Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're talking about biblical manhood, and we have to go back to Spurgeon who says that the Christian man is the freest, bravest, most heroic, and most fearless of men. He said, you are the salt of the earth, not the sugar candy. Well, I've got Paul Carrington and Trent Moody with me. We all go to church together and we get to talk about this.

I hope you enjoy the discussion. So it's a blessing. The Bible teaches men how to be men. We're not left to figure it out on our own. Our role models aren't really other men particularly.

They certainly aren't the most popular manly men like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. But there are many places in the Bible that tell us what men ought to be and do. And there are also lots of metaphors in the Bible. Men are warriors. They're athletes.

They're farmers. They're kings. They're priests. They're prophets. They are shepherds.

They are husbands. The Apostle Paul says that he was like a nursing mother in the Thessalonian church. So it's very rich and diverse. Men are dominion-takers. Men are strong and courageous like Joshua 1.9.

And God is pulling manhood out of this lonely, depressed, Medicaid, suicidal, effeminate man. And so that's what we're here to talk about. God shows us what manhood looks like. You know, I believe it begins with the greatest commandment in Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5. Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." And that's really our all. That's what we're aiming for, is to love God. And he's given us these aspects of who we are. He's given us our bodies, He's given us our soul, He's given us our mind to do this with. We need to love God with all that we are.

But the temptation for man is so often to be strong in one of these areas, but very rarely balanced in all three. And I think that's what we wanna talk about today. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, one of the things that I started talking to my boys when they were really young about was just something very simple for them to grasp was fit soul, fit mind, and then fit body. And in that order, kind of looking to focus them as they were, the books that they were reading, the things that we're doing together, Scripture memory, all these types of things, but looking in that category, because at the end of the day we're really a whole man in that sense.

And that's really what I was trying to communicate. You know, one of the biggest features of the spirit of our age is this feminism, we're kind of an emasculation. And so, how do you raise and produce men that are going to actually have a biblical way of looking at the world? And that's a great scripture you just quoted to kind of categorize it in those three areas. So that's what we've been doing.

Yeah. Yeah. And every... Our culture's no different, right? I mean, Paul says to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 16, 13, act like men.

David says to his son, Solomon, he says, I'm getting ready to go the way of all the earth. And he says, prove yourself to be a man, be strong, and keep the commandments of God. I mean, so, you know, we have really, we have really clear direction for what it means to be a man. Yeah. And, you know, our culture, a lot of times men interpret strength just simply with the physical aspects of their body.

We'll get to that in a moment. But I want to get to that first. But we often fail to realize that one of the greatest strengths that we should be focusing on is the strength of our soul. And, you know, any man can go out and lift weights and be strong. But how many men will go through the labor of being fit in their soul.

You know, maybe that's how we want to break it up is just thinking about the soul. Fit souls, yeah. The taking care of your soul. It's a really important question. How's your soul?

How's your soul? Yeah. You know, one of the things that's been on my heart lately, especially just considering my soul, is, as I read Psalm 42, and the psalmist writes, as the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul for you, O God, pants for you, O God, my soul thirst for God, for the living God. And I think that's one of the areas when we think about being fit in soul. It's interesting because he speaks of his soul as thirsting after God.

And as he thirsts for God, and God begins to feel that thirst and quench that thirst, if you will, that's where the strength lies. But it's actually his strength is made perfect in that weakness in the sense of us thirsting after him. You know, I think that's what the Apostle Paul was saying to Timothy in 2nd Timothy 2.2 when he said, be strong in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. This work of grace. He goes on and he says, endure hardness.

Endure hardness, yeah. He's a soldier of Jesus Christ. So there's this aspect that every man is involved in a holy war. So if you're not focused on having a fit soul, you're gonna be useless no matter how strong your body is, but absolutely important. And it's a very practical thing in a sense, right, because it focuses you on the most important thing, first of all, which is salvation.

Are you saved? Is your soul at peace with God? And if that's in place, there are certain very practical things that you can then embark on. It's not just sitting back. It's a lot of different things from making sure that you're taking advantage of the means of grace, reading the Word, prayer, attending church, but owning it yourself as opposed to having to be coddled or forced.

