Permission to Live from the Heart
Men need permission. Permission to be what they are — men made in God’s image. Permission to live from the heart and not from the list of should and ought to that has left so many tired and bored. What men need is something else: a deeper understanding of why they long for adventures and battles and a Beauty — and why God made them just like that. The voice that names that hunger most clearly belongs to a president who knew the arena well:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly… who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.
Teddy Roosevelt
Chapter One — Wild at Heart
Eve was created within the lush beauty of Eden’s garden. But Adam, if you’ll remember, was created outside the Garden, in the wilderness. The second chapter of Genesis makes it clear: man was born in the outback, from the untamed part of creation, and only afterward is he brought to Eden. And ever since then, boys have never been at home indoors, and men have had an insatiable longing to explore.
Look at the heroes of the biblical text. Moses does not encounter the living God at the mall. He finds him — or is found by him — somewhere out in the deserts of Sinai, a long way from the comforts of Egypt. The same is true of Jacob, who has his wrestling match with God not on the living room sofa but in a wadi somewhere east of the Jabbok, in Mesopotamia. Where did the great prophet Elijah go to recover his strength? To the wild. As did John the Baptist, and his cousin, Jesus, who is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
Deep in a man’s heart are some fundamental questions that simply cannot be answered at the kitchen table. Who am I? What am I made of? What am I destined for? It is fear that keeps a man at home where things are neat and orderly and under his control. But the answers to his deepest questions are not to be found on television or in the refrigerator. Out there on the burning desert sands, lost in a trackless waste, Moses received his life’s mission and purpose. He was called out and called up into something much bigger than he ever imagined, much more serious than CEO or “prince of Egypt.” Under foreign stars, in the dead of night, Jacob received a new name, his real name.
The way a man’s life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen; selling shoes at the mall; meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world — where the majority of American men live and die — requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But the soul refuses to be harnessed. It knows nothing of Day Timers and deadlines and P&L statements. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life.
”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). God doesn’t have a body, so the uniqueness can’t be physical. Gender simply must be at the level of the soul, in the deep and everlasting places within us. God doesn’t make generic people; he makes something very distinct — a man or a woman. There is a masculine heart and a feminine heart. They may be misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected, but in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.
A Battle to Fight
Capes and swords, camouflage, bandannas and six-shooters — these are the uniforms of boyhood. Little boys yearn to know they are powerful, that they are dangerous, that they are someone to be reckoned with. How many parents have tried in vain to prevent little Timmy from playing with guns? Give it up. If you do not supply a boy with weapons, he will make them from whatever materials are at hand. Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it. If man is made in the image of God, then we would do well to remember that “the LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15:3).
Little girls do not invent games where large numbers of people die, where bloodshed is a prerequisite for having fun. Hockey, for example, was not a feminine creation. Nor was boxing. A boy wants to attack something — and so does a man, even if it’s only a little white ball on a tee. When boys play at war, they are rehearsing their part in a much bigger drama. One day, you just might need that boy to defend you. Those Union soldiers who charged the stone walls at Bloody Angle, the Allied troops that hit the beaches at Normandy or the sands of Iwo Jima — what would they have done without this deep part of their heart? Life needs a man to be fierce, and fiercely devoted. The wounds he will take throughout his life will cause him to lose heart if all he has been trained to be is soft, especially in the murky waters of relationships, where a man feels least prepared to advance. As Robert Bly says, “In every relationship something fierce is needed once in a while.”
Women didn’t make Braveheart one of the best-selling films of the decade. Flying Tigers, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Magnificent Seven, Shane, High Noon, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun, the Die Hard films, Gladiator — the movies a man loves reveal what his heart longs for, what is set inside him from the day of his birth. Like it or not, there is something fierce in the heart of every man.
An Adventure to Live
To borrow Walter Brueggemann’s description of God: “wild, dangerous, unfettered and free.” That is the God in whose image men are made. And lest anyone mistake this for some sort of macho-man pep rally, Eldredge himself is no great white hunter. No dead animals adorn the walls of his house, he didn’t play college football, in college he weighed 135 pounds and wasn’t much of an athlete. Despite his childhood dreams, he was never a race car driver or a fighter pilot. He has no interest in televised sports, doesn’t like cheap beer, and though he drives an old jeep its tires are not ridiculously large. He says all this because the search here is the same search so many men — and hopeful women — are on: a search for an authentic masculinity.
