5 Ways to Be a Man Like Jesus

What does it mean to be a man? In this episode, we explore a clear framework—the five marks of manhood: strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. 

We delve into how Jesus perfectly exemplified each of these traits, demonstrating his manliness in ways that can inspire and guide us today. 

Join us as we learn from Jesus’ example to become better men and followers.

00:00 Introduction to the Five Marks of Manhood
01:56 Exploring the Five Marks: Strength, Courage, Skill, Honor, and Allegiance
04:44 Jesus as the Ultimate Model of Manhood
06:23 Strength: The Core of Manhood
11:08 Courage: Facing Challenges Head-On
14:28 Skill: Mastering the Art of Teaching
16:49 Honor and Allegiance: Building Respect and Loyalty
20:12 Conclusion: Emulating Jesus in Manhood
21:21 Join the Manhood Tribes Community

💪 Want to know how you measure up as a man? Take our free quiz, called How Manly Are You? and learn how you can get better at being a man. Download for free at manhoodtribes.com/manly. 💪

Transcript

Don Ross: 0:01

Guys, what if you had a clear framework for what it means to be a man, as well as the perfect model to demonstrate it for you so that you could follow along? On today's episode, I want to introduce or remind you of the five marks of manhood, and I want to tell you about how Jesus nailed every one of them. That's right. We're gonna talk about Jesus today and we're gonna talk about how he is the man most worthy of following. My name's Don, and here we are at the Manhood Tribes Channel, and we talk a lot about what it means to be a man, how to do that well, what the pathway to doing that well actually looks like. And we are in the midst of kind of a series where we're talking about this idea of Jesus as the man who is actually most worthy of being followed. That may be kind of like a new idea to you or a surprising idea to you that Jesus. A is a man, right? That's not something that we often talk about with Jesus. I mean, we kind of like assume that he was, but we don't talk about his manliness or his masculinity very much, and I think that's something that we need to kind of recover. But also we, we don't really kind of think about Jesus as the man that we want to emulate. There's a lot of things about Jesus that we want to emulate. Most of them are very kind of like holy or religious kinds of things that we think about emulating, but we don't always think about his masculinity as being something that we want to try to imitate, that we want to be true of our lives as well. But here on the Manhood Tribes Channel, we talk about manhood in some very specific ways. And as we talk about those things today, I think you're going to be able to see that Jesus not only modeled these things for us, he actually demonstrated the perfect ways to be able to live them out so that we can be the kind of men that we actually want to become. So let's dive into it. As a brief reminder for those of you who are following along on this channel or if you're brand new as by way of introduction, the five marks of manhood are the things that we believe all men should possess in order to demonstrate what it means to be a man. Those five marks are strength. Courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. And if you're doing well in all of those things, you are exhibiting to the world what it means to be a man. And just real briefly, let's touch on what each of those things are when it comes to strength. We're talking primarily about. Physical strength, men's bodies are built to be strong, and so part of what it means to be a man, and really the core of our essence of masculinity is about being strong. And yes, we're mostly talking about physical strength, although mental and emotional toughness comes into play in that as well, especially as we pick up the second mark of manhood, which is courage. Courage just means that we are facing our fears and moving towards them instead of backing away from the things that are difficult or challenging in life. We're actually figuring out how we can move into those things and overcome them. Skill is the third mark of manhood and it just is really about the idea that men are dependent on for being good at things that we need to be growing in our skills in lots of different areas, but probably also mastering or even perfecting our skills and one or two kind of key areas where me, we are meant to contribute to the good of others around us. Honor is really all about our relationships with our peers. Honor is about doing right by those around you, and so in particular, the group of men that you have closest to you are meant to share some values in common. And if you uphold those values, then you are worthy of honor. Allegiance is really about those kind of like authority relationships. So if honor is about kind of the horizontal axis of relationships, allegiance is really about that vertical axis. It's about how we relate to those who are in authority over us. And one area in particular that we have to deal with is our ultimate allegiance. What or who is the thing that we most give authority to in our lives. What are we choosing to follow that actually has authority over every place in our life, especially the big decisions and the ways that we shave our lives? Okay, so those are our five marks of manhood. Again, strength, courage, skill, honor and allegiance. As a man, you can grow and get better, and. All of those areas, and that's one of the great things about them is that you're not stuck as a man. Just kind of feeling like, I'm not really good at being a man, or I'm, I don't feel very manly today. Well, that's okay. You can get better at any of those things and start to feel more manly because you are living as what it means to be a man. Now, what does it look like that Jesus lived out all five of those marks of manhood, and