That's part of being a man as well. Yeah. And you know, the other aspect of this is if you're... Like the other two, you can have a fit mind and a fit body and die and go to hell. But if your soul is right with the Lord, then it goes throughout eternity with the Lord.

Now all three are important, but the first one here is eternally important, because a man can be strong and smart and spend eternity separated from God. So that's why we picked, I think, this one to be the very first, and it is the first, that we are strong in our soul towards God. And that's only by the grace of God through the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must make sure that we are right with God. You know, a young man should say, he will say, what does manliness mean?

And I think The Westminster Catechism sums it up. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And that has everything to do with your soul, but it really begins with this impulse, not to be your own man, not to be like somebody else, but to be a man who's glorifying God as his chief desire. That's really where manhood begins.

What's interesting about the connection, right, because we're a whole man having a fit soul. You know, Proverbs talks about how the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. So you're never going to know anything worth knowing unless you first know God. You can know a bunch of facts and history and so on, but you're not going to have a fit mind, a mind that knows how to understand the world that you're living in, your place in it, what God is actually doing in history, unless you actually have your soul in right position with God. So the things, they're not just disconnected little pieces, having your soul fit here, your mind fit there, your body fit there, but it'll contribute when you understand, wait, my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

I know we'll get there, but there's also this aspect of being a good steward and caretaker of your body, getting enough sleep, all the other things we'll probably talk about a little bit later. Exactly. Because if your soul is not right, I mean, you can have all the information in the world, but you're not gonna rightly apply it. You're not gonna have the wisdom that you should have to apply that knowledge that you can gain, and also the proper use of the body. Having a right soul, being right with God informs us in how we should use our bodies for the glory of God.

Apart from that, we're just glorifying ourselves or trying to use it just for pleasure or whatever it is. But it is that part which informs us in how we should live with our minds and our bodies. Right. Right. Yeah.

You know, you think of the soul and what a well-ordered soul does, it makes you a builder. It makes you a worker. It makes you a person who keeps his promises. It makes you a man who's unfazed by criticism, ungodly criticism. And so, you know, the soul, but the soul has to be ordered.

You know, men have to take action to nourish their souls. It's not just something that you think about intellectually, but you feed your soul, you feed your affections, and that's part of the work of sanctification. So let's go on, you know, we've talked about this matter of fit souls. Let's talk about minds, fit minds, because our lives are driven by our thoughts. That's why God, you know, speaks to us about our thinking.

Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on the earth. So a man should bring fitness to his mind. And how does he do that? Yeah. You know, one of the things that we, I've been teaching my children and others in the church is that we're not in a playground, we're actually on a battleground, we're at war.

And, you know, there's a passage in First Peter where he says, Peter's, but he's beseeching them as pilgrims and strangers to abstain from fleshly lust, which war against the soul. And I know we just, we finished up on the soul, but that brings me into this next passage of scripture in 2nd Corinthians 10 verses 3 through 6, he says, For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments in every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. And that's when I think about having a fit mind. I want to meditate upon that aspect of it, is my mind is actually being attacked, and therefore it needs to be fit.

I need to be ready for the attacks that are coming against me. The devil's not only worried about attacking your body or your soul, but he's actually going after your mind. And we need to be very careful to understand that. Here's a practical way of thinking about that. In Ephesians 4, the Apostle Paul is saying that God gave the church, you know, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and he says, till we come to the unity of the faith, of the knowledge of God, but then he says, to a perfect man.

And he actually uses the word for male. It's not a generic term at all. The perfect man is made partly just by the instruction that he gets from the men that God, you know, God gives the church men, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth. It's God gives men to teach men and says, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. Here's why I'm saying this.

Your life in the local church really matters for your manhood. Okay? And God gives you men to teach you what men should do so that you are to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, the perfect man. Right. Yeah.

I would also say too, so when I think of mind fitness, it's knowing what you believe, right? It's the ability to communicate it, to kind of render a reason. You have a well-ordered thoughts in the sense of if someone's asking you a question, you're going to be able to kind of give them an answer. It's kind of leaning on what Peter talks about as well. I think that's a really critical component.

