Christian Men Are Getting This Wrong About Faith

Most men admit their faith isn't as strong as they'd like, and this video explores why. We dive into the challenges men face in prioritizing spiritual growth, offering biblical wisdom to help trust God. Discover practical ways to navigate these 'hard times' and strengthen your connection.

A tribe of men can challenge you, support you, and help you grow spiritually in ways that isolated faith never will. In this episode we cover:

- Why many men’s faith becomes private and starts to fade
- The difference between routine spiritual habits and real spiritual life
- How brotherhood strengthens your faith like a shield wall in battle
- Why spiritual disciplines are actually preparation to fight for other men
- How a tribe helps you develop a vibrant, active relationship with Jesus
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Episode 071: Christian Men Are Getting This Wrong About Faith
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Why men struggle to prioritize their faith
03:00 How faith becomes private and starts to fade
06:00 Why routine spiritual habits often feel lifeless
09:00 Why men grow through action and challenge
11:00 The “shield wall” analogy for brotherhood
15:00 Spiritual disciplines as training for battle
16:00 Connecting to Jesus vs. religious routines
18:30 Why most men’s groups fail
19:00 Build Your Own Tribe program
20:00 Wrap up and comment prompt

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

As a man, would you say that your faith is as strong as you would like it to be? And my guess is probably your answer is no. I mean, because that's the answer that most men would give when it comes to our faith. We men struggle to really make it the priority that we know that we should, but we just have a hard time actually following through on that. There's a number of reasons that that's the case, and I wanna try to talk about those things today. But what I really want to do is be able to help you understand why it's important for you to strengthen your faith and what's gonna actually help you be able to do that. Because see. I think the reasons that you probably have in your mind about why it's important to strengthen your faith are kind of the same reasons that you have for why it's important to eat your vegetables, right? It's kind of just like, it's one of those things that you're just supposed to do. Like, I know it's gonna help me out, but I really don't enjoy it, and I guess I'll do it because I have to, or some woman in my life is making me. It's, it's usually something along those lines. I don't want faith to feel like that to you at all, and I don't think those are the reasons that you should make it a priority in your life, but we do need to talk about what those reasons are. My name's Don. I'm the host here at the Manhood Tribes Channel, and I really want to help you be able to build the best group of men around you that can help you be the man that you were meant to be. And that's really what we call a tribe. That's what Manhood Tribes is all about. And so I have been spending the last few episodes kind of talking about what are some ways that a tribe really can help you out as a man? What are some places in your life that a tribe can be of real benefit to you and make a difference in your life so that it's not just something that you kind of think of as a have to or an ought to, or a should, but as something that you. Can't live without. It becomes the thing that you most look forward to each week and the group of guys that you anticipate spending time with because you know how great it's gonna be. That's the kind of environment that I want for you, and that's the kind of environment that's actually going to help you be able to strengthen your faith. Because look, here's the thing, when it comes to building your faith as a man, there's usually a couple different paths that guys go down, especially as they enter into adulthood. Men tend to practice their faith in isolation. What that means is that we tend to treat our faith as personal, but then it actually ends up becoming something more just like private. It's something that we keep to ourselves. It's not really something that we offered anyone else. Maybe when you were young as a teenager or even as a college student and you had friends around you that you were maybe. Practicing your faith with, you might have been involved in a youth group or a college ministry or something like that, but then as you entered into adulthood and you were primarily in the workplace, there just weren't as many people around you that were practicing their faith. And so you didn't have anybody to kind of like share in that with or hold you accountable in any of that. And it sort of just became something that was to yourself. And almost certainly when faith becomes private like that, it starts to slip. The Christian faith is not something that's meant to be practiced alone. The scriptures are full of examples and teachings of how we are meant to do this together. God has designed us to be a family of brothers and sisters in Christ. We are meant to follow him in the context of relationships with other people, but as men, we tend to neglect that and we neglect it for a lot of reasons. But I think the biggest one is just that. It stops losing its relevance to our day-to-day life, right? As we get into adulthood and we're trying to figure out like how to be successful in our career and how to land a date with a girl that we're interested in and how to have the money situation handled so that we can have the things that we need and want, and also like potentially provide for a family. Like all of those things are important, but it doesn't