You can see it most clearly in boys. When winter fails to provide an adequate snow base, his sons bring their sleds in the house and ride them down the stairs. Just the other day, his wife found them with a rope out their second-story bedroom window, preparing to rappel down the side of the house. The recipe for fun in raising boys is pretty simple: add to any activity an element of danger, stir in a little exploration, throw in a dash of destruction, and you’ve got yourself a winner. If a man has lost this desire, says he doesn’t want it, that’s only because he doesn’t know he has what it takes. He believes he will fail the test, and so decides it’s better not to try.
A Beauty to Rescue
There is nothing so inspiring to a man as a beautiful woman. She’ll make you want to charge the castle, slay the giant, leap across the parapets. Or maybe just hit a home run. A man wants to be the hero to the beauty. Young men going off to war carry a photo of their sweetheart in their wallet. Men who fly combat missions paint a beauty on the side of their aircraft; the crews of the WWII B-17 bomber gave those flying fortresses names like Me and My Gal and the Memphis Belle. It’s not just that a man needs a battle to fight — he needs someone to fight for. “Don’t be afraid… fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.” The battle itself is never enough; a man yearns for romance. It’s not enough to be a hero; he wants to be a hero to someone in particular, to the woman he loves. Adam was given the wind and the sea, the horse and the hawk, but as God himself said, things were just not right until there was Eve.
Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman yearns to be fought for. Listen to the longing of a woman’s heart: she wants to be more than noticed — she wants to be wanted. She wants to be pursued. Every woman also wants an adventure to share. “To be cherished, pursued, fought for — yes,” one woman put it. “But also, I want to be strong and a part of the adventure.” So many men make the mistake of thinking that the woman is the adventure. But that is where the relationship immediately goes downhill. A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up into something greater than herself. As that same friend went on to say, “I know myself and I know I’m not the adventure. So when a man makes me the point, I grow bored immediately. I know that story. Take me into one I don’t know.” Do you see me? asks the heart of every girl. And are you captivated by what you see?
God gave us eyes so that we might see; he gave us ears that we might hear; he gave us wills that we might choose; and he gave us hearts that we might live. The way we handle the heart is everything. A man must know he is powerful; he must know he has what it takes. A woman must know she is beautiful; she must know she is worth fighting for. This is the invitation — to rush the fields at Bannockburn, to go West, to leap from the falls and save the beauty. For if you are going to know who you truly are as a man, if you are going to find a life worth living, if you are going to love a woman deeply and not pass on your confusion to your children, you simply must get your heart back. You must head up into the high country of the soul, into wild and uncharted regions, and track down that elusive prey.
Chapter Two — The Wild One Whose Image We Bear
Be honest now — what is your image of Jesus as a man? “Isn’t he sort of meek and mild?” a friend remarked. “I mean, the pictures I have of him show a gentle guy with children all around. Kind of like Mother Teresa.” Those are the pictures hanging in many churches. In fact, those are often the only pictures of Jesus we ever see, and they leave the impression that he was the world’s nicest guy — Mister Rogers with a beard. Telling a man to be like that feels like telling him to go limp and passive. Be nice. Be swell. Be like Mother Teresa. But how would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo?
Think instead of William Wallace going straight for the hearts of the fearful Scots: “Sons of Scotland… you have come to fight as free men, and free men you are.” He gives them an identity and a reason to fight. He reminds them that a life lived in fear is no life at all, that every last one of them will die some day. “And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” That kind of fire stirs a masculine heart because it is closer to the truth about the God whose image men bear.
A Battle to Fight
Virtually every book of the Bible — Old and New Testaments — and almost every page tells us about God’s warring activity. Would the Egyptians who kept Israel under the whip describe Yahweh as a Really Nice Guy? Plagues, pestilence, the death of every firstborn — that doesn’t seem very gentlemanly. And remember that wild man Samson? He’s got a pretty impressive masculine résumé: he killed a lion with his bare hands, pummeled and stripped thirty Philistines when they used his wife against him, and finally, after they burned her to death, he killed a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey. Not a guy to mess with. And every one of those events happened when “the Spirit of the LORD came upon him” (Judges 15:14). The aim here is to rescue us from a very, very mistaken image of God — especially of Jesus — and therefore of men as his image bearers.
