The Responsibility of Manhood

Amen.

Good morning.

My name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here at Missio.

It's my honor to welcome you.

Happy Father's Day.

We are so excited that you're here to celebrate with us.

You might not have come here to actually celebrate Father's Day.

Hopefully, you came here to celebrate Jesus.

But at the same time, Jesus makes us good fathers.

And so we're thankful that you are here.

And we're hopeful that this morning you'll be able to be filled with hope of the gospel of what Christ has accomplished for us and that we would actually be pointed to our perfect and true Father that we've been reconciled to by Jesus and his finished work.

And so for some of us, Father's Day can be really difficult, right?

Some of us want to be fathers and we're not.

Some of us have had bad fathers or absent fathers.

Some of us have lost fathers too soon.

Some of us have just come to this day and it's a difficult day.

And so we recognize that.

And our hope is not to just lavish some type of falseness of what it means to be a dad, but our hope is that we would point you to the truth that in Christ we can walk in manhood.

We can walk as fathers of many spiritual children, and that we can be those who are reconciled in relationship to God the Father.

This morning I would hope that you would uh uh be praying for me.

I've Friday I got uh went to the doctor, I had been feeling sick, and I had uh they said I had either bronchitis or walking pneumonia, one of the two.

And so they gave me uh four different medications just to cover both.

And I've so I'm feeling pretty good right now because I got steroids in me, I got all these other things.

And so feeling strong, if I start hacking in the middle of this thing or I pass out, just get me a donut and pop me back up.

Uh I'll be good to go.

But uh nonetheless, we're gonna be in the book of Genesis.

And so if you have a Bible, go ahead and open it uh to the book of Genesis.

Genesis is the actually the very first book of the Bible, so you don't have to turn very far.

If you don't have a Bible, uh, we'll have everything on the screen for you to follow along with.

We want to make that easy for you.

Uh, but we'd also encourage you and love to give you a gift of a Bible to have.

We have them at the welcome desk back there.

They'll be our gift to you to have a Bible that you can take home and study God's word uh in your own home.

And so we would love to be able to have that as a gift for you.

But we're gonna be in Genesis and we're gonna kind of dive right in.

I've got a lot of notes that I'm gonna hopefully cover.

We've got a lot of ground to make up, and so we're gonna be jumping right into the text.

I might need another one of these.

This is coffee.

With yeah, just coffee.

Um, I'm joking.

It's really just coffee.

Uh coffee black.

That's how I like it.

All right, uh, but uh we're gonna be diving right into the text.

So um let's look at what God has for us this Father's Day coming up in the book of Genesis.

So Genesis chapter 2, we're gonna be looking at verses 7 through 8, and then we're gonna skip down and look through 15 through 17.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

This is gonna be our opening text this morning.

It says this Genesis 2, 7 through 8.

Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

And the man became a living creature, and the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

Verse 15, jumping down.

Thank you, sweetheart.

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

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of the trees of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

This is the word of the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises.

So this morning my hope is that I would work to lay what I believe is a foundation for biblical manhood.

This is something that we see here at Missio as what it means to be a biblical man, how the Bible compels us and portrays men to act and behave and to be formed around these certain principles.

And so for Father's Day, I thought it'd be good to try and lay this foundation.

Now, some of you might ask why.

I believe that the absence of strong men in our culture is one of the leading issues for a lot of the damaging things we see wrong today.

Absence of strong men, of faithful men, and ultimately we're seeing a large problem with fatherlessness in America.

According to an NPR article titled Poverty, Dropouts, Pregnancy, Suicide, What the Numbers Say About Fatherless Kids was published in June 18th of 2017.

It says this 40% of children in first through 12th grade do not live with their biological fathers.

That's 25 million kids in America.

25 million kids.

According to this article, it goes on to say that seven out of ten high school dropouts are from homes where there's an absent father.

When it asks how it maybe affects gender differently, it says that actually it's easier to see in girls than it is in boys because what they've discovered through their study is that girls are twice as likely likely to suffer from obesity and four times more likely to become pregnant.

