The Masculine Mandate (part 1)

And I want to give you greetings from all your brothers and sisters in Greenville, South Carolina.

How many of you know anything about Greenville, South Carolina? And you still live here?

What is wrong with you people? Man, I tell you what. I had a church in Philadelphia call me a year or so ago and say,

Hey, what do you think about being our pastor? I said, Are you not aware that I live in South Carolina? Do you think

I'm moving back to Pennsylvania? I think not. But we are greatly blessed there.

But I am so excited to see a church like this in New England, which very early turned away from the

Lord. And everybody will say the ground's hard here. There's historical reasons for that. And what do we need?

We need men of God, right? We need the word preached. Although I did not know that your pastor was emergent until I got here tonight.

So, I don't know what to say about that.

But really glad to be here tonight. It's great to be among Red Sox fans. I don't believe one can be elect and a

Yankee fan. There's a reason why they wear black, right? So, but I needed to work a little extra hard this summer, so I was appreciative that Theo took the year off so that I wouldn't have to follow the

Red Sox this year, which was in 2010. But I'm really glad to speak to a group of men and to speak on the material

I was privileged to write on the masculine mandate. I suppose it may be because I've got an

Army background that I found myself a few years being asked to speak at a lot of men's events.

And so I'm the kind of person who likes to think through how does the Bible teach this?

Who cares what I think? What does the Bible say is what I really care about? And so I began thinking about it. And having written a book about it,

I speak to men a fair amount today. And I'm glad to do that. We have a great need for godly men today. So I'm really glad to be here.

Let me say as well what a joy it is to me to be at a church that's kind of in the

Master's Seminary. You're a Master's Seminary guy, aren't you? I praise God for that. I'm an old school Presbyterian.

I'm a product of 10th Presbyterian Church and Westminster Theological Seminary, which still has a lot of vigor,

Bible, Calvinists, men. And it's great for me to interact with guys in different streams where the

Lord is also doing a work. I'm a great admirer of John MacArthur and really praise God for the fidelity and the gospel vigor, the doctrinal fidelity of the

Master's Seminary. And I'm glad that God has been so good as to send you one of their products to be your pastor.

So for all those reasons, I'm really glad to be here tonight. Let me just begin then with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you for your grace to me and to all of us who are here tonight, which you have shown to us by sending your son that he would take up a human nature and would live the perfect life that we should have lived, and he would die a sin -atoning death that we might be justified through faith alone in him.

But, Father, what then now, Lord? Well, we know that we are to live for your glory, and the group that's here tonight, we're to do so as men.

So, Lord, I pray that you'd bless this time where we're going to think biblically about masculinity, and I pray that your word would enlighten and convict as needed and inform and help these brothers that they might glorify you and be a blessing to those in their lives.

I pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Well, I was working on this book, The Masculine Mandate, and I had spoken at a number of men's events, and I think

I actually had the book proposal. I may have even been under contract to write the book, and I was having trouble getting started, and I went into a barber shop in South Carolina.

I did not say the kind of stylist that your pastor goes through. But I went to a barber shop, and while I'm waiting there, they had

ESPN, the men's magazine. ESPN, the magazine. And I opened it up, and lo and behold, there is an article there about Brian Deegan.

Who knows who Brian Deegan is? Young guys, X Games, right? You don't know who Brian Deegan is.

This is not an immersion church, then. Because he is the Michael Jordan of Moto X.

You know what Moto X is? It's the loop -de -loop motorcycle trick thing where half of them die every year, and they do all these crazy stunts.

And Deegan, he's really the superstar of that sport, or at least he was the first superstar.

And he founded a group called the Metal Militia, which was the leading

Moto X group. Everything they did was Nazi paraphernalia.

Their helmets were the Storm Trooper helmets, and they got tattoos everywhere. And they were known for winning all the events and starting riots and drug use.

You know, you get the whole picture. Well, in 1997, no, no, that's when he formed it.

In 2000, I think six is the year, Deegan is filming a commercial for some

X Games thing. I don't know what it was. And he had an unbelievably horrific crash.

It's actually on the Internet, but I have not been able to watch the whole thing because I know what happens.

He lands on his handlebars. The handlebar goes through his body, wiping out his kidney. And he loses, like, as much blood as one can lose without absolutely dying.

And like a lot of guys in that kind of thing, he's got really no family background. Well, three things happened that led to his conversion to faith in Christ.

That was one of them. Another one was he had previously gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and she had left the whole

Metal Militia thing and had gone home. I actually think somewhere in New England is where it was. And she was in an evangelical church, and she came home to her church, and she repented of her sins, and she began following Christ, and she refused to have an abortion, and he kind of just dumped her.

But after he has this horrific accident, he has nobody else he can trust, right? And so he calls her up, and he's the father of her child, after all.

