Permission to Live from the Heart
Men need permission. Permission to be what they are — men made in God’s image. Permission to live from the heart and not from the list of should and ought to that has left so many tired and bored. What men need is a deeper understanding of why they long for adventures and battles and a Beauty — and why God made them just like that. The voice that names that hunger most clearly belongs to a president who knew the arena well:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly… who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.
Teddy Roosevelt
Chapter One — Wild at Heart
Eve was created within the lush beauty of Eden’s garden. But Adam, if you’ll remember, was created outside the Garden, in the wilderness. Man was born in the outback, from the untamed part of creation, and only afterward is he brought to Eden. And ever since then, boys have never been at home indoors, and men have had an insatiable longing to explore. Moses does not encounter the living God at the mall — he finds him somewhere out in the deserts of Sinai, a long way from the comforts of Egypt. Jacob has his wrestling match with God not on the living room sofa but in a wadi somewhere east of the Jabbok, in Mesopotamia. Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself — all go to the wild.
Deep in a man’s heart are some fundamental questions that simply cannot be answered at the kitchen table. Who am I? What am I made of? What am I destined for? It is fear that keeps a man at home where things are neat and orderly and under his control. But the answers to his deepest questions are not to be found on television or in the refrigerator. God doesn’t make generic people; he makes something very distinct — a man or a woman. There is a masculine heart and a feminine heart. And in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.
A Battle to Fight
Capes and swords, camouflage, bandannas and six-shooters — these are the uniforms of boyhood. Little boys yearn to know they are powerful, that they are dangerous, that they are someone to be reckoned with. How many parents have tried in vain to prevent little Timmy from playing with guns? Give it up. If you do not supply a boy with weapons, he will make them from whatever materials are at hand. Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it. Little girls do not invent games where large numbers of people die. A boy wants to attack something — and so does a man, even if it’s only a little white ball on a tee. Those Union soldiers who charged the stone walls at Bloody Angle, the Allied troops that hit the beaches at Normandy — what would they have done without this deep part of their heart? Life needs a man to be fierce, and fiercely devoted. As Robert Bly says, “In every relationship something fierce is needed once in a while.”
An Adventure to Live
When winter fails to provide adequate snow, his sons bring sleds in the house and ride them down the stairs. Just the other day, his wife found them with a rope out their second-story bedroom window, preparing to rappel down the side of the house. The recipe for fun in raising boys is pretty simple: add to any activity an element of danger, stir in a little exploration, throw in a dash of destruction, and you’ve got yourself a winner. If a man has lost this desire, says he doesn’t want it, that’s only because he doesn’t know he has what it takes. He believes he will fail the test, and so decides it’s better not to try.
A Beauty to Rescue
There is nothing so inspiring to a man as a beautiful woman. She’ll make you want to charge the castle, slay the giant, leap across the parapets. A man wants to be the hero to the beauty. It’s not just that a man needs a battle to fight — he needs someone to fight for. Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman yearns to be fought for. Every woman also wants an adventure to share. So many men make the mistake of thinking that the woman is the adventure — but that is where the relationship immediately goes downhill. A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up into something greater than herself. Do you see me? asks the heart of every girl. And are you captivated by what you see?
God gave us eyes so that we might see; he gave us ears that we might hear; he gave us wills that we might choose; and he gave us hearts that we might live. A man must know he is powerful; he must know he has what it takes. A woman must know she is beautiful; she must know she is worth fighting for. For if you are going to know who you truly are as a man, if you are going to find a life worth living, if you are going to love a woman deeply and not pass on your confusion to your children, you simply must get your heart back.
Chapter Two — The Wild One Whose Image We Bear
Be honest now — what is your image of Jesus as a man? “Isn’t he sort of meek and mild?” a friend remarked. “Kind of like Mother Teresa.” Those are often the only pictures of Jesus we ever see, leaving the impression that he was the world’s nicest guy — Mister Rogers with a beard. Telling a man to be like that feels like telling him to go limp and passive. But how would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captain Kangaroo?
Think instead of William Wallace going straight for the hearts of the fearful Scots: “Sons of Scotland… you have come to fight as free men, and free men you are.” He gives them an identity and a reason to fight. He reminds them that a life lived in fear is no life at all. “And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” That kind of fire stirs a masculine heart because it is closer to the truth about the God whose image men bear.