And then in another article put out by the Center of Disease Control, according to their research, 85%, 85% of abortions in 2015 happened from single women.

Now that 85% was out of a grand total of 913,000 abortions that was given and performed that year.

So according to the math, over 750,000 children might have been saved by men being men and not playing the part when they actually are just acting like boys.

I think we can begin just by looking at some of the very easy to find numbers that we have an issue of fatherlessness and an absence of real men in our culture.

I think that's a conclusion we can easily come to.

And we have to understand that the father plays a vital and distinct role in the home.

Often when we think about terms like biblical manhood, it's really hard for us to put functional definitions around it, right?

We often, as people, and especially myself, we can often get tied in instead of trying to put functional definitions around what biblical manhood might be, we start to draw caricatures of what they might look like, right?

Maybe for some of you you see like this burly dude who wears red and black flannel and just hunts his own food like all the time.

That's all he does.

Or maybe you see a mechanic, a guy who really works with his hands, he can fix anything.

Maybe you see uh an MMA fighter, a guy who can just go in there, handle business, he doesn't have to be scared.

We can begin drawing these caricatures about what manhood should look like.

The problem is that's not what manhood should look like necessarily.

In fact, I would make an argument, I hope that I can build a case for this morning, that masculinity and biblical manhood can have a very diverse expression, but it does have fundamental values and structures that help build it.

So we want to not begin with a caricature, but with a functional definition, and we want to create space inside of our culture and inside of our church for diverse expression.

I tell people a lot that I have learned more about biblical manhood from a professional ballet dancer than I have from most other men.

And he is a phenomenal leader in our city.

He works with uh young boys constantly to try and develop them into men.

He has a very flourishing ministry here in the city, and he was once a professional ballet dancer, and this brother will school me on what it means to be a man.

So I don't want us to get caught in caricature.

I want us to get caught in definition that we can function in no matter the expression of our masculinity.

So, how are we gonna define biblical manhood?

This is how we at Missio work to define it.

It's this biblical manhood is taking redemptive responsibility for the people and things around us.

Biblical manhood is taking redemptive responsibility for the people and things around us.

Let's see how we get there.

As we're gonna look at this unfolding story in Genesis, we're really gonna kind of work through four scenes.

Now, one thing that we actually struggle with in this opening creation narrative is it's not very linear.

In fact, the writer of this narrative jumps around quite a bit.

So there's some portions where we're working linear, right?

First day, second day, third day, but then it kind of jumps where there's man and woman created, and then there's man created, but woman's not there, and then all of a sudden woman's there and they're in the garden, they're working, they're here, they're there.

And so what we're gonna do is skip around a little bit to try and build a more linear framework for the narrative that's being told, rather than sticking with it verse by verse through the way that it actually is written in Genesis.

And so we started with Genesis 2, 7 through 8, 15 through 17.

And this is what we discover this is that Adam was created first.

So when God made man, he got intimate in his creating, and he got down and he formed man out of the dust, and he breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of Adam, and he began to breathe and have life and being in him.

As far as all other aspects of creation, we see this more distant uh relationship between God and creation.

He speaks and then boom, there it is.

He says, Let there be light, there's light.

Let there be vegetation, there's vegetation.

Let there be beasts of the field and birds of the air, and boom, there they were.

But this time, God is going to get intimately near with his creation.

He's gonna form and shape him with his very hands, and then he's gonna breathe the breath of life in him.

And so Adam, the man, was created first.

And then what does the Lord do?

The Lord God takes Adam, this man, and he places him in this garden that God had created.

And he says that Lord, he the Lord tells Adam that your job is to work this garden, this creation of which I have made and I have placed you in, your job is to work it.

And so what we see very quickly in the very beginning of the creation of man is that man is given mission by God.

Before there was ever a helper, man was given mission by God.

And he was called to work and to keep.

And so when we look at this closely, we have to look at a few things.

One is that mission is established before sin ever enters the world.

Min was called and ordained to live on mission from the very beginning of creation.

We have a job to do.

And in fact, men was given mission well before he was ever given a helper.

