How Boys Become Men

This week I discuss the necessity of reading the bible correctly, in order to rightly raise boys to become men. Too many of the worlds experts on this topic are creating false narratives that are biblically backwards. Boys must be taught to trust God's promises and gifts to become the man God built them to be. 

Transcript

Ethan: 0:02

Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture

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This is Raising joyful children in an angry world. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. This week is Reformation Week, and I want to talk today about how understanding the biblical ideas in the Reformation one, particularly, is beneficial in raising boys to become men. This is a topic that is being widely discussed outside of Christianity and what sometimes they call the man phe. And many non-Christian ideas from the world's definitions, methods and belief I believe are dripping into the Christian family. Jordan Peterson, great speaker, has a lot of wonderful arguments about the influence of feminism, but I wanna suggest having listened to him and read some of his stuff, he has clearly missed reformational and biblical understanding of becoming a man. And I would say the reason is. Now if Luther were around, he'd say, he reads the Bible backwards. What does that mean? You say? Well, the Reformation spoke about a lot of things, but one of the more difficult and yet most important thing is how to read the Bible and the concept of boyhood to manhood cannot be grasped in the Christian worldview without getting this right. I would also suggest it's gonna be hard to raise a daughter to be a strong woman without getting this right. Luther pointed to indicatives and imperatives. What is that? An indicative is a statement of fact, what God has declared as true and a promise that he is made to you and me. They are statements like. I am the way, the truth and the light. No one comes to the father except by me. That is an indicative promise statement of fact. What is an imperative? If you love me, you will obey me. It's an if you do this, if you do that, types of statements, those are imperatives. And what Luther would say and what the way to read the Bible is to start with what God has done. Before we get to the, if you statements, and I'm afraid what, what many of us have been raised in is if I do this, then God will do that. You start with the imperative rather than the proclamation of the promise. Rather than saying, God has stated this fact about me. This is what God has done for me. Therefore, I'm empowered to follow him. Now we start with it the other way around. If I do this, then God will do that. And unfortunately, what what that does is, is it makes God dependent on your actions and you end up removing certainty so you, so you leave yourself and the soul and the declarations of what God has said about your son in an anxious uncertainty. Let me give you a simple example that I think makes this clear. God goes to Samuel and tells him to anoint David as the future king of Israel. Before this young boy throws the stone that slays Goliath, he has been declared an anointed and given the promise by God, God declares his kingship before he becomes the king. Before he does. These imperatives. See, many of us, I'm afraid, have been brought up you may not recognize Rudyard Kipling because he's, uh, died in 1936, but you, you may be familiar with the poem. If you keep your head when all about you or losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowances for their doubting to. If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, and it goes on through all these kinds of virtuous statements. And then it says, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distant run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more, you'll be a man, my son. It's a whole understanding of becoming a man based on if you can. Rather than understanding becoming a man, because God made you to become a man, he has declared you to become a man. He has given you the power to become what is strong and powerful and courageous. It starts in Psalm eight. Speaking of David, he says he has ordained the mouse of babes and sucklings with strength to silence, Avengers and Foes. See the path to manhood from boyhood involves certainly mastering the skills God has given, trusting what God has revealed and empowered. But it starts with trusting the facts and the promises. The indicatives, the things that God has set are facts. Ephesians six, this is where we get into the kind of the confusion on the, if you, it says, put on the helmet of salvation. What is salvation? It's a declaration of fact that God has saved us the breastplate of righteousness. What is it? It's a promise that has taken our sinfulness and given us his righteousness, the belt of truth. I am the truth way in the life. It's always going back to what God has declared as facts and believing and trusting those facts. It's not an, if you do this feat, then you get the armor. The armor has been given. Just put it on. Now I, I, I think we can use things to help build confidence in sports and hunting and whatever we want to do to hand down to our sons. But we can't put these as proofs as tests. You know? Yes. Boys have to be prodded, I believe, into manhood, and yes, they need their confidence build up, but Reformation speaking, we build them up and we prod them by telling them what God has declared about them. The world we live in I see, is obsessed in two areas regarding this topic. One is largely sports and the other is sex. Now this world is filled with proof test slaying the dragon, swimming with the sharks, climbing the mountain, overcoming the great odds, and the other is obsessed in, in, in human sexuality. So many people parrot these ideas about sports making boys into men without explaining how it does this or any explanation of what we're actually seeing in the sports world. This season we're seeing college football looks more like a coliseum, where fans are shouting fire, fire the coach, fire the coach, and the coach is like some gladiator sitting there with an athletic director giving the thumbs up or thumbs down. We even got governors of states getting involved with this and, and then we've got the NCAA announcing this week. The college athletes will now be permitted to make bets on professional sports, not college, of course, because they've seen how widely this is being done in the recent NBA scandal. I mean, the concern for parents that are raising children is that we can't raise kids with this kind of view of winning any cost. Fire the coach if he's not winning my championship ring, because that's gonna confuse your understanding of God and at worst it, it may ruin it. And this world of psychology that's so influenced by Freud and, and new versions of Freud that sees everything through some line of human sexuality all this sort of stuff that sons must break, some weird bond with their mothers in the school, uh, takes people down these paths and, and it really gets us off of the biblical message in this topic. Fortitude, courage, altruism, whatever. The virtues of manhood, they're not gonna come by diving into some twisted sexual theories by Freud. What we do is we explain what God has declared about his people and the facts of the resurrection, and we challenge our sons to live in the power of God's promises. That is where real strength resides and where manhood will come alive there's, there's a recent book I think that really points out how we get so far away from this. It's a book called, you Are a Tree by a young lady named Joy Clarkson. And she points out that we talk so much metaphorically like machines. You pushed my buttons, my tank's emptied. I'm not wired that way. And that's not the way the Bible speaks. That's, that's, that's programming. That's if you do, you'll become kind of talk. And she reminds us, right? You go to the first psalm and it speaks about, you know, blessed is the man not walking with the wicked, hanging out with the sinful company of Mockers, which now looks a lot like the sports media in this country. But rather this person has a delight in God's law because he is like a tree planted by streams of water. That's an indicative. God is the potter. We are the clay. Jesus is the shepherd. We are the sheep. The tree doesn't decide to be planted. No. God plants you by the stream of water. God is the one that is shaping us and God is giving us his promises. And the reformational reading of the Bible is by letting those facts of God's promises shape what we trust and how a boy becomes a man. Trust these things. Trust what God has declared. Do not make it something you have to do in order for God to act. Instead, believe God has acted and now trust and live in that promise. God has made your son to become a man. Feed on that truth. Live in a world that confirms that idea. Ignore and avoid all people teaching and institutions that reject it. There is no if of doubt when it comes to what God has promised and what he has created your son to become.

Paul: 10:42

The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong.

Paul (2): 10:55

Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.