And so he comes, and she nurses him back to health and takes him to their Bible -believing church.

And he hears the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the people are friendly to him, and he converts to faith in Jesus.

He is born again. And then he goes back down to Italy in time he marries her, and he goes back to the

Metal Militia. And this is by the time the article gets written. He's evangelizing all his new hooligan friends.

And the other guys are doing interviews saying, yeah, you know, the Deags came back, and if you see pictures of Deags, let me just say right now, the guys, he still has some sanctification to do.

So this is not a broad -based endorsement of everything you will find if you click Brian Deegan into your

Internet browser. And he will show you, young men, if you cover your body in tattoos and then convert to faith in Christ, your tattoos do not go away.

Brian Deegan is living proof of this. But anyway, he's doing Bible studies among the Metal Militia.

And these are completely unchurched guys, and so they're interested, and he's leading them to faith in Christ one after another.

And so they have this interview. By the time I'm reading this magazine in the barbershop, thinking about my men's book, they talk about Deegan as sitting in a lawn chair at the

Metal Militia compound in California with his child on his lap. And he says to the guy, dude,

I've become a follower of Christ, and now I've got to figure out what it means to really be a man.

I thought, well, amen to that. And how much of that there is in our churches today?

Guys who, through the sovereign grace of God, through the ministry of the Word, hopefully in the context of a sound church, they come to faith in Jesus Christ, and then what then?

You know, the what then is where we in the Reform Movement really have so much to say. Because we believe that the chief end of man is to glorify

God and enjoy Him forever. We believe in the Christian life. I like to say to new converts, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that when you die or when Jesus returns, you will be received into His presence, and you will enjoy the eternal glory of the

Lord forevermore. Well, they say, what's the bad news? I say the bad news is you look pretty healthy, which means you've got a long life in this world.

It's a rotten world, and you're a sinner, and you've got a lot of repenting to do, and you've got a lot of work to do. And one of the crying needs we have today, not just among really radical conversions like Brian Deegan's, but more normal -looking guys like us, is godly masculinity.

We have a crying need. In fact, today, I was flying my flight from Greenville to Dulles.

I was flying next to a 62 -year -old woman who's a liberal columnist in one of our newspapers.

And since my sermons are printed in our newspapers, she knew who I was, and therefore she was offended by me before I even knew who she was.

But she's a feminist, and she asked me about lesbianism. And I said, honestly, of course the Bible's opposed to that.

But I said, you know, I tell you what we need is we need Christian men to start living as godly men, and we won't have a feminist problem.

The women won't be needing to do all that. Not that women aren't sinners, but we have a crying need in our society for y 'all.

You know that word, right? The English language needs a second person plural. And it's not you, it's y 'all.

And y 'all need to be men of God who live out the masculine mandate.

But the problem is we don't know what that is. I really do believe we do not know what it means to be a

Christian man. Many of you are married or you're about to get married. One of the things your wife is going to struggle with or is struggling with is most

Christian men do not know how to love their wife biblically. And so here's a question

I want to start with for Brian Deegan and for you, because I think Brian Deegan deserves some clear Bible teaching.

And if he's not here today, well, then I'll give it to you. When we're talking about gender issues like this in Jenner, where do we go in the

Bible to get this information? Well, the answer is Genesis chapter 2. When Paul's talking about tomorrow,

I'm going to talk about women's roles in the church, Paul grounds his teaching on the creation order that's found in Genesis 2.

Genesis 1 is macro -creation. God creates all things in six days and all very good, and it's the cosmos being put together, planets and stuff like that.

Genesis 2 is God's creation of human society and the man and the woman and the marriage relationship and all of these things.

And so when it comes to marriage, when it comes to women's roles, when it comes to masculinity, the

Bible directs us to Genesis chapter 2. And that's where I'm going to be tonight for the most part, or at least

I'm going to start there, in the Bible's teaching in Genesis 2. And what I want to do tonight in the first address is

I want to talk about biblically who you are, where you are, what you are, and how you are to be as a man of God.

And that's what we're going to start with. First is who we are. If you have your Bibles open, look at Genesis 2, verse 7, where we read that the

Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Now this tells us who we are. First of all, here we have the pinnacle of creation in Genesis 2.

This is not abstracted from Genesis 1. But notice the personal involvement, the hands -on intimacy that God does when he creates this special creature, man.

In Genesis 1, God is doing divine fiat. God spoke, and it was. Let there be, there was, it was good.

And God could very well have said, okay, let there be a man, poof, there's a man. But what he does instead is he gets his hands dirty, and he creates man, and really the

Hebrew really is getting at this, he creates man face to face. Man was made to know

God. We were made, who are we? We are spiritual creatures made by God to know

God and to declare his glory. That's what it means to be a man. And so far as we go, the same is true of the woman, although we'll say a little bit more about that tomorrow.