What About Adventure?
If you have any doubts as to whether or not God loves wildness, spend a night in the woods… alone. Take a walk out in a thunderstorm. Go for a swim with a pod of killer whales. Get a bull moose mad at you. Whose idea was this, anyway? The Great Barrier Reef with its great white sharks, the jungles of India with their tigers, the deserts of the Southwest with all those rattlesnakes — would you describe them as “nice” places? Most of the earth is not safe; but it’s good. After God made all this, he pronounced it good, for heaven’s sake. It’s his way of letting us know he rather prefers adventure, danger, risk, the element of surprise. This whole creation is unapologetically wild, and God loves it that way.
And God gave us a remarkable choice. He did not make Adam and Eve obey him. He took a risk — a staggering risk, with staggering consequences. He let others into his story, and he lets their choices shape it profoundly. When God needs to get a message out to the human race, without which they will perish forever, what is the plan? First, he starts with the most unlikely group ever: a couple of prostitutes, a few fishermen with no better than a second-grade education, a tax collector. Then, he passes the ball to us. Unbelievable.
The ultimate risk anyone ever takes is to love, for as C. S. Lewis says, “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.” But God does give it, again and again and again, until he is literally bleeding from it all. God’s willingness to risk is just astounding — far beyond what any of us would do were we in his position.
A Beauty to Fight For
As Francis Frangipane so truly states, “Rescue is the constant pattern of God’s activity.” This is no afterthought in the heart of God; it is the steady note running through the whole of Scripture. “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:1, 5). And so often our word to boys is don’t. Don’t climb on that, don’t break anything, don’t be so aggressive, don’t be so noisy, don’t be so messy, don’t take such crazy risks. But God’s design — which he placed in boys as the picture of himself — is a resounding yes. Be fierce, be wild, be passionate.
And after years of hearing the heart-cry of women, there is one conviction that surfaces again and again: God wants to be loved. He wants to be a priority to someone. How could we have missed this? From cover to cover, from beginning to end, the cry of God’s heart is, “Why won’t you choose Me?” It is amazing how humble, how vulnerable God is on this point. “You will find me,” says the Lord, “when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). In other words, “Look for me, pursue me — I want you to pursue me.” As Tozer says, “God waits to be wanted.” And God wants not merely an adventure, but an adventure to share. He didn’t have to make us, but he wanted to. Though he knows the name of every star and his kingdom spans galaxies, God delights in being a part of our lives. Do you know why he often doesn’t answer prayer right away? Because he wants to talk to us, and sometimes that’s the only way to get us to stay and talk to him. His heart is for relationship, for shared adventure, to the core.
This is far too simple an outline. There is so much more to say, and these are not hard and rigid categories. A man needs to be tender at times, and a woman will sometimes need to be fierce. But if a man is only tender, we know something is deeply wrong, and if a woman is only fierce, we sense she is not what she was meant to be. The two notes ring side by side in Scripture itself:
One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard: that you, O God, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving.
Psalms 62:11–12
Chapter Three — The Question That Haunts Every Man
The real life of the average man seems a universe away from the desires of his heart. There is no battle to fight, unless it’s traffic and meetings and hassles and bills. As George Herbert put it, “He begins to die, that quits his desires.” And how come there are so many “sports widows,” losing their husbands each weekend to the golf course or the TV? Why are so many men addicted to sports? It’s the biggest adventure many of them ever taste. Why do so many others lose themselves in their careers? Same reason. Even the Wall Street Journal advertises itself to men as “adventures in capitalism.” Some guys spend hours online, e-trading stocks. There’s a taste of excitement and risk to it, no question. And who’s to blame them? The rest of their life is chores and tedious routine. It’s no coincidence that many men fall into an affair not for love, not even for sex, but, by their own admission, for adventure.
