lord, that hopefully we can live within a larger church that repents of and glories in a biblical masculine view for manhood.

Lord, help us to understand the critical importance of your design for men and for women, but today we're looking at men. Help us, Lord, to glory in the things that you glory in, and help us, Lord, to help produce, disciple, and grow up the things that you say are good.

Lord, help our men. Help all of our men here today and our young boys to grow up and to become men with chests, men who are not just brains and guts disconnected from each other, but men who are integrated beings submitted to the lordship of Jesus Christ that exist for your glory and for the good of your kingdom's advancement in the world.

Lord, let us aim at that. Let us succeed in that. Let our men grow strong in that. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. The first thing that I want to focus on as a positive vision of masculinity is men with chests in our home.

The first man in this passage that I want to focus on is a man named Jason. Now, why is the passage talking about Jason? Because this is exactly where the enemies of God leveled their strongest blow, was at this man named Jason.

Notice what's happening in Thessalonica. The attack doesn't come on Paul. The attack doesn't come on Silas. The attack comes on this random dude named Jason, this guy that we never hear about anywhere else in the Bible, who's not an apostle, not a preacher, not an elder in the church.

He's found nowhere else in Scripture. It's just this guy, Jason. Why? Why did the mob drag him out of his house? Why did the mob haul him in front of the magistrates? Because Jason was lord over his home.

And as lord over his home, he made a very dangerous decision to open up his door. I want you to understand what the door is for, brothers, because you are the lord of your door. A door is a border. A door that is a border is a line where man's authority is exercised over his home.

It's the threshold for what he decides, for what's welcomed in and what's kept out. Every time that a man opens up his door or bars it, he's governing his home. He's ruling his home. He's acting as the sovereign over his home.

And that's exactly what Jason did. Jason let in those who were proclaiming the truth of God, but the enemies of God had to tear down his door to yank him out, because Jason was lord over his door. He flung it open and pulled it that pulled the gospel inside, and yet he closed it to the enemies of God who had to drag him out by his ankles.

The righteous he welcomed by joy. The wicked only came in by force. This is a man who governed the threshold of his home. This is a man who was holding fast the gate. He took the most wanted men in the empire and he quartered them under his own roof.

He put them in his house, he shared with them his food, his table, and he wasn't dangerous because he was loud or because he could fart the loudest or burp the loudest or drink the most beer. He was dangerous because he ruled over his door.

He was dangerous because he let in a gospel that Jesus is king instead of Caesar. He was dangerous because he was what stood between what was inside his house and what was outside his house. He was the thing that stood in the way of whatever would come in.

Brothers, this Father's Day, the place where a man with a chest first forges a home is by first being lord over his door. But sadly, that's not instinctively what most of us do. Look at our forefather Adam.

He's the first man in history without a chest. Remember God put man in the garden? He handed him only two commands, to dress and to keep the garden. The second word, keep, is the word in Hebrew that means guard.

It's a word literally that prisons would use to lock down an inmate. It's a word that military officers would use to lock down an enemy. Guard the garden. Guard the perimeter. Stand as a sentry, as an officer, as a warrior, guarding the space.

Hold the line. And then Adam was given something precious to hold the line for, a wife. And then the serpent came to the door of Adam. And where was the man? He was sitting right there. Instead of being lord over the door, he allowed Eve to open it.

He allowed Satan to supplant his leadership. The text says that the woman gave the fruit to him because he wasn't guarding the door. It says he was even with her, which is even more pathetic. The first man without a chest in the history of the world was not cooked up in a faculty lounge, cursing at the water cooler.

He wasn't invented by feminists. He was standing in the paradise of God, refusing to secure his bride. And because of that, the fall came upon all men. He was as passive as a fence post. And then hell strolled in through his own door that he had been commanded to hold.

I want you to understand this well. What comes in your home comes through you, whether you're sitting, watching, doing nothing like Adam, or you're there and they have to go through your dead body. What comes into your home comes in through you, and you will be held responsible for it.

And the abdication of every father will cause a collapse on your home. If you don't guard the gate, if you don't guard the door, if you don't guard your home, it will lead to ruin. If you don't guard your home from what?

From every single threat that would come in your home. If you don't guard the door from society polluting your children, your children will go through a great fall. If you don't guard your wife from every single way that culture would want to dehumanize her, you will undergo a fall, and it will be your fault.

And you will stand before the Lord. If someone breaks in your home, whether physically or ideologically, through entertainment or through a shotgun, let them do so with your dead body lying on the floor.

You are the gate. You're the man. Guard your home. Guard your home from what would come from without, but also guard your home from what will percolate and bubble up from within. You guard your home from the threats, yes, but you guard your home for something.

What? That the praise of Yahweh would be sung in your home. That the word of God would be read in your home. That the prayers of God would echo on the lips of your members of your home. That family worship would abound in your home.

That discipleship and discipline and growth in Christ would abound in your home. That the aroma of Christ would be the aroma in your home. You guard the gate from what's coming from without, and you guard the gate for something happening within.

If you let your guard down, if you don't stand at the door, you can be assured, my brother, that ruin will come. It is the pattern from Adam. It is the pattern in Ezekiel, and it is the pattern throughout all Scripture.

That's the first place that I would say men have chest. Men be strong. Men be courageous. Guard your door from what's outside and guard it for what ought to be inside. That's the first thing. The second thing that I would say is men, we have to have men who have chests in church.

Dangerous Men in the Church and the Promise of the Kingdom

Jason was not alone in all of this. Luke says that they dragged off Jason and certain brethren. That word brethren means people who are a part of the church in Thessalonia. There was a whole pack of them that they were dragging off with their heads bumping along the concrete as they dragged them by their ankles.