But God makes us. He breathes into man his own life. And you may know that the

Hebrew word for spirit is the same word for breath. And so God's breath goes into the man.

And so man, as he's made by God, is made in the image of God in that sort of way.

And so we are made in a way that we are enabled to know God. We are enabled and we are called to bear his image in the created world.

And so that is, according to Genesis 2, who we are. Now let's answer the question, secondly, where are we?

And you may say, well, Pastor, I know where I am. I have no idea where I am. My wife called me today. She said, where are you? I said, I'm somewhere in Massachusetts.

This is Massachusetts, right? Okay, because I flew into Rhode Island. I said, I really have no idea.

They pick me up. They take me to the airport. It's great. It's good to be here. What town am I in? West Boylston, Massachusetts.

Well, that is where you are. But theologically, let's ask the question, where are you?

And look at Genesis 2 .8. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

God made this special creature uniquely made to know him, to see him face to face, to have his breath within him, to bear his image in the world.

And God places him in the garden that God has made.

Now, what do we mean by this whole, what am I getting at when I say that God placed man in the garden?

Well, the garden is, let me put it this way, the garden is the covenantal world of human society that God made.

God placed us in the world and the relationships that he had made.

Now, I'm going to have my first polemical moment of the weekend. I'm sure it will not be my last, but I already know it will make your pastor happy that I do this.

One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I read John Eldredge's book, Wild at Heart.

Go ahead and raise your hand. I will close my eye. I already know that you've read, I mean, five million people have read it, so some of you have read it.

I got my copy from one of my elders in Florida who said, let's do a, get the DVD curriculum.

I said, well, the only problem is it's heretical. Other than that, I'm completely in favor of it. And there's a reason why

Wild at Heart was a success and made traction, and that's because he timed it just right, and Eldredge says, hey, stop being a bunch of sissies and wimps and start being masculine in the church, and that got traction with people, and I honor that.

The problem is that Eldredge exposits, or he performs what is increasingly popular today, we call it the bizarro hermeneutic, by which he makes the text mean the exact opposite of what it says.

The text says that God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden. Now, help me out here. Where does this suggest that God wants us to find ourselves?

In the Garden, right? God put us in the Garden. He wants us to be in the Garden. So Eldredge says in his book, well, if God made him and then put him, and this is like the theological core of this book,

God made him and put him in the Garden, therefore he was made outside of the Garden, therefore he is wild at heart, and he finds himself not in the place where God put him, but by leaving the place where God put him, and basically you find your masculinity.

He actually says that being a man is being on a quest to find your masculine identity.

I'm already, I mean, can you imagine Ronald Reagan saying, Sir Ronald, what are you doing? I'm seeking my masculine identity.

I'm trying to picture Churchill or George, no, men do not sit around saying, I'm searching for my masculine identity.

We receive our identity from a sovereign God who made us and owns us and calls us to a holy purpose.

We're not looking for it. He actually says in the book, and he says that Jesus in the wilderness was on a quest for his masculine identity.

Man, I want to say this. Look, if God, and so you find your masculine identity, basically by leaving your wife and kids and ignoring her, going on a wilderness exploit, hunting an elk with your bare hands, and stabbing it in the chest and drinking its blood in a metal cup.

That's basically, and you just keep doing that your whole life. And you go on, and see here's the problem.

You got all these Brian Deegan guys, that's what they were doing when they were unregenerate. All this self -centered garbage that's all about them trying to find themselves.

It's really about avoiding responsibility and commitment and godliness. And so they're off, everything's this self -absorbed ego trip.

And now we're being told that's what we're supposed to do as Christian men. Well, brothers, I really want to say to you. In fact,

I was talking to a well -known older guy who's written a bunch of great books, and I said, and he lives in Colorado Springs, and he's just telling me how terrible it is to have this guy in that town.

I said, well, why don't you write a book about it? He said, well, I don't have time, you've got to write the book. And so I did. But I have to say that that portion of Walden Heart really helped me.

Because it made me think about this text. And I said, you know, he's on to something. These texts in Genesis 2 really do have a paradigmatic form about them.

There's foundations being laid here. And what it says is not that God put the man in the garden so the guy would leave the garden, but that men find their identity by obeying

God and glorifying God in the place where God put him. And that is the humdrum world of covenantal relationships.

You find yourself as a man, as it were, by being a godly husband, by being a faithful father, by being a good church member, by investing yourself in the kingdom of Christ.

God created the garden and the covenantal. He created family relationships.

He created marriage. He created the church. And all that stuff that's supposed to be so boring, and what a dork you are if you're not fleeing all that stuff.

