Be a Man

Read: 1 Timothy 4:12-13

Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.                      

                                                                                                              1 Corinthians 16:13

     I sat in the food court of the mall the other night and observed the droves of young men file past me, unaware that they were being watched. The one thought that kept floating through my mind was, “Where has manliness gone?” I was appalled by the way these young “men” flitted about, looking just like the girls they were walking with. The softness of their manner and the wimpiness in their actions left me wondering if men like George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, or D.L. Moody would have ever become what they became if they had acted the same way when they were teenagers. The obvious answer was a resounding “No!”

      The number of true men boys have to emulate is dwindling, but Jesus is the greatest example of manliness. He was not some floppy-haired metro-sexual with skinny jeans. He was a real man. He had enough emotions to cry at the tomb of Lazarus, and he had enough backbone to overturn the tables of the money changers in the temple. A typical young man today would have tiptoed into the temple (brushing hair out of his eyes), and as soon as someone said, “You can‘t be in here talking like that,” he would have responded with something like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I must have accidentally come into the wrong place.” And he would have left! Jesus had the grit to endure the torture He had to face to make it to the cross. The typical young man would have stopped with the first whipping on the way to Calvary. He never would have even made it to Golgotha let alone through the entire process of being crucified. Today’s generation of boys has long forgotten the era when young men worked alongside their fathers in the fields and learned skills and trades at a very young age. That has been replaced with boys who know nothing of manliness, but only how to play video games, listen to head phones, and text on cell phones.

     It is time for young men, especially Christians, to put down the video game controller, and pick up the Bible and read it. Get off of Facebook. Leave the social media frenzies to the girls. In an age when manliness is escaping faster than snow in the heat, it is not time for Christian young men to cower and bend to what society tells them they must be. It is time to stand up and look and act like a man. 

 

Quote of the day: “Big men become big by doing things they didn’t want to do when they didn’t want to do it.”