There's so many times that we do premarriage counseling or we're working with young people who are struggling to figure out what's the next step for their life, and there's so many times where it's like we're finding that these young men want helpers before they even understand mission.

That's really not the way that we see it in the narrative.

God will give you a helper once you understand the mission that she's going to help you with.

You see, you don't want to frustrate a woman in the way that she was designed by calling her on something that is absent of mission because her purpose is to help you cultivate the call and work that God has established for you to do.

That's what she's designed.

And we have homes that are filled with frustration and tension and contention because the mission that she you have called her on to help you with is to make you a sandwich while you watch cars grow in a circle over and over again.

No, man was given mission before he was ever given helper.

And this is what God told Adam to do.

He said, I want you to do two things.

I want you to work it and I want you to keep it.

These are the two things that I want you to do.

When we look at these commands of God for the mission of Adam in his creative garden, what we see is that to work it means to actually labor to serve another.

You see, Adam's work was twofold.

He was to labor to serve all that God had created.

He was to feed and cultivate and take care of and nurture all that God had given under his control.

But also his labor was for another.

His labor was to serve for the glory and majesty of the creator who had placed him there on mission in the first place.

So Adam was never a worker of self.

Adam was from the very beginning created to be a worker of another.

And then God said, Adam, you're also supposed to keep the garden.

That means to protect it.

Adam was to defend what God had created.

Adam was to protect fiercefully what God had created and placed him in charge of.

Man had responsibility that was ordained to him by his creator with one restriction.

Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That was the only restriction that God had given Adam.

Everything that I've made is yours.

You can have all that you want.

It's under your control.

You're to work it and you're to keep it.

But Adam, one thing I'm telling you is don't eat of this tree.

We're going to see how that plays out for him in just a second.

And so scene one is the creation of man.

Scene two, let's dive deeper into the mission of man.

And we see this in Genesis one.

We're going to back up and actually go through Genesis 1, 27 through 28, and it says this.

So God created man in his own image, and the image of God he created him, male and female, he created them.

And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and 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.

So what we see here is a more defined and robust understanding of the mission that God had called Adam into.

And now at this point, Adam has discovered for himself a helper.

You see, God had brought all of his creation before Adam and said, We're going to try to find a helper suitable for you for the mission of which I've called you on.

And he searched and he looked and he interviewed and he put him through the process and he said, I haven't found one.

And so Father put him to sleep, took out his rib, and he fashioned and formed and made a helper who would be suitable for the man of whom he'd called on mission.

And so at this point, Adam has his perfect helper.

The woman has been created out of man to be his helper.

Equal in value, dignity, and worth, but distinct in role and responsibility.

A helper on a mission which was already given to the man.

And here, I want to kind of show us how this works out in a more uh uh transcendent nature because if we look at why marriage exists in an Ephesians revelation that Paul had given the church at Ephesus when he says that this marriage, this thing called a husband and wife, is actually a mystery or a portrait of Christ and his bride.

You see, what we are seeing here is that the church is on mission, but the church is not uniquely on mission because it's not our mission that we're called to fulfill.

You see, Christ is on mission.

Christ is resurrected, reigning king over all of earth, and he is actively on mission to see the restoration and redemption of all things.

We as the church do not get to create a new mission.

If we are going to be faithful helpers, submissive brides to the true bridegroom who is seeing all things renewed through his power and glory, then we will submit to follow and help cultivate as true helpers the mission that he's already on.

You see, it's that fundamental name of Mystiode, this theological phrase that we cause for some of you who might stumble in here the first time and thinking we might be a Spanish-speaking church, I apologize.

No, we named our church when we thought Latin names were super cool.

We figured out that's not the case anymore.

However, we still will press on because the theological implications behind it mean something.

And fundamentally, when we unpack what that means, it is that God is on mission and we as the church are joining him on it.

Do you see the parallel that we are noticing?

That man is called on mission and then God creates for him a helper.

Christ, the true man, is on mission for the glory of his name and the redemption of all things, and we, his bride, are his true helper to help cultivate and see it come to completion.

This is not about us, this is about Christ and his glory.