And what you're supposed to do is to grow a soul patch. He told me his wife thinks it's sexy, so I give in to that, man.

No, no, no. The where, the who we are is we are creatures made to bear

God's image and to know God in a personal way and to revel in the knowledge of him and the display of his glories as he works in our lives, and we're to do it in the garden.

You're to do it. If we're going to say you find yourself, you find yourself in the church.

You find yourself in godly marriage. You find yourself as a father.

One of the big problems we've got today is in the evangelical churches and to some extent in the reformed churches is the indefinite adolescence.

I got all these lovely women. They're 25 -year -old. Their eggs are drying out. You know, they feel it. No, they are.

And they don't have a godly man to marry. Why? Because the 25 -year -old guys, and I'm not trying to pick on you if you're 25, but because we have this culture that I'm going to play video games until I'm 40 years old, and there will be, but this is not godliness.

You know, I say in my church, my oldest son is 12, and I was watching with some of my elders. We have a church basketball league, and we have a church that's really cool.

Dads in the church coach the teams, and we have a gym, and I was watching the middle school boys' basketball team.

I turned to one of my elders and said, You know, our duty as the leaders of this church is to minister with God's blessing so when these boys graduate college and are entering the workforce, there will be mature church members.

They're able to be deacons in the church. Did you guys say to elders? So you know what I mean. And they're able to be married and to be godly men who, as young adults, it is not good for the man to be alone.

And this whole 29 -year -old trying to figure out who you are, and I'm not trying to belittle you if you're wrestling with that, but we need to, as Christians, we need to embrace godly masculinity.

Young men, our young men now, in appropriate ways, need to be challenged to be thinking about being husbands, to be thinking about being providers, to be thinking about being fathers, to be thinking about being servants in the church so that they grow into it.

And that's where God wants us to find and experience the blessings of Christian masculinity.

It's not going to happen through Madden football or through Halo. And they're not objectively evil, per se.

Some of them maybe, I don't know. But the avoidance of the garden, God wants you to prepare yourselves, and then if you're in it now, to devote yourself to the service of his glory in the covenantal world he has made.

Now, what are we there? Who are we? We're spiritual creatures made to know

God and glorify him. We're in the covenantal world God has made us. He put man in the garden. Well, one thing we are, and I want to say what we are, is two things.

First of all, we are lords. Genesis 128, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Men are called by God to lordship. Now, that's a little l. He's the capital l lord.

But we are called to exercise authority and to take responsibility as God's servant lords in the world.

Part of what it means to bear the image of God, by the way, it's not so much how we're made, but as God is the capital l lord of the macrocosm of the universe, of the cosmos, of the whole covenant world, we as men are to be little l lords, his servants, and we're to be lords in the microcosm.

And God created the man to exercise and bear authority in the sphere over which

God put him. And then secondly, he's to do so as a servant. We are to be servant lords in the garden.

Be fruitful and multiply. We are to devote ourselves, and I'll talk about that a lot more, to the exercising of lordship, each in our sphere, so that God is glorified and there's a bounty of grace working in the world and in lives.

That is what we are to be. Adam was not to devote himself to an endless quest for his masculine identity, but he was to be the lord and keeper of God's realm, bringing glory to the creator in servant faithfulness.

Well, that leads me to the fourth thing, which is really where I'm going with all this, is how do we do this? Who are we?

We are spiritual creatures made to know and glorify God. Where are we? We're in the garden, the covenantal world of divinely established relationships.

What are we there? We are lords and servants in the garden. And so the question is, and here's why

I think a lot of sincere guys, undoubtedly many of you are this way, and I hope to help you, they go, how do

I do that? I want to know. And for this, we turn to Genesis 2 .15, which really is,

I believe, the masculine mandate. And that's not just a book title for me. That's what this verse is.

It's the grid. It's the place where God in the Bible sets the grid for what godly masculinity is.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

To work it and keep it. Now, I was raised in a cavalry family.

I fired my first tank at age 10. It was pretty cool, I have to admit. When I was a little boy, my father was a tank battalion commander.

I remember him at the breakfast table with a helmet on his head and pistols, and his jeep would come. When he was a boy, his father, who was a horse cavalry officer, would ride off to work on his war horse.

And so let's suffice it to say that I own a lot of cavalry paraphernalia. In fact, in my office at home, there's a print of a cavalryman firing at the wicked enemy in that print.

And of course, therefore, I know what is the greatest movie for men ever made. What was that?

No, it's good. I'm from the Patton Wing of the Army. That's a very accurate movie, except for his voice was very high -pitched.