So we live in an age where there's probably more information produced than at any other time, but that doesn't equate with the level of thinking, right? We kind of also live in a very dumbed-down age where people are struggling to even communicate properly, get their thoughts out, that kind of thing. So it's interesting information and actual knowledge and the ability to think don't actually equate all the time. And I think that's where, as Christians, we have an opportunity to kind of stand out, to be able to give a good reason. Another aspect, I think, of a mind fitness is being thick skinned, in a sense, you're not easily offended because you're not deriving your identity from what other people are saying.

You first have this connection with the Lord, you're able to actually rest and believe in something that's concrete, and so you're not just, like you mentioned, tossed and swayed with everything. And when you're attacked, I think there's an element of mind fitness that is so important there that you're not just going to be, you know, knocked off your horse in a sense because of the fact that you've got some foundation and roots in the things that you actually believe. So that's important. And let's be really clear, men fool themselves. They deceive themselves and they think that they can feed their souls with a five-minute little devotional in the morning, reading the Bible.

No, that's fooling yourself. And then you have your nice little five-minute Bible study in the morning, and then you go out the day and you listen to five podcasts. That's not feeding your soul, I think, the way that God has designed it. There's this transformation of the mind. We are so saturated with all these inputs, and it's usually people talking instead of the Bible talking to you.

And I think if you're going to have a fit mind, you've got to prioritize the Bible over your podcast. Absolutely. You know, that's something recently I've been convicted about. And you know, it's the art of meditation. Every person meditates upon something.

The question is, what are you going to meditate upon? You know, your mind is not just this empty void. There's always something going through your mind. And that's, you know, thinking about what is it that I'm going to like exercise my thinking upon. And it's interesting because just like you were saying, these three are interconnected.

They're not just these separate things. But as I'm focusing my mind on the Word of God and the truth of God, it actually is strengthening my soul as well. I was just really taken with the Puritans. And I'm sitting here, and I have on this laptop, I've got Logos, I've got all of this kind of stuff. I can pull up every verse in the world in seconds.

However, what is easily gained is not very valued in the human nature. And I'm reading these Puritans who had none of these things, and yet their scriptural knowledge and their ability to pull illustration from Scripture is mind-boggling to me, how these men pulled all of this information, but it's because they were exercising their minds in godliness. And we are malnourished in mind thinking of the Word of God, and we are like babes compared to these men, and yet we have everything at our fingertips. It's really convicting. One thing I would just add to that, I just finished listening to a biography of John Knox and you look at these men and how they were able to endure.

So he spent 19 months in a French galleyship, right, where the average lifespan is just, you know, months, if that. But his meditation, his constant focus was on the things of God, even as he's pulling back on the oar. And that's what keeps coming back to him. So that when he's even free, that thing that he went through wasn't even detrimental. It might have been a school or university for him to kind of launch him into future things as well.

So just cultivating the mind, the ability to think. If I think of one thing that describes our age kind of in comparison to a man like John Knox, it's the word fragile. You know, men are fragile. And it's, I think because of their minds a lot of the times as well, right? So we're just weak in a lot of different ways, but I think it starts at the mind and it's easily, easily, I would say, just easily attacked by our adversaries or spiritual warfare, all these other things that come into play that serve to undermine where we're at.

And I think we filled our minds with so many things. Our mind is an open door, and we let everything in it. And it is that war, is the warfare that we need to be taking up and taking every thought captive. I mean, this is battleground language here. We need to guard what is coming into the Eye and Ear Gates so that we can be a well-ordered man in our mind.

That's why Peter said in 1 Peter 5, 8, be sober-minded, be watchful. Why? Your adversary, the devil, prowls around seeking whom he may devour. He also said, gird up the loins of your mind. I just love that word, that phraseology there, girding up the loins of your mind, bringing in all of those loose ends, tucking them in, keeping them tight, being self-controlled in our thinking.

Weren't you, you were telling me the other day that you were reading some Puritan who said the devil, the devil isn't going around to bite you, he wants to devour you. He's not just going to give you, it's not like a mosquito bite. He's wanting to devour all of you and leave nothing left. Let's turn to fit bodies here. I think we're here to say it's really important that you maintain your physical and your emotional strength and both of them are connected.