usually feel like. Our time in prayer or the things that we're reading in the Bible actually have much to do with that at all. So we just start to neglect it. And going to church may be something that we start to neglect as well, because we're exhausted from the week, and sleeping in on Sundays becomes a lot easier than getting up and going to church, which can just feel boring and routine and again. Not all that helpful or relevant to your day-to-day life. So all of it, because you've kept it private, starts to really slip from being regular and consistent and relevant to who you are as a man. I. If that's the case for you, don't judge yourself. I'm not judging you. That's a really common story as a man. But another common story for men is that we know that these things are really important. And so we just find ways to be able to kind of double down on making sure we're gonna do them. We develop these kind of habits. Maybe you have something like a quiet time where you, uh, make sure that you have time in the morning where you are reading the Bible and praying, and sometimes you get something out of it, but more often than not. It's a routine. You, you think it's a part of what keeps you healthy and strong and is essential to you know who you're gonna be, but at the end of the day, it's more something that you do as opposed to something that you really benefit from even your church. Activity, your church attendance, your church groups that you're a part of, you're volunteering at church. If you're honest with yourself. Sometimes those things are good, but a lot of times they're just routines. They're commitments and their disciplines, and they're not necessarily bad things, but you're doing them out of just rote practice. Maybe, especially if you have a family and you think it's important for your family to be at the church, you commit yourselves to doing something at the church to kind of keep yourself invested and involved in doing those things. But they're not really sources of life or change or transformation for you. They're just kind of the habits that you think you're supposed to maintain, and you want your family to maintain those habits as well. So you kind of go along with the flow, even though you don't find them all that life giving. Now look. Both of these are big patterns in men's lives and a lot of the reasons why faith becomes sort of like, uh, just non-essential to a man's everyday life. That's the last thing that faith should be. If you look at the life and the teachings of Jesus. Everything that Jesus taught about was relevant to day-to-day life. In fact, one of the reasons that he was so beloved as a teacher was because he didn't just focus on all the shoulds and the aughts. He actually talked about the way that people lived their lives, and he used examples of things that were relevant to their day-to-day life, like farming and fishing and cooking and going to the market, and all kinds of other things that were just a normal. Part of the way that people lived. He tied in faith to those things. He talked about the conflicts that people have, the way that they related to each other in marriages or in sex, or in all kinds of different ways. But he talked about normal, relevant everyday stuff. Your faith should matter to your day-to-day life. And if it's not. That's an indication that you've got a mismatch between what you think faith is really about and the way that it's described in the scriptures. Okay, that's okay. That's pretty common in our culture. It's pretty normal if that's the case for you. But I want to help rescue that for you. And the way that that's gonna happen is that you need a group of men around you who are gonna call you to that and challenge you to live it out in that kind of way. That is what a tribe is meant to do for you. A tribe is really the life-changing brotherhood that you've kind of always hoped for. It is the thing that can make you into the man that you have always wanted to be and to have the kind of faith that you've always known you probably should have and maybe wished you could have, but just didn't know how to get there. A tribe can and will do those things for you, but the way that it accomplishes those things in your life is maybe a little different than you think it could be, because it's not just about showing up at some weekly men's Bible study where you're all reading a passage together and learning some information from it and saying a little prayer and then heading off into your life. I've been a part of a whole bunch of those things, and rarely do they actually make long standing life change in me or in the lives of the other men in the group. For the most part, most men find those things boring and they don't show up to them regularly. You'll always have some guys that do. Some guys will always be oriented towards learning and studying and will enjoy that kind of interaction with other men. But not most men. And it's okay if you're not part of the group that finds that part of, finds that opportunity to be something that you just really love. It's okay that you don't, in fact, most men want because men aren't wired that way. God, for the most part, didn't design us as men to thrive on learning head knowledge. He built us to thrive on putting things into practice. He built us to thrive on challenge and on action. But yet most of our men's groups. Aren't built that way at all. So what I want you to understand is that a tribe is built to help you as a man in the way that men work and in the way that men grow. So let's talk a little bit about that. What is it that a tribe can do for you to help you strengthen your faith? The first thing that it's gonna do is to help you understand that