No, no, it's John Wayne. What's the greatest John Wayne movie? It's not a

Westerner, so you can have your Westerners. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is the, and to me, growing up, particularly when

I was a young, I was converted at age 30, so when I was an unregenerate combat officer in armored cavalry units, to me, the quintessence of manhood and masculinity was

Captain Nathan Brittles, played by John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. And he had two words that he gave his hapless lieutenants all through that movie that would help them to be real men.

Who knows what the two words were? Never apologize. And so I took that to heart, and let's just say because of that, my early adulthood was more obnoxious than it needed to be.

Never apologize, mister. Well, the Bible gives you two words that tell you how you are to fulfill the matrimonial mandate, and they are not never apologize.

They are work and keep. Work and keep. And here's what, one of the things you will notice, you probably noticed this from your pastor, is that biblical truth is always simple and clear.

You ever notice that? The Bible argues against alloyed doctrines. Whenever you have an alloy, a mixture of the world and the church, it's not true.

Biblical truth is always simple, not therefore easy, but it's direct and simple.

And here you have two things that the Bible gives us as our grit. I'm very grateful to that because I can't handle much more.

Remember my father tried to teach me how to play golf. And I think life is frustrating enough without golf already.

But I remember I was like 14 years old and my dad's teaching me and he's got like 15 things. Okay, son, knees slightly bent, left elbow straight, head down, eyes on the ball, tilt your...

Dad, I cannot handle any more feedback. So I'm not giving you 14 things so you can hit the ball.

The Bible gives you two things. The Lord God took the man and then put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Now let's look at these two words. The first word is a... Both of these, by the way, are Hebrew verbs that appear hundreds of times throughout the

Old Testament. They are not technical terms. This is in the... If you were to take Hebrew as a language, probably in the first set of vocab cards, both of these words would be there.

Basic, plain. The word abad, to work, means to serve in a general way.

It's used of the priest in the temple. They served in the temple, the words there.

Now here it's an agricultural context. And so to work has an agricultural idea.

It's to cultivate, to nurture. And so God says, look,

I want you to glorify me and I'm going to put you in the world that I have designed and I'm going to give you lordship over your little piece of it that through that you might display the glories of my name and the first thing

I want you to do is I want you to labor in the garden so that it grows and is fruitful. It's fruitful and multiplies.

I want to say right now that this is already a revolutionary idea because one of the things, one of the ways in which

I think that American masculinity, which has some very good strengths about it, one of the ways in which

I think we've gone wrong is the whole idea of nurture is not in our idea of masculinity.

If you say, well, who's the nurturer? Who would you normally say? The mother. Folks, that is not true.

Women get upset when I say this, but it's just not what they do. My wife who homeschools five children,

Lord, what a wonderful wife I have. I leave for work and I see her with laundry for seven going and homeschooling five kids and I just go, thank

God for this tireless servant. And she's meeting our needs and she's keeping the home together. She's serving and helping.

But she does not have the primary calling. I don't want to deny that women do nurture, but the primary calling to really reach the heart, say in parenting, of the child and instill an identity and beliefs and values is not the mother's job, it's the father's job.

And God says to the man, I'm going to put you in the garden to work and you are going to devote yourself in servant lordship and labor that is designed to cause things to grow.

I got a whole book on this. I'm only doing two sessions. In the book I work all this out in different relationships, but already right now that has been a revolutionary idea to me just in terms of clarity to my thinking.

You put me in any context and what does it mean for me to be a

Christian man? It means I exercise authority on God's behalf that he's given me in a servant way and I devote myself to wholesome growth and life and blessing.

If it's a garden, well then I plant, I plow, and I seed, and I fertilize, and I water.

How many agricultural metaphors do you have in the Bible that way? And my job, I have succeeded as a man when the garden is beautiful and growing.

Now let's talk about marriage. What is my job as a husband? Well, I am to work my wife.

And by the way, if you look at the Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3, 7, you'll see how a lot of what's being told to husbands is the nurture of their wives.

Husbands, dwell with your wives according to knowledge, 1 Peter 3, 7. Cherish her. So know your wife.

Be involved in her. Build her up. If you're a husband, your fingers are to be dirty with the soil of your wife's heart.

Now, I got to tell you right now, I have just improved your marriage dramatically because you probably don't know to do that.

I'm going to be honest with you. That whole idea, that whole way of thinking is not ways that most of us were raised.

It's been a great help to me to realize that in my marriage, I am to orient myself ministerially on my wife.

I'm to know what's going on in her heart. I'm to know what she's afraid of. And I'm to minister to that with the

Word of God. I am to know what her needs are. I'm to provide so far as I'm able to that ministry.

I know what encouragement she has. And I am to devote myself so that she grows. What does it mean to be a father?

You know, this is why the killer for men, and many of you can attest this growing up, is the emotional distance of fathers.