So the Lord calls for the man and the woman to fulfill his mission given to them through two means.

And we see these two means here laid out in this instructive passage.

Number one is this through multiplication.

Mankind was meant to stretch the boundaries of Eden with the image of God.

You see, what God did is he established a garden, he established this boundary, this layout of what could be or what would be, and then he placed man in the middle of it.

But then there was this empty canvas that existed beyond the bounds of Eden, and God said, Adam, Eve, be fruitful, multiply, and fill it.

Our call, our mission was to stretch the bounds of Eden of what could be, that the earth might be filled with his glory, so that the earth would be filled with his glory through the reflection of himself in the midst of his highest creation.

You see, what we look at is that God had created a temple, earth.

And the first thing you do when you build a temple is you fill it with an image of a God.

And so what did he do?

He made man, he made woman to reflect and resemble him.

And his glory would be seen and known throughout all of earth as that image reproduced and multiplied and filled, and his temple would be full of his image, full of his glory.

The second thing that he called him to do is to have dominion.

So the first means by accomplishment of mission was multiplication, the second means of the accomplishment of mission was dominion.

Both the man and woman would be able to exercise authority and ruling power over God's creation.

Man was called to be God's representative head, to place all of creation under his dominion.

A ruler who would work and subdue for the flourishing of all things.

You see, when we hear the word ruler, dominion, subdue, we get fearful.

We get fearful because we've not known good kings.

We get fearful because we've not known good rulers.

But this ruler, this one who would exercise and practice his dominion over all of creation, would not practice or exercise said authority for his own prosperity and his own gain.

No, he would exercise it and practice it throughout all creation that all creation might achieve their maximum possible flourishing.

You see, that's what a good king does.

A good king exercises his authority for the flourishing of others.

We have not known good kings.

So to hear that, we get fearful.

Scene three, the disobedience of man.

Genesis 3, 4 through 6 says this.

And then the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die.

For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

And he ate.

While it is true that the woman was deceived first, she was not absent of her husband in the process.

You see, Adam allowed for the serpent to have entry in space inside the very garden that he was called to protect.

Adam put off his responsibility as the representative head and allowed the serpent to cultivate deception.

Ultimately, Adam failed to kill the snake.

You see, that's what he should have done.

As the representative head, as the one who was put in charge, as the one who was supposed to protect and keep and work.

What Adam should have done, and he failed to do, was to cut off the head of the snake to ensure that God's creation would remain safe.

Though Eve first bit the fruit, it was Adam's casting off of responsibility that ushered in sin and death to all image-bearers.

Romans 5:12 says this.

Romans 5:12

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

You see, it was the responsibility, the man who was given ultimate responsibility to care for and protect all of God's creation.

He was the representative head.

And even though he did not bite first, he cast off his responsibility well before Eve ever tasted the fruit.

He fell, he sinned before she bit.

And so being the representative, being the one who bore the ultimate responsibility, sin was ushered into all image bearers.

But the truth is this every single one of us would have done the same thing.

There is no hypothetical situation.

There is no philosophical spin where you can't just say that every time a quarter falls off your desk and it lands on heads, or one time a quarter falls off your desk and lands on heads that every single time it's going to.

No, true.

Philosophically, you can't make that conclusion.

But what the scriptures tell us that all have sin, that active participation, is that every single one of us who would have been in his same circumstance would have done the exact same thing.

And the problem is we continue to do it even today.

In some form, in some fashion, we all wake up and we take a bite of what looks like to be such beautiful fruit.

So man fell.

But he did not leave them hopeless.

Because in scene four we see the restoration of man, the beginning of it.

Genesis 3.15 says this.

God speaking to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.

He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

You see, we understand this theologically as the proto-evangelion.

This means that it is the first gospel.

The first time that this hope-filled message is proclaimed is not by man, but it is by God Himself, as He is handing out cursing to those who disobeyed Him, who those who rebelled against Him, He gives this message and proclamation of hope that this will not last forever, because, devil, there's someone coming.

There's someone coming.

God declared that though the first Adam failed to crush the head of the serpent, there will be coming a second head crusher.