the disciplines of developing your faith are necessary, not just because there are things you ought to do. They don't just make you more spiritual or more holy, or more knowledgeable about the Bible. Those things are not bad. There's nothing wrong with being any of those, but for most men, that's not enough of a motivation to actually get you to do them. I want you to think about the disciplines of your spiritual life as something more like training for battle. Now that might seem a little extreme and maybe that seems a little like macho or gusto or something like that, but let me help you understand why I think that is a really good analogy. What we do together as a tribe is something that I of I often describe as fighting for one another's freedom. You really do have to fight for each other to help you find a way forward in the ways that you want to grow and change, but in order for that to happen, the men around you. Need to be good fighters. They need to be able to come after you and come beside you and come for you and helping you be able to be the man that God has designed you to be. Think about it like combat and I'll, I'll think about combat the way that, uh. I like to think about combat, which is in some kind of a medieval setting. All right. I'm a, I'm a nerd. I'm a lord of the Rings freak. I love things like Game of Thrones and the Last Kingdom on Netflix and movies like Braveheart and Gladiator. So when I think about combat, I like to think about swords and shields. Okay, so, uh, maybe you've watched some of the Vikings show and you've seen the way that the Vikings would fight in a shield wall. A shield wall was where they would. Pull together their shields and literally form a line that was a wall of shields, and it helped to protect and solidify every man next to you so that you could use your sword, your free hand, as a way of attacking while trusting that the men around you were defending you and you were doing the same for them. It was an unbelievable military strategy, and it worked for a really long time in terms of combat. This is sort of the same thing that we men are meant to do for each other and the way that we fight for each other in the context of a tribe. Because what mattered in the shield wall was that you as an individual, needed to know how to use your shield. You had the strength to hold it and maintain it against the oncoming assault and that you had your sword hand. Free to be able to, you know, stab the guy in front of you who was pushing against your shield and the guys around. You had to trust that you could do all of those things. If you were weak in any of those areas, then you were not dependable in the shield wall. And I guarantee you, the guy next to you did not want to be standing next to you. You weren't reliable as a fighter and that made the guy next to you. Afraid, concerned, and really troubled that he was gonna get hurt because you weren't able to pull your weight. Okay. Now that might be a little extreme to describe what fighting for one another in a spiritual context looks like, but it, it does have a lot of parallels. And here's what I mean. The spiritual disciplines that you practice are the things that are gonna help you be able to fight for another brother. So the time that you spend in scripture, learning the stories and the teachings of scriptures, the time that you spend in prayer, connecting to God and the life of Jesus. The time that you spend in community and in serving the time that you spend in worship, all of those things that can help you be able to connect better to God. Those are the things that God is actually gonna use when it comes time to fight for your brother, especially when it comes time to listen to him for what he wants to say to that man. Okay, so the skills that you develop, especially like your time in scripture, becoming familiar with the stories of scripture and the teachings in scripture. When it comes time to listen to God, if you are practiced and developed in those things, God just has more to work with When it comes to you being a good listener. He can remind you of things that you're familiar with from the scriptures that he might want you to say to the man next to you that you're listening on his behalf, and then you have something more to be able to offer because you're more familiar with the scriptures. It's the same thing. If you're standing in the shield wall and you're more practiced with your shield, you're gonna be able to offer the men standing next to you more than the guy who isn't practiced. And that's the kind of guy that you want to be. You want to be the guy that's reliable. You want to be the guy that can pull his weight, that when he shows up to the shield wall, the men next to you feel comfortable. Because they know that you are going to bring strength. You are going to bring practice and experience, and that means they can trust you and they feel like they're in good hands being next to you and a part of your tribe. That's the kind of context that you need to have when it comes to developing those spiritual disciplines. It's not just eating your vegetables. It's not just doing something because you're supposed to, because it's gonna build good character or because it's something that you, you know, think is just a part of what it means to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus. All of those things are correct, but again, none of those things are motivation enough to get you to actually do it on a consistent basis. When you start to see your spiritual disciplines as the means for fighting for the brothers around you so that you can be counted on a. All of a sudden it becomes really important to make consistent habits out of those