Isn't that right? Well, you know, I provide a good roof over her head. And, you know,

I don't talk to them much. But, you know, that is a killer. And pastors are constantly dealing with 50 -year -old men who come into their office and go,

Man, you know, I don't know my dad. And so I don't know who I am. And we are to invest ourselves in the soil of my heart.

What's the key verse in the book of Proverbs? You know, Proverbs is not miscellaneous tips.

It's a father manual for his son. And Proverbs, I think it's 22 -26 or 26 -22.

My son, give me your heart. Is at the heart of the

Proverbs. I was blessed with a father who was very involved in my life. And I talk in the book about when I was 12 years old, my father spent the year in war.

He spent two and a half years of my childhood in Vietnam. And my entire sixth grade year, which is a pretty big year for a boy.

My oldest boy is that age right now. I just thought of that. And my father's in Vietnam. My whole 12th, you know.

And I would get letters from him every week saying things like, Dear Ricky, boy, your mother told me about the great kits that you made.

Oh, I would have been there. And I'm so proud of you. And let me tell you what's going on in my life. And I felt he was my dad.

Or, Dear Ricky, let me rebuke you for talking back to your mother. You know, to the lightning bolt, transcontinentally.

But we are to be workers. And so the masculine mandate, just lay this on your heart.

Think about this. Open your own Bible, Genesis 2 -15. This is not my spiel to you. This is the word of God.

The Lord God took the man, put him in the garden of Eden to work it. And so if you own a business, part of your job is to be involved in growing the business and in working in the lives of your employees.

A man is someone who exercises authority with the intention of producing wholesome growth in the lives of others.

You can apply that to church membership. You can apply that to marriage. Again, I think there's a great need for us to realize our callings to know our wives.

I tell you what, I'm going to just say this now because I'm not going to do a whole thing on marriage. But, you know, it's kind of sad. I mean, if I were to do a thing on wives submit to their husbands and if I were to teach about how the

Bible talks about women having a control issue, you'd all be snickering. You'd go, yeah, my wife has to be commanded by God to respect me.

You have to be commanded by God to love her. This is what sin does to us. It makes us,

Satan's a counterfeiter. And it makes us self -centered. And commitment becomes conflict and service becomes selfishness.

And, you know, Adam in the garden, the first woman is made from his own bone and he says, wow, that's what

I'm talking about. Woman. And now my wife has to go to bed night after night because I have to see whether Papalbon can get through the ninth inning.

I have been greatly convicted in my own life about what am I saying to my wife when I'm up there watching the

Sox. And I already know that Papalbon is going to blow the safe this year anyway. But, you know, the mesmerizing, and the world becomes large in my eyes.

And it becomes sports. It becomes work. And our wives feel emotional distance from us.

And God says, Rick, this marriage is where you, one of the places you glorify me.

Get involved. Get your fingers dirty in her heart. Get up there and pray with your wives. I subscribe to MLB .TV

anyway. I will see the highlights in the morning. And I have had to say to myself, you know,

I need to give up Papalbon and Big Poppy when that's in conflict with my wife going to bed alone without her husband talking to her about how her day was.

And that's our growth as Christian men will be seen as we involve ourselves and we commit ourselves.

Look, I don't know who God's, maybe you're a single person. Yeah, but you have friends. You're a church member. You've got employees.

You're a husband. You have a wife. If you're a father, you have children. And God's mandate to you to glorify

Him is to minister with the spade in your hand in the heart of the person in your life.

Well, the second half is to keep. This is the Hebrew verb shamar. Psalm 121 is filled with shamar.

The Lord watches over Israel. That's shamar. The Lord will keep your soul. He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

It's the word for protect, to watch over, to stand guard. And so a biblical man, a godly man, and this is what we need.

This is what God's calling you and me to be. And it's simple, but not therefore easy. But we have the grace of God working in us.

He says, Rick, I want you to work the garden. Get busy. Make it grow. Make it beautiful. And you stand guard and you keep it safe.

And what do you have when Nehemiah is building up the walls of Jerusalem? You have the men of Israel with the trowel in their left hand and the spear in their right.

That's the picture of biblical manhood. Psalm 23, verse 4. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Eve death,

I will fear no evil, for thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. The rod is a weapon of protection. The staff is a shepherding guide of ministry.

And so God calls us as men to devote ourselves to the nurture and the cultivation and the growth of people in our lives.

And then we need men who stand guard. We need men in churches who stand guard over doctrine. You know what's going wrong in the churches today?

Is that the pulpit sits there and does, the pew sits there and does nothing when the pulpit starts teaching the latest scholarly lies.

I'm not telling you to be contentious with your pastor or anything. Although you are a Bible church, so you have a little more warrant for that than my

Presbyterian church does. But you know, Christian men need to be people who say, I am going to stand up for the truth of the word of God.