how did he do it in ways that we might look at him and say, oh yeah, he really is kind of like the ideal man, or the man most worthy of being followed. Why would we say that? I think when most of us kind of think of Jesus, we have this picture of him that's kind of like soft and sweet and nice and you know, encouraging kind like all of these words kind of come to mind. I think in our sort of modern picture of Jesus. And look, none of those words is wrong. None of those words is bad, but none of those words completely describe what Jesus is like even if they have kind of taken over as sort of like the major themes of his life. I don't know that it's really fair to say that those are the major things of his life, but that is kind of the picture that we have of him in modern culture today, is that he's soft, he's meek, he's gentle. Okay. All of those things are true, but I. If we're honest as guys, none of us really kinda look at those characteristics and say, those are the things that I most want to be known for. Right? They're not bad things. It's not bad to have those things be true of us, but they're probably not the essence or the core of really what I want to be known for as a man. As a man, I'm probably more drawn to those kind of like five marks of manhood, things that I just talked about, strength, courage, honor. I wanna be known for those things, and that's really kind of getting at the heart of what it means to be a man. And I think those really are the things that Jesus lived out. He demonstrated those things well, so let's talk about how he did that. Let's just start with the most basic, the one that's kind of at the core of what it means to be a man strength. Now the thing about strength in our day and age is that we tend to think about it too much in terms of sort of like the Hollywood culture or the bodybuilding culture or you know, YouTube and Instagram fitness influencers who are just showing off their like perfectly sculpted and, you know, intricately waxed bodies so that we can see every crevice in between all of their eight pack abs, right? But that's really not what strength is about. And for the most part of human history, that's not what strength has been about for men. Strength has really just been about am I strong enough to get through the basic needs of my day, and do I have enough strength that when I'm tested with something exceptional in life, I can rise up to that challenge. Okay, so strength means having some things in reserve. It means that I've got more in the tank than usually what my day-to-day requires. I definitely have enough to get through the day-to-day, but I've, I've got some. Extra in the tank. I've got some strength built up that's capable of doing more than what I usually need to do on a day-to-day basis, so that when those needs arise, I'm able to meet them. Now here's the thing about Jesus. He was strong enough to meet all of the day-to-day demands of his life and look his day-to-day demands. Probably we're much more taxing than the lives that most of us live. When you look at the stories of Jesus, one of the things that he probably spent a whole lot of time doing that most of us don't have to do is walking. Jesus walked. Everywhere. And he walked really long distances to get from one end of Israel to the other, which he did several times throughout. The biblical narrative was usually a multi-day hike. Okay. It involved a long trip and it involved carrying packs on your back and it was heavy and it was hot and they camped outside, you know, in between, uh, days of the hike. So like. There's real physical effort involved in Jesus' day-to-day living that probably most of us don't experience as we, you know, live in our air conditioned homes and work in our air conditioned offices and, you know, have food preserved us for us in our refrigerators. And, you know, most of us sit in front of a computer for our work on the, you know, large amount of the day. Okay. We live a much more. Rested and, uh, you know, soft kind of life than what Jesus actually lived. So he was in fairly decent shape just because as a man and his culture, you kind of had to be, it was a much more physically demanding culture than what we live in today. But we also see some ways that Jesus was even stronger than that. That he really did have the ability to rise up to the challenge when he was faced with it. We see this, especially when he had the strength to kind of walk into the temple and to challenge everyone there and with a whip to actually drive people out of the temple, to turn over tables, to push people out of the way to be intimidating with his physical presence. We see him living out some of the strength in moments like that. And probably more so than in any place in the narrative, we see his physical strength through his crucifixion, through the way that he had to endure the torture, leading up to his crucifixion, to the fact that he had to carry his actual cross for long distances before he was even crucified. With a body that was beaten and bloodied and bruised. He was weak, and yeah, he fell a couple times, but he's carrying this massive wooden beam on his shoulders. We would probably fall more than a couple times, especially in the condition that he was in, but he fell along the way of actually getting there. He carried the thing. He made the trek of being able to hold up this huge wooden beam and carry it down into a valley, up a hill again. While he's waiting his own death at the other end of that trial, and then to be able to be crucified, to hang on that cross, the strength required to endure the torture and the punishment that he faced is something that most of us will never have to face. So when we look at Jesus' life, we see all these examples of, yeah, he had manly strength that most of us men today don't have. He was capable of doing things and of pushing