Virtually every book of the Bible tells us about God’s warring activity. And God gave us a remarkable choice — he did not make Adam and Eve obey him. He took a risk, a staggering risk, with staggering consequences. He let others into his story, and he lets their choices shape it profoundly. The ultimate risk anyone ever takes is to love, for as C. S. Lewis says, “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.” But God does give it, again and again and again, until he is literally bleeding from it all. God wants to be loved. He wants to be a priority to someone. “You will find me,” says the Lord, “when you seek me with all your heart.” As Tozer says, “God waits to be wanted.” And God wants not merely an adventure, but an adventure to share.
One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard: that you, O God, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving.
Psalms 62:11–12
Chapter Three — The Question That Haunts Every Man
The real life of the average man seems a universe away from the desires of his heart. There is no battle to fight, unless it’s traffic and meetings and hassles and bills. As George Herbert put it, “He begins to die, that quits his desires.” Why are so many men addicted to sports? It’s the biggest adventure many of them ever taste. Why do so many others lose themselves in their careers? Same reason. It’s no coincidence that many men fall into an affair not for love, not even for sex, but, by their own admission, for adventure.
Why is pornography the number one snare for men? He longs for the beauty, but without his fierce and passionate heart he cannot find her or win her or keep her. What makes pornography so addictive is that more than anything else in a lost man’s life, it makes him feel like a man without ever requiring a thing of him. The less a guy feels like a real man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn. Underneath it all sits every man’s deepest fear: to be exposed, to be found out, to be discovered as an impostor, and not really a man. Why don’t men offer their strength to a world desperately in need of it? For two simple reasons: we doubt very much that we have any real strength to offer, and we’re pretty certain that if we did offer what we have it wouldn’t be enough.
Why does a man long for a battle to fight? Because when we enter the story in Genesis, we step into a world at war. The lines have already been drawn. Evil is waiting to make its next move. Desire reveals design, and design reveals destiny. Adam and all his sons after him are given an incredible mission: rule and subdue, be fruitful and multiply. “Here is the entire earth, Adam. Explore it, cultivate it, care for it.” The secret longing of your heart, whether it’s to build a boat and sail it, to write a symphony and play it, to plant a field and care for it — those are the things you were made to do. Man is not born into a sitcom; he is born into a world at war. Somewhere back before Eden, Lucifer, the prince of angels, rebelled against the Trinity. He failed, and was hurled from the presence of the Trinity — but the battle is not over. God now has an enemy… and so do we. Man is not born into a Home Improvement; it’s Saving Private Ryan. There will be many, many battles to fight on many different battlefields.
Chapter Four — The Wound
Men rarely praise each other directly, as women do. Men praise indirectly, by way of accomplishments: “Whoa, nice shot, Ted. You’ve got a wicked swing today.” That is how validation passes between men, and a boy is alert for it from the very beginning. If Dad works outside the home, as most do, then his return in the evening becomes the biggest event of the boy’s day. Whatever Dad’s eyes land on, whatever Dad’s voice names, that becomes the news the boy carries into the rest of his life. The names a father gives matter enormously — a mother might call her son “sweetheart,” but a father might call him “tiger.” Which direction do you think a boy would want to head? “Tiger” speaks the language of the masculine soul in a way that “sweetheart” never does.
Chapter Five — The Battle for a Man’s Heart
”How do I get my husband to come alive?” a wife asks. The answer comes back: “Invite him to be dangerous.” What looks on the surface like dullness in a husband is almost always something deeper — a man who long ago stopped expecting his life to be where his question gets answered, and who has gone looking elsewhere for the verdict on his soul.
Seductive beauty reaches down inside and touches a man’s desperate hunger for validation — touches it like nothing else most men have ever experienced. This is deeper than legs and breasts and good sex. It is mythological. Every man remembers Eve. We are haunted by her. And somehow we believe that if we could find her, get her back, then we would also recover our own lost masculinity.