Romans 5.17 shows us this: that for if because of one man's trespass death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

You see, we needed a second Adam to come and fulfill what the first Adam failed to do.

And so, what's the main idea for us this morning?

It's this.

Just like the first man, all men have failed to bear their ordained responsibility.

Just like the first man, all men have failed to bear their ordained responsibility.

We see this happening in two ways.

First way is this some of us put off the responsibility that we're commanded to carry.

Some of us put off the responsibility that we're commanded to carry.

You see, we're passive men who rely on others to pick up our slack.

We make it a felt need for women to step up into spaces that they weren't designed to fulfill.

Men who put off responsibility cause hard times to flourish in their homes and in their culture.

You see, there's a lot of tension in our culture right now where women are feeling the felt need to step up into places that they were never designed to occupy.

And it's because we have weak men who are putting off the responsibility and we're celebrating beta men instead of alpha men, according to titles of our culture, who are putting off the responsibility that they have been given by God to reflect and represent.

And so women are having to step up to carry the slack.

We're putting unnecessary burdens on the shoulders of women, and they're being broken and fractured under the weight of it.

Look at our culture's disgust for men.

Look at it.

If you are a man and you try to voice your opinion on anything, you will see a high retaliation from a large group of women.

And you can call it wickedness all day, that's fine.

But we have to understand that it's also an overflow of brokenness.

Because weak men have put off responsibility.

You see, instead of being men who bear that responsibility, who seek to work for the flourishing of all of God's creation so that culture is redeemed, so that their homes are redeemed.

No, the thing that flourishes most in our culture and in our homes is hard and difficult times.

There's this poem that I really like.

I was introduced to it a couple years ago, and it says this it says, Hard times make strong men.

Strong men make good times.

Good times make weak men.

Weak men make hard times.

And the cyclical nature of that, you can see it as you just look throughout our history.

And we are in a season, we are in an era that I would argue weak men are making for hard, hard times.

So some of us put off the responsibility that we're commanded to carry, others of us, though, we pervert the responsibility that we're commanded to carry.

We pervert the responsibility we're commanded to carry.

We are not passive men, we're aggressive men who abuse our headship for self-gain.

We were called to use our headship for the flourishing of others, and instead we use it to falsely build up ourselves.

We place fear in women to fulfill God's beautiful and holy commands of submission.

And ultimately we build distrust in a good God.

When we pervert the responsibility bore to us, when we are aggressive men who seek to use that dominion and authority for the gain of self, we build distrust that there could be a good God.

And culture has such a hard time grasping that.

Like I said, we have not found ourselves under good kings.

And so this concept of dominion and authority and power is terrifying to us.

And so many of us men, we have perverted the responsibility given to us and we've aggressively used it for our self-gain.

And what we've done is we have fed and fed that distrust.

How could there be a good God?

As a woman, how could I submit to something that's going to end up hurting me?

How could I enjoy fulfill the commands of the scriptures to follow and help and submit when I'm terrified of what's on the other side of it?

Just like the first man, all men have failed toward to bear their ordained responsibility.

But the beauty of the gospel is this Jesus is our representative head crusher.

Jesus is our representative head crusher.

In complete power and taking full responsibility, Jesus laid down his life for the flourishing of his Father's children.

Before we were able to be restored as representatives of God, Jesus had to die as a representative of us.

Through Christ's death, he fulfilled what was demanded for our sin.

And through his resurrection, he fulfilled what was demanded for our restoration.

We are not only forgiven for our failure, but we are restored to renewed representatives.

We have been given the mission once again, but now Christ's authority is ours, and the Spirit's power has been given to us as well.

Our primary multiplication is not through the flesh, but in the new birth of the Spirit.

And our primary dominion is not through conquering, but through the laying down of our lives for the flourishing of others.

Jesus is our head crusher.

Where Adam failed to kill the snake, Jesus steps in and he severs his head clean off.

Praise God.

Praise God.

Men, think about some of your current situations.

In your home, in your work, in your culture.