himself to limits and beyond that most of us don't have to face. There is a manliness to his strength that we would do well to emulate. He had the strength that he needed and he rose to the challenges that he was faced with when he needed to be able to do that. That's all that's asked of us as men when it comes to strength. Jesus had that and more, and so we should look to him as our example of what it looks like to cultivate physical strength. Now let's talk about the second one. Courage. Jesus was not afraid to walk into the challenges that he faced in his life and attempt to overcome them. You've probably heard many people say that Jesus was not afraid of picking a fight. What did that actually look like though? Jesus was not really kind of like the playground bully, right? So he was not the guy who was just walking up to and pushing people down and intimidating people and you know, trying to say things that provoked them into arguments. He did that sometimes, but that wasn't typically his way. So what does it look like that Jesus demonstrated courage in those different kinds of situations? Well, Jesus had a real clear sense of what was right. Of what was just, of what was good and when things got in the way of that, he wasn't afraid to move towards what was right and good, even if it was going to be upsetting in his culture. So for example, one of the things that he wasn't afraid of doing was in his culture, they had what was called the Sabbath, which was a day of rest, and no work was supposed to be done on those days. That happened once a week, and it was surprising the number of times that Jesus would do something on the Sabbath, that his culture would consider work just to kind of like irritate or agonize the spiritual leaders around him. But he was doing good things. He was feeding people. He was. Healing people. He was taking care of needs that needed to be met. All of these things were good and were within the boundaries of what God would say was okay on the Sabbath, but the religious leaders were so afraid of anyone doing anything that might be construed as work that they couldn't see the good that Jesus was doing. But Jesus didn't shy away from that. He didn't back down from the religious leaders because he knew that they weren't in the right. They weren't interpreting that Sabbath idea well, and so he wasn't afraid to push past their wrong ideas, to do what actually needed to be done. He took care of people on the Sabbath and that wasn't the kind of work that God wanted people to avoid. That was the kind of thing that he wanted us doing all along. And yet the religious leaders were more concerned about rules and regulations than they were about people. Jesus had the courage to be able to face that and to say, Nope, that isn't right. That's not the way that that's meant to be handled. And I'm going to set a different example. Jesus wasn't afraid to call out those very same religious leaders to address them and to let them know that the way that they were living was wrong. They were missing the heart of God. And so even in very precarious situations, he wasn't afraid to stand up and to call out loudly. The way that they were handling things and the way they were teaching others to handle those things was wrong. He had the courage to face those who were in the wrong and to call them out for it. That takes a lot of courage. When was the last time that you stood up to your boss and told him or her that the way she was handling things was not good, or the way that he was handling the people on the team was not the right way to do it yet? Probably not at all. Right. Probably not ever have. Most of us stood up to an authority figure in our lives in that way, and yet Jesus kind of made a habit of it because he knew the purpose that he was after, and so he had the courage to be able to go after what was right. Now let's talk about the third mark of manhood, which is skill. Jesus was a skilled man and he showed that he had developed and honed the skills necessary for him to accomplish the mission that God had given him. In particular, I wanna focus on one skill that we can really see that he cultivated, and that was the skill of teaching Jesus thought about and practiced teaching in ways that nobody else in his day did. And even today, the way that people teach, especially even sometimes the way that pastors and other religious leaders teach, isn't much like the way that Jesus taught. Jesus tried to teach in a way that people would not only remember his teaching. But they would actually be able to put it into practice. His goal wasn't just retaining information, which people were able to do remarkably well because he told stories that helped them to retain it. But his goal was actually that they would be able to live it out. And so he told stories. He gave examples. He tied things into very practical, tangible, daily parts of their lives. Things like farming and. Fishing and things that related to the temple culture that they and their Jewish world were all very familiar with. He tied it into those things that were in their everyday world, and so because of that, it made sense for how they could actually apply it. Here we are 2000 years later and people are still applying his teaching. Jesus is hands down the greatest teacher who has ever lived. There's not a teacher in all of the world whose teaching has been more sought after and followed and copied and taught than Jesus. His skill at teaching surpasses everyone, and it was this kind of thing that demonstrates that Jesus really knew what skill was about. He knew that that was needed of him, and so he practiced it. He rehearsed it, he honed it. He told his stories in multiple places so that he could get good at them and rehearsed them and know how to be able to use them. He told it in ways that others could copy it and preach it as