If a man does not find those things for which his heart is made, if he is never even invited to live for them from his deep heart, he will look for them in some other way. Why is pornography the number one snare for men? He longs for the beauty, but without his fierce and passionate heart he cannot find her or win her or keep her. Though he is powerfully drawn to the woman, he does not know how to fight for her. What makes pornography so addictive is that more than anything else in a lost man’s life, it makes him feel like a man without ever requiring a thing of him. The less a guy feels like a real man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn.
Underneath it all sits every man’s deepest fear: to be exposed, to be found out, to be discovered as an impostor, and not really a man. Why don’t men play the man? Why don’t they offer their strength to a world desperately in need of it? For two simple reasons: we doubt very much that we have any real strength to offer, and we’re pretty certain that if we did offer what we have it wouldn’t be enough.
Why does God create Adam? What is a man for? If you know what something is designed to do, then you know its purpose in life. A retriever loves the water; a lion loves the hunt; a hawk loves to soar. It’s what they’re made for. Desire reveals design, and design reveals destiny. Adam and all his sons after him are given an incredible mission: rule and subdue, be fruitful and multiply. “Here is the entire earth, Adam. Explore it, cultivate it, care for it.” The secret longing of your heart, whether it’s to build a boat and sail it, to write a symphony and play it, to plant a field and care for it — those are the things you were made to do. That’s what you’re here for. Explore, build, conquer — you don’t have to tell a boy to do those things, for the simple reason that it is his purpose. But it’s going to take risk, and danger, and there’s the catch. Are we willing to live with the level of risk God invites us to?
And why does a man long for a battle to fight? Because when we enter the story in Genesis, we step into a world at war. The lines have already been drawn. Evil is waiting to make its next move. Somewhere back before Eden, in the mystery of eternity past, there was a coup, a rebellion, an assassination attempt. Lucifer, the prince of angels, the captain of the guard, rebelled against the Trinity. He tried to take the throne of heaven by force, assisted by a third of the angelic army, in whom he instilled his own malice. They failed, and were hurled from the presence of the Trinity. But they were not destroyed, and the battle is not over. God now has an enemy… and so do we. Man is not born into a sitcom or a soap opera; he is born into a world at war. This is not Home Improvement; it’s Saving Private Ryan. There will be many, many battles to fight on many different battlefields.
And finally, why does Adam long for a beauty to rescue? Because there is Eve. He is going to need her, and she is going to need him. Adam’s first and greatest battle is just about to break out — a battle for Eve.
Chapter Four — The Wound
Men rarely praise each other directly, as women do: “Ted, I absolutely love your shorts. You look terrific today.” Men praise indirectly, by way of accomplishments: “Whoa, nice shot, Ted. You’ve got a wicked swing today.” That is how validation passes between men, and a boy is alert for it from the very beginning. If Dad works outside the home, as most do, then his return in the evening becomes the biggest event of the boy’s day. Whatever Dad’s eyes land on, whatever Dad’s voice names, that becomes the news the boy carries into the rest of his life.
The names a father gives matter enormously. A mother might often call her son “sweetheart,” but a father might call him “tiger.” Which direction do you think a boy would want to head? “Tiger” sets him on a road that “sweetheart” never does, because it speaks the language of the masculine soul.
Many, many adult men resent their mothers but cannot say why. They simply know they do not want to be close to them; they rarely call. As one friend, Dave, confessed, “I hate calling my mom. She always says something like, ‘It’s so good to hear your little voice.’ I’m twenty-five and she still wants to call me her little lamb.” Somehow, he senses that proximity to his mother endangers his masculine journey, as though he might be sucked back in. It is an irrational fear, but it reveals that both essential ingredients in his passage were missing: Mom did not let go, and Dad did not take him away.
Chapter Five — The Battle for a Man’s Heart
”How do I get my husband to come alive?” a wife asks. The answer comes back: “Invite him to be dangerous.” That single line opens a door, because what looks on the surface like dullness in a husband is almost always something deeper — a man who long ago stopped expecting his life to be where his question gets answered, and who has gone looking elsewhere for the verdict on his soul.
Why is pornography the most addictive thing in the universe for men? Certainly there’s the fact that a man is visually wired, that pictures and images arouse men much more than they do women. But the deeper reason is that seductive beauty reaches down inside and touches your desperate hunger for validation as a man you didn’t even know you had — touches it like nothing else most men have ever experienced. You must understand: this is deeper than legs and breasts and good sex. It is mythological. Look at the lengths men will go to to find the golden-haired woman. They have fought duels over her beauty; they have fought wars. Every man remembers Eve. We are haunted by her. And somehow we believe that if we could find her, get her back, then we would also recover with her our own lost masculinity.