These were not soft, harmless men sipping a warm chai latte, nodding along with every single stupid idea that's presented. These were dangerous men. These were men of conviction. These were men with great character.

These were men who made the church in Thessalonia so dangerous that the Jews thought the only way that we can destroy them is by setting the entire city in an uproar, by pinning on them that they're haters of Caesar, which was an executable offense.

They were so noxious to the city that they were trapping them to be murdered. They were dangerous men, brethren in the church, known for their vigor, conviction, and for being dangerous. The church of Jesus Christ has not advanced much more than that in the last 2 ,000 years.

We still need dangerous men. We still need men who are strong and not just agreeable. That's how the church wins. Jesus said, The mission of the church is to see the gates of hell torn down. The mission of the church is not for men to sit in circles and talk about their feelings.

I guess there's a time and a place to kumbaya, but we have a mission. We have gates that we need to see torn down. We need to smell the smell of sulfur dissipating in New England. The church is described militantly because it needs military men.

And think about this, gates aren't weapons. Like, you're going up against the gates of hell. Nobody goes into a battle wielding a gate. Nobody's like, oh, look at that guy, he's got a sword. Look at that guy, he's got a rifle.

Oh my gosh, this guy's got a gate. Gates are defensive structures. All they do is stand there. They don't chase you, they don't shoot you, they don't do anything. They just stand there. And you've been promised, men, that if you will just move towards them, they will fall down.

It doesn't take a lot of effort. Jesus said, The gates of hell will not prevail against you. Which means they cannot stand against the advance of dangerous men. They cannot stand against the advance of holy, righteous men.

Why do we not advance when we've got a promise that the gates will fall down? Why do we not take back New England when we're promised that the gates will fall down? Why do we sit in our churches and do nothing when we're promised that the gates will fall down?

Why don't we raise up elders and deacons and Christian men who are dangerous to the world when we're promised that the gates of hell will fall down? Why do we produce such vanilla, watered-down men when we're promised it?

And, men, why do we own inside of ourselves something far less than what we have been called to? Why do we settle for less than that? It's time that the gates of hell start falling again, is it not? It's time that the fiends of hell start shrieking again.

It's time that the lime-haired lesbians start thinking that their time is up. It's time that men stand up and have knobby knees from how hard they're praying, and have worn Bibles from how hard they're reading, and have worn soles on their shoes by how hard they're leading.

It's time that the church produce these kinds of men in the church and without the church so that we see the gates of hell fall down. It's promised. All we have to do is stand up and take it. Men, it's okay to have ambition.

It's a godly thing. It's okay to have strength and vigor. It's a godly thing. It's not godly to have it unbridled. It's not godly to have strength and vigor that's disconnected from Christ, but it is godly for you to take dominion, for you to make war, for you to excel in things, have ambitions for things.

It's actually really godly if you say, in a year, I'm going to be promoted, and within five years, I'm going to be the CEO of my company, because my company would thrive under a Christian's leadership more than it would thrive under the pagan who's leading it now.

It's actually godly for us to say, and I'm getting into my next point, but I don't care. It's actually godly for us to say that Massachusetts would be governed better by a Christian who's filled with the Spirit than with someone who bows down to whatever idol that she bows down to.

Congratulations, Massachusetts. We're the first state in America that has a lesbian governor in the history of America. Why? Because the men have abdicated their responsibility. And why? You can't blame the pagans.

They have no vision. What I can blame is Christian men. Why have we not ran for governor? Why have we not taken Beacon Hill? Why have we not taken school boards? Why have we said, absolutely not, over my dead body, you will not show pornography to my children, or anybody's children?

Why have we not said enough? Why have we lived in comfort, like in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World, over-medicated, over-comfortable, lazy, passive? Why have we done that? We need to recapture a vision for what it means to be men with chest.

We need to rise up in holy, righteous love for God and country, and take it back for Him. There's nothing wrong with that. It's actually noble. We've been told all of our life that this kind of thing is dangerous.

Men wanting to take over the government. Okay. If you don't take it over, someone else is. The same people who tore down targets and burned down Minneapolis, you want them to take it over? Because they have a vision.

You want to be ruled by that? Or do you want to reach down and grab what you've got, and go take what has been lost? I'd much rather see godly men do that than anyone else. I'd much rather see America become a Christian nation.

Why would we want to be a Christian nation? Don't we have separation of church and state? Not a biblical concept. Jesus says, go and baptize all the nations. He doesn't say, go baptize all of the individual believers who write down on a believer's card, I have decided to follow Jesus today.

He says, go baptize the nations. The nations have governments. The nations need Christians. Washington D .C. needs Christians. It's time for us to catch a holy vision, which actually is our third point.

Christlike Masculinity, Holy Ambition, and New England Bending the Knee

And because we've already covered it, I want to say that the reason that we can do this is not out of some kind of bravado, and not out of some kind of over-testosterogenated hype obsession where we beat our chest and we grunt.

The reason that we can do this, men, is because we follow a savior who did this for us. Don't feather Jesus' hair. Look at what he did. Jesus went into the temple and braided his own whip, and then chased out the money changers because they would dare pollute God's holy temple.

I want you to think about that for a second, put yourself back in that situation, and think about what a boss move that was. Jesus comes in the middle of it, sits down, and for like 20 or 30 minutes braids his own whip.

Can you imagine what people were thinking? What's this fellow doing? Braiding, braiding, braiding, and then uses the whip he braided to whip them. That's peak masculinity. That's not unbridled. It was very thoughtful, very deliberate, and very directed.