This is also why so many men secretly fear their wives. She sees him as no one else does, sleeps with him, knows what he’s made of. If he has given her the power to validate him as a man, then he has also given her the power to invalidate him too. The same woman he once asked to be his answer becomes the one whose smallest sigh can undo him — because she was never supposed to be carrying that question in the first place.
Chapter Six — The Father’s Voice
That deep heart-knowledge of who you are comes only through a process of initiation. You have to know where you’ve come from; you have to have faced trials that test you; you have to have taken a journey; and you have to have faced your enemy. God created each of us for a unique place in his story, and he is committed to bringing us back to the original design. God calls Abram out from Ur to a land he has never seen, and along the way Abram gets a new name — he becomes Abraham. God takes Jacob off into Mesopotamia, and when Jacob rides back into town, he has a limp and a new name as well.
Most of us are asking the wrong questions: “God, why did you let this happen to me?” or “God, why won’t you just help me succeed, get my kids to straighten out, fix my marriage?” To enter into a journey of initiation with God requires a new set of questions: What are you trying to teach me here? What issues in my heart are you raising through this? What is it you want me to see? What are you asking me to let go of? God has been trying to initiate you for a long time. What is in the way is how you have mishandled your wound and the life you have constructed as a result. The only thing more tragic than the tragedy that happens to us is the way we handle it. In order to take a man into his wound, so that he can heal it and begin the release of the true self, God will thwart the false self. He will take away all that you’ve leaned upon to bring you life. And Satan spies his opportunity and leaps to accuse: You see — God is angry with you. He’s disappointed in you. If he loved you he would make things smoother. The Enemy always tempts us back toward control, to recover and rebuild the false self. But it is out of love that God thwarts our impostor.
A man needs a much bigger orbit than a woman. He needs a mission, a life purpose, and he needs to know his name. Only then is he fit for a woman, for only then does he have something to invite her into. A man does not go to a woman to get his strength; he goes to her to offer it. We must reverse Adam’s choice; we must choose God over Eve. We must take our ache to him. For only in God will we find the healing of our wound.
Chapter Seven — Healing the Wound
The deepest desire of our hearts is for union with God. God created us for union with himself: this is the original purpose of our lives. “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). We are made to depend on God; we are made for union with him, and nothing about us works right without it. Notice what a deep and vital part of King David’s life this is — a man’s man, a warrior for sure — listening to how he describes his relationship to God in the Psalms: “I love you, O LORD, my strength.” That is not the language of clinical religion. That is a warrior at the feet of his King.
And God never does the healing the same way twice. He spits on one guy; for another, he makes mud and puts that on his eyes. There are no formulas with God. The core of Christ’s mission is foretold in Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me… to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners.” This is the central passage in the entire Bible about Jesus, the one he chooses to quote about himself in Luke 4. Take him at his word: ask him in to heal all the broken places within you and unite them into one whole and healed heart.
Chapter Eight — A Battle to Fight: The Enemy
C. S. Lewis was direct about it: “Enemy-occupied territory — that is what this world is.” Every man is a warrior inside, but the choice to fight is his own. Above all else, a warrior has a vision; he has a transcendence to his life, a cause greater than self-preservation. Whatever specific terrain you are called to — at home, at work, in the realm of the arts or industry or world politics — you will always encounter three enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. They make up a sort of unholy trinity.
Things began to change for a man named Carl when he saw his whole sexual struggle not so much as sin but as a battle for his strength. He wants to be strong, wants it desperately, and that desire began to fuel his choice to resist. A man’s addictions are the result of his refusing his strength. The enemy knows that, which is why the counterfeit always offers the feeling of strength without the cost of actually becoming strong. Has it ever crossed your mind that not every thought that crosses your mind comes from you? The enemy relies on our blindness. The moment we stop looking for him, he has already won the opening move.
Chapter Nine — A Battle to Fight: The Strategy
You can’t fight a battle you don’t think exists. This is right out of The Screwtape Letters, where Lewis has the old devil instruct his apprentice: “Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves.” Scripture doesn’t let us stay naive: “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Peter 5:8–9). Commit yourself to prayer every morning for two weeks and just watch what happens. Satan will throw a thought or a temptation at you in hopes that you will swallow it. He knows your story, knows what works with you, and so the line is tailor-made to your situation.