Think about where you're seeing sin reign, where you're seeing disobedience and rebellion reign, where you're seeing your failure day after day.

Think about some of the circumstances where your children are being disobedient, where your wife just doesn't want to follow where your lead, where your work won't respect you or give you what you think that you deserve, where culture itself, you get on Facebook to try and put your opinion out there, and you are just brought to the slaughter for the public sacrifice of all to enjoy.

Just think about it.

Sin is reigning.

Where are you seeing situations in your life where the narrative is that sin is conquering?

Let me ask you this, men.

Do you believe that Christ has forgiven you of all your sin?

Do you believe that?

Every sin you ever have committed, every sin you are committing currently, and every sin that you ever will commit, do you believe that Christ has forgiven you of all of it?

More than that.

Do you believe that he has crucified the old man that you once were?

More than that.

Do you believe that through his resurrection power, that he has made you a new creation?

More than that.

Do you believe that he has placed his spirit who created all things, the power that gave life to the cosmos and all creation?

That he has placed that spirit within you, the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead now fills your very being?

More than that.

Do you believe that he has crushed the head of every single one of your foes?

More than that.

Do you believe that he has seated you on high with him at the right hand of the Father?

More than that.

Do you believe that you are in his hand and there is nothing that can pluck you from it?

Not even your own self or continued sin that you see in your life?

More than that.

Do you know that you are an overcomer in Christ Jesus and that there is no weapon formed against you that can prosper?

Do you believe it, men?

Then act like men.

If you believe it, act like it.

Stop wallowing in your failures like Christ didn't bury them in an eternal grave.

Stand up and act like men.

How do we do this?

Under the understanding the function of biblical manhood, we will create in us freedom for its diverse expression.

Like we said at the beginning, we want manhood to be expressed very diversely.

There's not one way.

There's a way I express manhood, right?

And we've kind of talked about this with some people lately, is that look, if I was a pastor who loved golf, I'd be up here giving all kinds of like, you know, sins like missing that ninth hole putt when it when you're on the approach.

Like I just, that's not me.

I don't do that.

I've I kind of enjoy cigars and I enjoy a bourbon or I enjoy different things.

So that's what I do.

That's how I express.

By no means, listen, church, right now, here and now, never ever assume or presume that I define or understand biblical manhood through the way that I uniquely express it.

If you don't enjoy those things, praise God.

That's okay.

I do, so I'm gonna do them.

Because I have liberty and freedom in the gospel.

And you guys have liberty and freedom in the gospel to watch cars go in the same circle 500 times.

Praise God.

If that's what you want to do and that gets you riled up like a man, man, do it and just eat a big old ham sandwich.

I don't care.

That's how you express manhood.

There's diversity in its expression.

But within that diversity, manhood must be shaped and formed through three distinct traits: man as a pastor, man as a protector, and man as a provider.

I'll get back to those.

John Piper, founder of Desiring God and a council member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, said in an article titled Valuing Biblical Manhood, he said this that the theology in the church and the mission are marked by overarching male leadership and an ethos of tender-hearted strength and contrite courage and risk-taking decisiveness and readiness to sacrifice, to protect, and provide for the community.

The feel of a great, majestic God making the men lovingly strong and the women intelligently secure.

I love that quote.

Well, how do we put these kind of foundational principles around this definition of biblical manhood?

We see three character traits arise: pastor, protector, provide.

Let's look at pastor.

In this role, men, we bear the responsibility to shepherd.

The home is a little church, and the father is the lead pastor.

You see, we have a responsibility to shepherd and to cultivate godliness inside of our homes.

We should be the first who are discipling our children.

We should be the first who are reading the scriptures, praying with them.

We should be the first.

It should not be absent of the mother.

And sometimes women, as we talked before, it's in spite of a father who won't do it.

But I'm telling you now, if we're going to bear the responsibility that God's called us to, men, we are called to be the lead pastors of our homes, and we should have the primary responsibility of discipling and shepherding our children.

And men, it's easy for us to view the role of the shepherd through the holding of the crook.

Right?

It's easy for us to see the role of the shepherd as the one who strikes down or who disciplines through force the obedience of the people in our home.