Your mental and emotional life is connected to your physical, the physical fitness of your body. And I think we're here to say that it's critical that we maintain optimal levels of physical and emotional strength. Spurgeon said, you're the salt of the earth, not the sugar candy. You know, a few years ago we went to Williamsburg as a family and we were there talking with one of the guys who was, you know, in character as one of the farmers of the day. He came out of character and he started talking to us about what these men actually did on a daily basis.

He had a list of all the tasks and he looked at me and he said, I still don't know how this man, who he was in character of, was able to accomplish everything that he has here written down. But this was his day in and day out. And I think having a fit body is important as men. You know, it's something, again, going back to the fact that it's we're the temple of the Holy Spirit and so we we want to cultivate that aspect of it and that's because of our sedentary lifestyles probably now more than ever. I mean there's all sorts of reports on the depletion of testosterone and even young men today because of the fact that they're sedentary or sleep deprived or...

40% of people have pre-diabetes. So yeah, it's huge, right? So this is a big aspect of being a good steward of our bodies. And I used to say to my boys, like, you know, when we're out doing exercise, you know, when your body says, stop, let your mind say, keep going. And, and it's amazing what you can do when you, you push yourself beyond what you feel comfortable with.

Right. And so it's a, it's just another aspect of kind of growing in character, not the, again, it's in the order fit soul first, fit mind and fit body, but it's not unimportant. Right. And it's actually that, that connection there, the mind is what makes the body do what it doesn't want to do. And, you know, it's interesting, too, because God gave us a body that houses the soul and the mind.

Why would we not care for it as well? And we only have one. We don't get multiple. And we need to take care of this body because the more fit we are, and the more energetic we are, the more we can actually serve the Lord with all of our strength. And that's the great commandment, to love the Lord your God.

And we're to do that with all of our strength. And if we're weaklings in any of these areas, we're not able to do that to the fullest extent that God created us to do. How do you glorify God if you can't get off the couch and you can't actually physically go and preach the gospel, or you can't, you know, labor in some task as being a missionary because you're so weak that you can't do it. So this is just, I think, a strong encouragement for us to take this into consideration. Your body is the only instrument God gave you to manifest His glory, and so it should be well taken care of.

And, you know, men and women should watch their weight, they should watch their diet, they should sleep to restore their minds. There's a restorative thing that happens when you're sleeping and cheating your sleep is no help to your mental capacity. I read somewhere a long time ago that if you get four or five hours of sleep, most people are going to operate at about a 30% deficit of their intellectual capacity, which is really a problem for people like me. Plus, as you grow older, your body is deteriorating. The man is deteriorating, the Bible says.

And I've read that by the time you're 50 years old, 40% of your muscle mass goes away if you don't do something about it. And look, you should be able to stand up, to be vigorous. I mean, for me, I want to be able to play duck, duck, goose with my grandchildren. I want to be able to throw them in the lake. I want to be able to play duck-duck-goose with my grandchildren you know I want to be able to throw them in the lake I want to be able to race them on the road you know I will admit though the 12 year olds are now beating me in the foot races.

It's very embarrassing, but I'm going to keep racing. That's right. That's good. That's great. Okay, so there you have it.

Fit souls, fit minds, and fit bodies. So I think that really explains sort of the range of thinking that men, particularly young men, need to have as they go forward in life. Yeah, and there's a real healthy balance with all of those things. It's not one, but all three, and keeping, especially the last one, keeping that in the proper balance perspective. It's not, your body being fit is not for your own pride and for your own glory.

Remember, your body is for the glory of God, not for the glory of yourself. Not for self-feeling. If you're in the gym an hour a day and before your Bible for five minutes a day, you should be ashamed of yourself. Right. Your priorities are all whacked out.

Yeah. We're called, I think, going back to the idea, holy warriors. And so let's endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Amen. Yes.

The salt of the earth, not the sugar candy. Amen. Guys, Thanks for the conversation. I pray that God really even uses this in our own lives to stimulate us to love and good deeds. Amen.

Amen to be. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com