Even marriage doesn’t settle it. As one man put it, “Even if I marry a beautiful woman, I will always know there is an even more beautiful woman out there somewhere. So I’ll wonder — could I have won her?” That haunting, that wondering, is what keeps a man’s eye drifting and his heart restless even in the bed of the woman he chose.
This is also why so many men secretly fear their wives. She sees him as no one else does, sleeps with him, knows what he’s made of. If he has given her the power to validate him as a man, then he has also given her the power to invalidate him too. The same woman he once asked to be his answer becomes the one whose smallest sigh can undo him — because she was never supposed to be carrying that question in the first place.
Chapter Six — The Father’s Voice
That deep heart-knowledge of who you are comes only through a process of initiation. You have to know where you’ve come from; you have to have faced a series of trials that test you; you have to have taken a journey; and you have to have faced your enemy. Psalm 139 makes it clear that we were personally, uniquely planned and created, knit together in our mother’s womb by God himself. He had someone in mind, and that someone has a name.
God created Adam for adventure, battle, and beauty; he created each of us for a unique place in his story, and he is committed to bringing us back to the original design. So God calls Abram out from Ur of the Chaldeas to a land he has never seen, to the frontier, and along the way Abram gets a new name. He becomes Abraham. God takes Jacob off into Mesopotamia somewhere, to learn things he has to learn and cannot learn at his mother’s side. When Jacob rides back into town, he has a limp and a new name as well.
Most of us are asking the wrong questions. We ask, “God, why did you let this happen to me?” or, “God, why won’t you just help me succeed, get my kids to straighten out, fix my marriage?” But to enter into a journey of initiation with God requires a new set of questions: What are you trying to teach me here? What issues in my heart are you trying to raise through this? What is it you want me to see? What are you asking me to let go of? In truth, God has been trying to initiate you for a long time. What is in the way is how you have mishandled your wound and the life you have constructed as a result. The only thing more tragic than the tragedy that happens to us is the way we handle it.
In order to take a man into his wound, so that he can heal it and begin the release of the true self, God will thwart the false self. He will take away all that you’ve leaned upon to bring you life. And Satan spies his opportunity and leaps to accuse God in our hearts. You see, he says, God is angry with you. He’s disappointed in you. If he loved you he would make things smoother. He’s not out for your best, you know. The Enemy always tempts us back toward control, to recover and rebuild the false self. But it is out of love that God thwarts our impostor. As Hebrews reminds us, it is the son whom God disciplines, therefore do not lose heart.
Practically, this means facing your fears head-on. If you’ve run to sports because you feel best about yourself there, then it’s probably time to give it a rest and stay home with your family. If you never play any game with other men, then it’s time you go down to the gym with the guys and play some hoops. Drop the fig leaf; come out from hiding. For how long? Longer than you want to — long enough to raise the deeper issues, long enough to let the wound surface from beneath it all.
And because so many of us have turned to the woman for our sense of masculinity, we must walk away from her as well. This does not mean leaving your wife. It means you stop looking to her to validate you, stop trying to make her come through for you, stop trying to get your answer from her. For some men, this may mean disappointing her. If you’ve been a passive man, tiptoeing around your wife for years, never doing anything to rock the boat, then it’s time to rock it.
A man needs a much bigger orbit than a woman. He needs a mission, a life purpose, and he needs to know his name. Only then is he fit for a woman, for only then does he have something to invite her into. In the Masai tribe in Africa, a young man cannot court a woman until he has killed a lion. That’s their way of saying, until he has been initiated. A man does not go to a woman to get his strength; he goes to her to offer it.
But if this is the water you are truly thirsty for, then why do you remain thirsty after you have had a drink? It’s the wrong well. We must reverse Adam’s choice; we must choose God over Eve. We must take our ache to him. For only in God will we find the healing of our wound.