It's not that the role of the shepherd is absent of the crook, where discipline isn't necessary.

But we have to understand that we don't just shepherd the outward obedience of our children.

We must also uh pastor their hearts and their spirits as well.

I'll give you two examples.

This just happened this week.

So, Harper, who's four years old, we were having dinner the other night.

And uh what I've been noticing is that my wife eats last and her food's colder than mine.

Because we all sit down at the table and we're like all right, and then and then she's like still getting us drinks, and there's like kids like, I gotta go to the bathroom, I don't have a drink, I need ketchup.

Um, and so she's just constantly doing she when she sits down, her food's cold and unpleasant.

So I've been trying to have more consciousness about that.

And so uh, I think it was Friday night.

I said, Okay, we're not gonna eat until mama sits down at the table.

And some of them had, you know, start started to want to eat and things like that.

We were still getting drinks like this, and so um Harper, I see, has this piece of pulled pork in her fingers.

And I said, Harper, I said, we're not gonna eat until mama sits at the table.

She looked at me, I said, Harper, if you eat before your mother sits down to eat at this table, I will spank you.

And she looked straight into my soul and she licked that piece of pulled pork.

Didn't blink, didn't budge, and I said, get up.

And I walked her over into the other room, and I spanked her like I said that I would, and I sat her down.

In that moment, she needed the correction of her behavior.

She was purposely rebellious.

She looked at me with full uh intentionality to defy me, and in her four-year-old little heart, she did it.

Licking a piece of pulled pork.

But then I had another situation.

Piper, my eight-year-old daughter.

My she her sister Addison had came and told me that Piper had destroyed one of her toys.

And so I said, I'll have Piper come up here.

So Piper came up here and I said, Did you destroy one of Addie's toys?

Yes, she admitted to it, she was fine.

I said, Why did you do that?

She said, She didn't really know.

And so I thought, like, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna kind of be like King Solomon here.

I'm gonna feel super wise and awesome.

I said, Go down and pick out a toy of yours that is equal to the way that Addy values and sees that toy.

And so she went downstairs, and like a few minutes later, she comes up with this tiny little toy that's like precious to her, and she's looking at me like, what are you gonna do with this thing?

And I said, Give me the toy.

I took it and I held it up like I was gonna tear it into.

This is the King Solomon part, like where he, you know, I'm gonna cut this baby in half.

Who's the real mom?

So I felt that's what I kind of like, oh, I'm gonna show her.

And so I held the doll, and uh I at first, I'll just admit, I was ready to rip that thing in half just to prove a lesson, right?

And uh, she just started weeping and weeping.

And I um I thought this is a moment where I need to shepherd the heart.

And so I took the toy and I took her hand and I placed the toy back in and I looked at her and I said, I love you.

And sometimes, even in our disobedience, in our destruction, and in our sin, we are given grace.

And that's the gospel.

That Jesus doesn't give us what we deserve, sweetheart.

Jesus takes our punishment for us.

And I love you, and I want you to know that I'm not gonna destroy your toy, and I want you to know that Jesus loves you so much that he is not gonna destroy your soul because he's gonna give you grace.

And she cried some more, wiped her tears up, went down and played.

And that was a moment where I was able to exercise the shepherding of the heart of a child rather than just looking for outward physical obedience.

The father should do both as a pastor, it should not be absent of one or the other.

The second kind of person that we embody is to be a protector.

We're called to protect as men.

In this role, we bear the responsibility to defend.

This speaks to both the physical and spiritual.

In a spiritual perspective, we should be strong men who are able to identify and put down the wolves and serpents who try to come in our midst.

There's two things there.

One, men, you have to be understanding and trained in God's word enough that you can identify wolves and serpents.

There's too many men who cannot do that, who have not cultivated the gift of discernment in their own lives to be able to identify a false gospel from a true gospel, a heresy from the faithful proclaimed word of God.

And we welcome wolves and serpents into our Homes.

So not only do you have to come do you have to cultivate the ability to identify wolves and serpents, but then you have to cultivate the ability to be able to put them down.