And we're going to do something, and that's what you're doing, that's why you have conferences. And this is not being contentious.

This is not being mean -spirited. We need people who will stand up and say these are precious things. We're going to guard the trust.

We, in our marriages, you know, I always say if you're a married woman, or let me say if you're on a first date, some of you guys are single, you're on a date.

My wife and I wrote a dating book and we talk about this in that. If you're on a date with a young lady, as a biblical man, real masculinity will say this, that young lady, precious to the

Lord, while she's with me, she's going to be safe and she's going to be built up.

And she may think I'm a dork and she may not like me, but I don't really care because there's other women, and there are.

The, uh... Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And, uh... But I'm going to honor

God and she's out with me. I'm not just going to talk about myself. This is the bane of women. You go on a date, what does he do?

He talks about himself all the time. Um... And you're going to say, no, I'm going to, I'm going to look at her,

I'm going to pay attention to her, I'm going to ask what's going on in her life, I'm going to pray with her, I'm going to minister the Word of God for her, and she's going to be safe.

She's going to be safe from me and from my sin. She's going to be safe from the world. Now, let me give you a hint. If you do that on a date, what is going to happen?

She is going to fall in love with you because she has never experienced that in her entire life.

When I do this stuff in marriage conferences, the women fall out of their chairs every time. Young women, middle -aged women, old women.

They go, I've never experienced this. I would die to be with a man who was with me.

And this doesn't mean you don't have interest. This doesn't mean you're not working hard. I'm going to talk about work in the second session. This doesn't mean that you're not, your life's not just revolving around her.

But you accept your covenantal lordship over her. And when she's with you, she's being built up. I have to say this.

It blows my mind sometimes how men speak to their wives. Do you notice in the Bible, when you see the speech between a husband and a wife, how there's even a bit of formality to it?

And people go, oh, that's not appropriate in a marriage. Why isn't it? I have no more precious earthly relationship than that between my wife.

The person I can least afford to speak offhandedly to is Sharon Phillips. Because she's under my covenantal care and headship, and she is to receive thoughtful Christian ministry.

And I never shoot from the hip with her. Oh, I do, but I repent of it later. And she gets no locker room talk from me at all.

And I think about what I say to her, and I deal with her and care. And people go, why would you do that? Because I'm reading my

Bible and I'm a Christian man. And so you're on a date with a young lady. You keep her safe. You're with your children.

What do we do with children? We discipline them and we disciple them. You know, the keeping of children is disciplining them.

What is said about David and Adonijah and Absalom and Amnon and all those rotten kids of his?

At the beginning of 1 Kings, during Adonijah's revolt, the Bible says this is because David never displeased his sons.

And so I protect my children by governing them, by spanking them appropriately when they're little children, and by bringing them under authority, and by waging war against sin in their lives.

Not that I'm the model father, but I just bought my 14 -year -old daughter her first copy of John Owens, The Mortification of Sin.

And so we're going to read this. Because we're going after your sin. Why? Because I love you. And your father is going to work on your character.

And so we must discipline our children, although I have to say we've got discipline down pretty well, but not discipleship.

All these Christian fathers saying, Pastor, I don't know what went wrong. I mean, I took him to Sunday school.

He only had Christian friends. Went to a private Christian school. Did this, did that.

And I go, did you ever spend any time with your child? Did you do family worship? Did your child ever sit there and hear your prayers?

You know what I mean? Of course they did. But we've got to personally disciple our own children. We never outsource the

Christian nurture of our children to the youth pastor. I saw a joking ad that youth pastor sues for custody of children.

He demands the tax benefits, since he's doing all the work anyway. And no, no, no.

It's the father's working and keeping, glorifying God. Well, I don't want to go too long.

I'm not sure exactly how much time I have. But this is our calling, the masculine mandate. And I did write a book that works this out in some detail.

Well, let me just conclude that John Wayne, you know, actually if you look at She Wore a

Yellow Ribbon, he actually does a lot of that. And I'm not saying that, I'm not really trying to be overly critical, because to the extent that our country has grown in great ways, it is largely because of the influence of the

Bible. Actually, I go back to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and John Wayne was investing himself in the nurture of his lieutenants.

And he was keeping people safe, and he was devoting himself to others. And that's one of the reasons why we think

John Wayne's a masculine guy. I don't want to endorse everything about the guy. I don't know him. Probably wasn't a believer. But what an opportunity there is for us as Christian men.

One of the great challenges of our time is the absence of manhood. The haves and have -nots in America today are the have -fathers and don't -have -fathers.

And it is not enough for us merely to be there. We need to embrace

God's calling on our lives. We are called to exercise authority on God's behalf.

Women really are not called to do that the same way. We are called to lordship, but servant lordship.