Chapter Seven — Healing the Wound
The deepest desire of our hearts is for union with God. God created us for union with himself: this is the original purpose of our lives. When a father watches his sons head into adventure and feels them test their strength against his, all of that takes place in the context of an intimate bond of love that is far deeper than words can express. That is the picture of what God intends with us. “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). He’s not berating us or mocking us or even saying it with a sigh, all the while thinking, I wish they’d pull it together and stop needing me so much. Not at all. We are made to depend on God; we are made for union with him, and nothing about us works right without it.
The true essence of strength is passed to us from God through our union with him. Notice what a deep and vital part of King David’s life this is. Remembering that he is a man’s man, a warrior for sure, listen to how he describes his relationship to God in the Psalms: “I love you, O LORD, my strength.” And again: “But you, O LORD, be not far off; O my Strength, come quickly to help me.” That is not the language of clinical religion. That is a warrior at the feet of his King.
And God never does the healing the same way twice. He spits on one guy; for another, he spits on the ground and makes mud and puts that on his eyes. To a third he simply speaks; a fourth he touches; and a fifth he kicks out a demon. There are no formulas with God. The way in which God heals our wound is a deeply personal process.
When the Bible tells us that Christ came to “redeem mankind,” it offers a whole lot more than forgiveness. To simply forgive a broken man is like telling someone running a marathon, “It’s okay that you’ve broken your leg. I won’t hold that against you. Now finish the race.” That is cruel, to leave him disabled that way. No, there is much more to our redemption.
The core of Christ’s mission is foretold in Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners.” The Messiah will come, he says, to bind up and heal, to release and set free. What? Your heart. Christ comes to restore and release you, your soul, the true you. This is the central passage in the entire Bible about Jesus, the one he chooses to quote about himself when he steps into the spotlight in Luke 4 and announces his arrival. So take him at his word: ask him in to heal all the broken places within you and unite them into one whole and healed heart. Ask him to release you from all bondage and captivity, as he promised to do.
And here is the warning that hangs over the whole process: to do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do — to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst — is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed.
Chapter Eight — A Battle to Fight: The Enemy
C. S. Lewis was direct about it: “Enemy-occupied territory — that is what this world is.” Every man is a warrior inside, but the choice to fight is his own. He must have a cause to which he is devoted even unto death, for this is written into the fabric of his being. Above all else, a warrior has a vision; he has a transcendence to his life, a cause greater than self-preservation. The root of all our woes and our false self was this: we were seeking to save our life, and we lost it. Christ calls a man beyond that. “Whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:35). This isn’t just about being willing to die for Christ; it’s much more daily than that.
Whatever specific terrain you are called to — at home, at work, in the realm of the arts or industry or world politics — you will always encounter three enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. They make up a sort of unholy trinity. Because they always conspire together, in any battle at least two of them are involved, but usually it’s all three.
Things began to change for a man named Carl when he saw his whole sexual struggle not so much as sin but as a battle for his strength. He wants to be strong, wants it desperately, and that desire began to fuel his choice to resist. This is the reframe that changes everything: a man’s addictions are the result of his refusing his strength. The enemy knows that, which is why the counterfeit always offers the feeling of strength without the cost of actually becoming strong.
”Without Christ a man must fail miserably or succeed even more miserably.” That is the only range of outcomes available to a man trying to fight on his own. A good question to ask yourself, and to keep asking: Where am I deriving my sense of strength and power from?
And consider this: has it ever crossed your mind that not every thought that crosses your mind comes from you? Who caused the Chaldeans to steal Job’s herds and kill his servants? Satan, clearly (Job 1:12, 17). Yet do we even give him a passing thought when we hear of terrorism today? Who kept that poor woman bent over for eighteen years, the one Jesus healed on the Sabbath? Satan, clearly (Luke 13:16). But do we consider him when a headache keeps us from praying or reading Scripture? Who moved Ananias and Sapphira to lie to the apostles? Satan again (Acts 5:3). But do we really see his hand behind a fallout or schism in ministry? The enemy relies on our blindness. The moment we stop looking for him, he has already won the opening move.
Chapter Nine — A Battle to Fight: The Strategy
Reality can be harsh, and you shut your eyes to it only at your peril — because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destroy you while you are facing the other way. You can’t fight a battle you don’t think exists. This is right out of The Screwtape Letters, where Lewis has the old devil instruct his apprentice in this very matter: “My dear Wormwood, I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves.”