things. You know that you want to be the man that can be relied on. You don't want to be the weak link in the tribe. You don't want to be the guy that causes another guy to fall down because you weren't ready and prepared to be able to offer strength to him. So show up, put in the discipline and the practice to be able to help your other brothers out and then when it comes time, you'll be ready and prepared'cause you have put in the discipline that you needed to. One of the other ways that a tribe is going to help you with strengthening your faith is that it's going to teach you that your faith isn't just about doing spiritual habits. It's actually not the, the disciplines that you're doing are not the point of your faith. The point of your faith is to connect to Jesus. In manhood tribes, we talk a lot about the five marks of manhood, and one of those marks of manhood is the mark of allegiance. Allegiance is the act of pledging ourselves to an authority figure, and in particular, when it comes to our ultimate allegiance, we're talking about the God that we serve. And in this case, we want to give our allegiance to Jesus. He is our king and the man most worthy of following, but giving him our allegiance doesn't just look like. Attending Sunday school or showing up to your small group or serving at the soup kitchen on the weekend. Again, none of those things are bad, and that is a way to act out your faith. But what Jesus really wants and what he says to us is that we should abide in him and that he will abide in us as well. We are meant to stay connected to him abiding. The way that he uses the imagery is of a vine and a branch. That we are meant to be connected to him, like a vine is connected to a branch so that we draw our life from him. This is inherently relational. It is meant to be life giving. We are meant to interact with Jesus, our king. It's not just about. Rote and routine disciplines are going through the motions of things that are considered spiritual. It's actually about connecting with Jesus as a person and learning to draw life from him and as a tribe. You will do that regularly as you learn to practice listening to the voice of God and how to be able to put the words of Jesus. Into practice, and now all of a sudden your faith becomes vibrant. It becomes something that you want to do because you are actually drawing life from Jesus. And as you do that, you see that you start to change, and now your faith really matters. It's actually having an effect on your life and on the day-to-day things of your life, on the important relationships, on the big decisions that you have to do on just. You know how you choose to live your day-to-day life, all of that starts to matter, and Jesus has things to say about it and you are listening to him. All of those things might be new for you, but that's okay. Just because they're new doesn't mean that they're wrong. Just because you haven't practiced them before doesn't mean that you've been missing out all of life now, as your opportunity to be able to experience that life that Jesus offers and to draw close to him through the context of a tribe. Now you may be hearing all of that and thinking, you know what, that sounds great. I would love that. But I've been to a bunch of men's groups or you know, I've been a part of a men's group in the past and my experience there was not anything like that. Or I've heard guys that go to these men's groups and most of them don't stick around because they're just boring. Hey, I get it. Look, I've been a part of dozens of men's groups over the years, and most of them have been mediocre at best. In another episode, we're going to get into the reasons for all of that. But the point is, a tribe is meant to be different than that. It is meant to be the best men's group ever, the kind of life changing brotherhood that you have really always hoped for, and that's what we're trying to create. But you may not have any idea how to create that, and that's totally okay. That's where I think I can help. If you would be interested in that, I would love to talk with you about it. You can go to manhood tribes.com and just check out what we do in terms of helping you build your own tribe. You can schedule a call with me just to chat. No pressure. Just to find out if building your own tribe would be the right next step for you and what that would look like. I would love to talk to you about it and see if I can help in any way. Guys, what I want you to know is that your spiritual life, your faith can be more life-giving and more vibrant than you have ever imagined it. It can become a cornerstone and an essential piece of your life in a way that you actually want it to be. Not because you're forcing yourself for it to be that way, but because you can't imagine doing it any other way, and a tribe will help you be able to get there. If I can help you out with that in any way, I really would love to just go check out manhood tribes.com and let's chat to see if that would work out for you. Alright guys, if this has been helpful for you, I would love for you to like and subscribe this video. It will help get our content in front of other men. And I would also love for you to, uh, leave a comment in the comment section down below just to talk about what's one area of your faith where you would like to get stronger. How would you like to see your faith strengthen even now? And maybe something that you put in the comments will spark an idea of another guy and help him to think about how he could grow as well. So leave that down in the comments. I look forward to reading and engaging those with you, and I look forward to talking to you again soon here on the Manhood Tribes Channel. We'll see you then.