The most dangerous man on earth is the man who has reckoned with his own death. All men die; few men ever really live. The less we are trying to “save ourselves,” the more effective a warrior we will be. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. A soldier surrounded by enemies needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
Against the flesh — the traitor within — a warrior uses discipline. Time with God each day is not about academic study or getting through a certain amount of Scripture. It’s about connecting with God. Use whatever helps: sometimes music, other times Scripture or a passage from a book; often journaling; maybe a run; then there are days when all you need is silence and solitude and the rising sun. As one writer put it, “When Christ ceases to fill the heart with satisfaction, our souls will go in silent search of other lovers.”
The full armor of God described in Ephesians 6 is not a metaphor to admire — it is equipment to wear: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace, the shield of faith to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests — be alert, and always keep on praying.
Don’t even think about going into battle alone. The friendless condition of the average American male is a serious problem. Men find it hard to accept that they need the fellowship of other men. We don’t need accountability groups; we need fellow warriors — someone to fight alongside, someone to watch our back. There is never a more devoted group of men than those who have fought alongside one another. It will never be a large group, but we don’t need a large group. We need a band of brothers willing to shed their blood with us.
Chapter Ten — A Beauty to Rescue
So many couples wake one day to find they no longer love each other. Why do most passionate romances end with evenings in front of the TV? The answer begins with a question every woman carries: Am I lovely? Every woman needs to know that she is exquisite and exotic and chosen. This is core to her identity, the way she bears the image of God. Will you pursue me? Do you delight in me? Will you fight for me? And a hesitant man is the last thing in the world a woman needs. She needs a lover and a warrior, not a Really Nice Guy.
Consider Joseph, the carpenter. Mary turns up pregnant with a pretty wild story. The situation is scandalous. But an angel in a dream convinces him that Mary is telling the truth and that he is to follow through with the marriage — and this is going to cost him. Shunned by his business associates, certain to lose his standing in society — notice the insult crowds will later use against Jesus: “Isn’t this Joseph and Mary’s son?” — a sneer and a wink. Joseph will pay big-time for this move. Does he withhold? No. He offers Mary his strength; he steps right between her and all of that mess and takes it on the chin. He spends himself for her.
The masculine journey takes a man away from the woman so that he might return to her. He goes to find his strength; he returns to offer it. As Dostoyevsky saw it, “Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing. There God and the Devil strive for mastery, and the battleground is the heart of men.”
Chapter Eleven — An Adventure to Live
Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an adventure to be lived. God rigged the world in such a way that it only works when we embrace risk as the theme of our lives — which is to say, only when we live by faith. A man simply won’t be happy until he has adventure in his work, in his love, and in his spiritual life. God is intimately personal with us, and he speaks in ways that are peculiar to our own quirky hearts — not just through the Bible, but through the whole of creation. His word comes through sunsets and friends and films and music and wilderness. Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors. Most men spend the energy of their lives trying to eliminate risk, or squeezing it down to a more manageable size. If it works, if a man succeeds in securing his life against all risk, he’ll wind up in a cocoon of self-protection and wonder all the while why he’s suffocating. “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).
If you had permission to do what you really want to do, what would you do? Don’t ask how; that will cut your desire off at the knees. How is never the right question; how is a faithless question. How is God’s department. He is asking you what. What is written in your heart? What makes you come alive? A man’s calling is written on his true heart, and he discovers it when he enters the frontier of his deep desires. Mystery is essential to adventure. There are no formulas with God — period. God is a Person, not a doctrine. He operates with all the originality of a truly free and alive person. Simple questions change hassles to adventures: What are you teaching me here, God? What are you asking me to do… or to let go of? That posture — curious, attentive, and willing — is what keeps a man fully alive inside the story God is still writing.
Chapter Twelve — Writing the Next Chapter
We are free to change the stories by which we live. We are co-authors as well as characters, and few things are as encouraging as the realization that things can be different — and that we have a role in making them so. The wound does not have to be the final word. The false self does not have to be the permanent self. The battles yet unfought, the beauty yet unpursued, the adventure yet unlived — none of that is closed to you. Pick up the pen. The next chapter is yours to write.