Scripture doesn’t let us stay naive: “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings” (1 Peter 5:8–9). Commit yourself to prayer every morning for two weeks and just watch what happens. Satan will throw a thought or a temptation at you in hopes that you will swallow it. He knows your story, knows what works with you, and so the line is tailor-made to your situation.
The most dangerous man on earth is the man who has reckoned with his own death. All men die; few men ever really live. You can create a safe life for yourself and end your days in a rest home babbling on about some forgotten misfortune — or you can go down swinging. The less we are trying to “save ourselves,” the more effective a warrior we will be. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
Against the flesh — the traitor within — a warrior uses discipline. Most men have a hard time sustaining any sort of devotional life because it has no vital connection to recovering and protecting their strength; it feels about as important as flossing. But if you saw your life as a great battle and knew you needed time with God for your very survival, you would do it. Time with God each day is not about academic study or getting through a certain amount of Scripture or any of that. It’s about connecting with God. Keep those lines of communication open and use whatever helps: sometimes music, other times Scripture or a passage from a book; often journaling; maybe a run; then there are days when all you need is silence and solitude and the rising sun. The point is simply to do whatever brings you back to your heart and the heart of God. The whole point of a devotional life is connecting with God — this is our primary antidote to the counterfeits the world holds out. If you do not have God, and have him deeply, you will turn to other lovers. As one writer put it, “When Christ ceases to fill the heart with satisfaction, our souls will go in silent search of other lovers.”
A man will devote long hours to his finances when he has a goal of early retirement; he’ll endure rigorous training when he aims to run a marathon. The ability to discipline himself is there, dormant for many of us. When a warrior is in service to a True King — that is, to a transcendent cause — he does well, and his body becomes a hardworking servant, which he requires to endure cold, heat, pain, wounds, hunger, lack of sleep, and hardship of all kinds. The prayer that flows from that life is simple and keeps a man honest: show me where the larger story is unfolding, and keep me from being so lax that I think the most important thing today is the soap operas of this world.
The full armor of God described in Ephesians 6 is not a metaphor to admire — it is equipment to wear: the belt of truth buckled around your waist, the breastplate of righteousness in place, feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, the shield of faith to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests — be alert, and always keep on praying.
But don’t even think about going into battle alone. Don’t try to take the masculine journey without at least one man by your side. Yes, there are times a man must face the battle alone in the wee hours of the morning and fight with all he has. But don’t make that a lifestyle of isolation. The friendless condition of the average American male is a serious problem. Men find it hard to accept that they need the fellowship of other men. We don’t need accountability groups; we need fellow warriors — someone to fight alongside, someone to watch our back. Yes, we need men to whom we can bare our souls. But that isn’t going to happen with a group of guys you don’t trust, who aren’t really willing to go to battle with you. There is never a more devoted group of men than those who have fought alongside one another — the men of your squadron, the guys in your foxhole. It will never be a large group, but we don’t need a large group. We need a band of brothers willing to shed their blood with us.
Chapter Ten — A Beauty to Rescue
So many couples wake one day to find they no longer love each other. Most passionate romances seem to end with evenings in front of the TV. Why do most of us get lost somewhere between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after”? The answer begins with a question every woman carries from childhood: Am I lovely? Every woman needs to know that she is exquisite and exotic and chosen. This is core to her identity, the way she bears the image of God. Will you pursue me? Do you delight in me? Will you fight for me? And a hesitant man is the last thing in the world a woman needs. She needs a lover and a warrior, not a Really Nice Guy.
Consider Joseph, the carpenter. Mary, his engaged young woman — almost still a girl — turns up pregnant with a pretty wild story: she is carrying God’s child. The situation is scandalous. Joseph is hurt, confused, and no doubt feeling betrayed. But he’s a good man; he will not have her stoned, he will simply “divorce her quietly” (Matthew 1:19). It takes an angel in a dream — which tells you what it sometimes takes to get a good man to do the right thing — to convince him that Mary is telling the truth and that he is to follow through with the marriage. And this is going to cost him. Shunned by his business associates and most of his clients, certain to lose his standing in society and perhaps even his place in the synagogue — notice the insult crowds will later use against Jesus: “Isn’t this Joseph and Mary’s son?” — a sneer and a nudge and a wink. In other words: we know who you are — the bastard child of that slut and her foolish carpenter. Joseph will pay big-time for this move. Does he withhold? No. He offers Mary his strength; he steps right between her and all of that mess and takes it on the chin. He spends himself for her.