You see, as the one of the uh pastors here at Missio, one of my primary jobs is to be able to discern and identify potential wolves and serpents.

And one of my primary jobs is to, when they rub their head rises up, we put them down.

That's what we're called to do.

We're called to protect the sheep.

What kind of pastor would I be if I allowed these predators to come in amidst the fold and steal you one by one?

Same thing in our home.

We have to have the ability to identify and the ability to put down the wolves and serpents who try to come in our midst.

Now, when it comes to a physical sense of defend the home, I want to say this.

There may be a case where the man is unable physically to be the defense of his family, but it does not dismiss his responsibility to protect them.

That man, even if physically unable to defend his family, must bear the responsibility to ensure that his family is protected.

That because of the disability in his life does not mean that the responsibility is cast off.

He still has to walk it through.

And so, no matter the case, I'm not saying you should all go out and start paying$100 a month for Krav Maga lessons.

I'm just saying that someplace, somehow, you have to be able to defend your home and protect that which God has given you.

Thirdly, we're supposed to provide for our families.

We're supposed to be men who provide.

In the same role, in this role, we bear the responsibility of others' needs.

Like the others, the physical is not absent of the spiritual.

The needs of others are placed in our primary care.

Food, shelter, clothing, they are placed in our primary care.

And we have to ensure that others' needs are met before our own are.

And we see that this is not just physical, this is also spiritual.

We should be the ones who lay down our lives constantly for the sake and benefit of others, so that their needs are met before our own.

And even in a spiritual sense, if we try to uh if we try to undo these from one another, then we see clearly in the book of James, how dare you say be uh to a starving man, well, be full and be blessed and walk away without giving them bread.

You see, to meet the needs of all of them around us, to meet the needs of those who God has put under our care, we actually have to do both.

We must give them bread if they are hungry, and then we must give them the bread of life for their souls so that they might feast and never hunger again.

You see, they're intertwined with one another, never separated.

And so, us as men, we must be men who pastor, protect, and provide as we seek to bear the responsibility, the redemptive responsibility for the people and things around us.

I want to do something this morning.

Typically in our liturgy, we have a time where we uh confess and we respond and we and we're gonna do all those things too.

But this week, as I was praying over this, looking at my own life uh and and looking at some of the research and things that I was, I just realized many of us, a lot of our failure comes from ignorance.

We just don't know how to be men.

We don't know how to function, we don't know how to act responsibly, we don't know how to perform in the ways that God has created us to.

I know if we if we are cultivating a fatherless generation, that cycle is gonna be true to where men are gonna operate much more out of ignorance than they are out of purposeful rebellion.

And I praise God for the men who God has brought into my life to be able to help me see what that looks like.

As a person who didn't have a father, uh, both not in my home for most of my life, and then when I went to live with him, he was still absent in every way you can describe for a relationship with me.

I didn't know what it was to be a man.

I searched as hard as I could to find it in him, and he didn't give it to me.

And so there was so much destruction in my life, to my wife, to uh some of my children, that still continues today because I'm still faulty learning what it means to be one.

So if you're a man in this congregation, and this is what I this is where this kind of this kind of comes from, is that in the New Testament we see where Paul challenges to stir these giftings inside through the laying on of hands.

And I think that we've been gifted by the Spirit of God to be taught what it means to be men.

I believe that we've been gifted by God's word to be able to be taught what it really means to be a man.

And I think that we need one another to help do that.

And so if you're a young man in this congregation or an older man in this congregation, and you want for us to pray over you and lay hands on you in an effort to stir up that gift that God might cultivate a biblical man within you and in your life, I want you to actually come forward and receive prayer this morning.

I'm gonna invite one of our members, Rick Ianello, to come forward as well and pray for men who come forward to receive that.

And so, right now, before we get into this time of confession and um taking of communion, if you want us to pray for you, I just want to make a space and time for us to lay hands on you and pray for you that God would begin stirring that gift and cultivating biblical manhood within your life.

So, Rick, if you come forward.

Thanks, brother.

Corey, can you mute my mic, please?