well, which he sent his followers out to do. He knew what he was doing when it. Came to the skill that was needed of him in order to do good for the sake of others around him. And that's really what skill is all about. Jesus was a master of it. Now let's talk about those last two marks of manhood, honor and allegiance. Honor is really about peers. Jesus had so many peers in his life. Yes, he had the 12 disciples, the group of young men who he had around him who were his closest followers, and the men who carried the torch after he was gone. But not only that, he had women who were among his followers and he had a wider circle of followers beyond the 12 as well, who were committed to him and who wanted to take his message to the world. Jesus. Had honor among those people because of the way that he treated them. He lifted them up, he healed them. He cared for their needs and their burdens. He paid attention to them. He taught them what it meant to love. He taught them what it meant to pray. He taught them that following God wasn't just about the rules and the restrictions that they were used to, but that was really about a relationship with God and how that relationship translated into relating rightly to the other people around them. He was so unique and so different, and that made him worthy of so much honor in their lives. They valued him so much. They wanted to spend time around him. They wanted to care for his needs. They wanted to honor him because of how good he was and how much he was changing people's lives. Jesus was worthy of honor in ways that few people ever have been. And the people closest to him really demonstrated that they honored him in all the ways that they possibly could. Now, they didn't do it perfectly, and we see that example all throughout the biblical narratives, but they did do it well and they wanted to do it, and that was probably what was most important. Jesus was a man worthy of honor, and he was so honored by the people around him. When it comes to allegiance, Jesus's allegiance was very clear. He was allegient to God, his father, and he talked about God the Father all the time, and how he was following the Father and how he only did what he saw the father doing and how he. Got away regularly to pray to the father all the time the father was on his lips. He talked about his allegiance to the father and that he wanted his followers to know the Father as he knew the father. There was so much about his allegiance to the Father that was so clear and the way that he did his ministry and the way that he lived his life, and this is what we would call ultimate allegiance. Jesus structured all of his life around his ultimate allegiance. To God the father, and it made every other aspect of his life abundantly clear. He knew what kind of skills he had to go after because of his relationship and his allegiance to God the father. He knew what kinds of things needed to be honored in his community because of his allegiance to God the father. His allegiance to God, the father gave him a courage. It gave him an identity to be able to say, I know what I can stand for because I know I'm already accepted and loved by God, my father, and so I can stand up for the things that he really values. I. And it also gave him a strength. He knew that he needed to be the man that God the father had created him to be, and that pushed him to be able to grow physically strong, mentally, strong, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, strong in so many ways. I. So all these five marks of manhood, Jesus demonstrated them heroically. He demonstrated them in ways that we as men can only hope to be able to do. But that's really the point. We have all these models today of how to live out those same kinds of traits from men who are doing them in ways that just seem silly. Right, that ways that, you know, we talk about it sometimes in our culture, like there's this thing called toxic max masculinity, or now there's woke masculinity, and now there's all these just different ways of living out what it means to be a man. And yet none of them seem truly genuine. None of them seem to really be getting at the kind of man that most of us men want to be. But when we look at Jesus. We see a very clear picture of all of those things. We see the kind of man that we want to be, and we see those five marks lived out in ways that we are meant to go after. So let's do that. Let's go after being that kind of man that Jesus was and is, and live out the five marks the way that he did it. That is the best kind of man that we can be.'cause Jesus is the man who is most worth following. Alright. If this has been helpful to you, I would love for you to put down in the comments, which of the five marks of manhood do you want to grow in and become more like Jesus in that way? Which of those five marks? Strength, courage, skill, honor, allegiance, you can just put one word, or you can put the mark of manhood and how you want to become more like Jesus in that area. Whatever you want to do, just put it down in there in the comments and if you would like. To connect with some other men who are trying to grow in those five marks of manhood as well, who are like-minded to your purposes in your life. Then I would encourage you to consider joining our Manhood Tribes community. You can check it out at manhood tribes.com/community. And there you're gonna find men who want to get better at being men who want to get better at following Jesus and who are looking to connect with other like. Minded men. I know that's probably true of you as well, so head on over there and get your name on the list for how you can connect with our community, manhood tribes.com/community. All right, I hope I'll hear from you in the comments and I look forward to talking to you again next time here on the Manhood Tribes Channel. We'll see you then.