The masculine journey takes a man away from the woman so that he might return to her. He goes to find his strength; he returns to offer it. Pornography is what happens when a man insists on being energized by a woman rather than bringing his energy to her — he uses her to get a feeling that he is a man. Far too many men choose a woman who will make them feel like a man but never really challenge them to be one.
The book of Ruth is devoted to one question: how does a good woman help her man to play the man? The answer: she seduces him. She uses all she has as a woman to arouse him to be a man. She can emasculate him — “I thought you were a real man; I guess I was wrong” — or she can arouse, inspire, and energize him, getting him to use all he’s got as a man. The difference is everything. As Dostoyevsky saw it, “Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing. There God and the Devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men.”
Chapter Eleven — An Adventure to Live
Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an adventure to be lived. God rigged the world in such a way that it only works when we embrace risk as the theme of our lives — which is to say, only when we live by faith. A man simply won’t be happy until he has adventure in his work, in his love, and in his spiritual life. God is intimately personal with us, and he speaks in ways that are peculiar to our own quirky hearts — not just through the Bible, but through the whole of creation. His word comes through sunsets and friends and films and music and wilderness and books. Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors — going where the world takes us, drifting with whatever current happens to be running the strongest. Most men spend the energy of their lives trying to eliminate risk, or squeezing it down to a more manageable size. If it works, if a man succeeds in securing his life against all risk, he’ll wind up in a cocoon of self-protection and wonder all the while why he’s suffocating. “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). You can lose your soul, by the way, long before you die.
When God set man on the earth he gave us an incredible mission — a charter to explore, build, conquer, and care for all creation. It was a blank page waiting to be written, a clean canvas waiting to be painted. And God never revoked that charter. It’s still there, waiting for a man to seize it. If you had permission to do what you really want to do, what would you do? Don’t ask how; that will cut your desire off at the knees. How is never the right question; how is a faithless question. It means, “unless I can see my way clearly I won’t believe it, won’t venture forth.” How is God’s department. He is asking you what. What is written in your heart? What makes you come alive? If you could do what you’ve always wanted to do, what would it be? A man’s calling is written on his true heart, and he discovers it when he enters the frontier of his deep desires.
Mystery is essential to adventure. More than that, mystery is the heart of the universe and the God who made it. There are no formulas with God — period. God is a Person, not a doctrine. He operates not like a system, not even a theological system, but with all the originality of a truly free and alive person. Take Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. The Israelites are staged to make their first military strike into the promised land — their D-Day — and God’s opening strategy is to have them march around the city blowing trumpets for a week, then on the seventh day do it seven times and give a big shout. It works marvelously, and it never happens again. There’s Gideon and his army reduced from thirty-two thousand to three hundred, their plan of attack being torches and water pots. That works splendidly too, and it also never happens again. Jesus heals the blind and never does it the same way twice. The rule that emerges from all of this is simply: “Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as he is with you.”
A woman doesn’t want to be related to with formulas, and she certainly doesn’t want to be treated like a project that has answers to it. She doesn’t want to be solved; she wants to be known. The same is true of God. The only way to live in this adventure — with all its danger and unpredictability and immensely high stakes — is in an ongoing, intimate relationship with him. Simple questions change hassles to adventures; the events of our lives become opportunities for initiation. What are you teaching me here, God? What are you asking me to do… or to let go of? What in my heart are you speaking to? That posture — curious, attentive, and willing — is what keeps a man fully alive inside the story God is still writing.
Chapter Twelve — Writing the Next Chapter
We are free to change the stories by which we live. We are co-authors as well as characters, and few things are as encouraging as the realization that things can be different — and that we have a role in making them so. The wound does not have to be the final word. The false self does not have to be the permanent self. The battles yet unfought, the beauty yet unpursued, the adventure yet unlived — none of that is closed to you. Pick up the pen. The next chapter is yours to write.