The Bible does not teach mutual submission between men and women, but it does teach mutual servitude.

And my wife should often hear and does often hear me say to her, Sweetheart, how may

I serve you as your husband? And how may I minister to you? And we need to exercise authority.

And God very helpfully, I think, gives us this grid. Okay, here's what you do. Here's the how.

You're going to work it, and you're going to keep it. You're going to devote yourself in all the context of life that God gives you to nurture and growth and blessing.

You're particularly going to use the Word of God and prayer and the means of grace to build up the arm around the shoulder, the pad on the back.

We know how people made a difference in our lives. That kind of personal involvement. You're going to have the soil of hearts stuck to your fingers, and you're going to stand up, and you're going to keep people safe.

By the way, that's the way to grow in sanctification, because you realize one of the things you've got to keep them safe from is your own sin.

But we do that. Now, let me go back to the beginning of what I said of who we are. This is what it means biblically to bear the image of God.

Most of us have heard it said that to bear the image of God means you're a reasoning creature. The animals, they don't have reasoning.

They can't have worship. And man bears the image of God in what God made him as.

There's some truth in that. But biblically, we bear the image of God by what we do.

We enter into the family business. One of the great joys of my life was to be...

Why was I a tank officer? It doesn't take Freud to figure this out, because my dad was a tank officer.

And one of the great visceral joys of my early manhood was to go home on leave and to talk tank gunnery with my dad and to be an insider in his world and all those sorts of things.

And here's the good news. God wants you to do that too. God calls us into the family business.

And the best way to really know somebody is, yes, through your own interaction, but also to see his son.

You know how that is. You see someone's son and you go, Wow, they spit off the old block. I mean, I can tell that you're

Bob Smith's son. Well, as we, exercising covenant authority as servant lords in the garden, working and keeping, we will be showing the world,

I want you to know what my father is like. Because isn't this what God has done for you in Jesus Christ? Isn't that what he's done?

You have the terror of Satan, the guilt of sin, the law of God against you.

And so determined was God in your life to protect you because he loves you, because he chose you for the creation of the world.

And God the son came in and he slew the dragon, as Revelation 12 pictures it.

He engaged in the holy warfare, even shedding his own blood on the cross, that you might be kept safe from eternal damnation.

And then what does he do? Praise God, the Christian life is not only that. Praise God for that.

But then he says, I'm going to give you my Holy Spirit. And God's going to say, I'm going to get my fingers dirty in the soil of your heart.

And I'm going to nurture you. And I'm going to build you up with the word. And my Holy Spirit's going to guide you. And I'm going to put you in a church where I have shepherds, elders, and pastors, and Christian friends.

I'm going to give you, I'm going to build you up. And here's the beauty of godly masculinity. That as we embrace this calling, and I've got to be honest with you,

I'm going to spend the rest of my life learning how to do this. I really mean that. But I praise God for simplicity and clarity.

And God says, dude, I want you to work it and keep it. And as I do that, and I learn to be more like Christ as he works in me, and as I embrace my callings as a pastor in my case, as a husband, as a father, as a friend, and all my relationships, working and keeping,

God says, you know why you're doing that? You're witnessing my glory so that people will come to know me better. Well, what a great opportunity we have as Christian men.

I think back to Brian Deegan. What a glorious thing to be told a young man who realizes he comes to know the

Lord Jesus, and he's got his own messed up background, but he says, I want to be a blessing.

I want to glorify God. And God gives us this mandate and this blueprint, and he will give us the grace.

You see, when we do this, maybe you're thinking, you know, I'm just not that kind of person. Listen, you offer yourself up in obedience to God's calling on your life, and he will give you his

Spirit. It will please him. Not only does God's mandate work because he knows what he's talking about.

That is true. You know, the guy who, you go to the auto shop, and the people who are trained and who built the car, they know how it works.

Listen to them. That's true of the Bible. But it will change your life and your relationships.

It will change your marriage. It will change your relationship with your children. Not only because obeying

God works, because when you do it for his glory, he is pleased to send the Holy Spirit. And he will bless it to enable you to glorify him in your life.

Well, I hope this is a help to you. Let me pray. Father, thank you for your Word. Lord, I want to thank you so much for the clarity of your

Word, that we can read it and we can understand it, and it gives us a clear grid. But, Father, we have a great need of the grace in order to do it.

And so, Lord, I may be stirring up a lot here tonight. I pray that these brothers would open their Bibles, they would not think about so much what

I've said, but about what you're saying here, Lord. And then I pray that you would embolden us to think about what this means in our own lives, to begin applying ourselves, that the people in our lives would be blessed by our godly manhood.

But even more, Lord, that your glory as our Father in heaven would be shown in the world through our lives.