Mission Focused Men for Christ

Episode Summary: Christ has called you and me to follow him in his cause of defeating evil and establishing his righteous kingdom over every square inch of human hearts and lives. There is no other man who can replace you in your life, in the arenas you have been called to. If you leave your place in line, it will remain empty. You must be the hero in your own story. There is no extra or stunt man to fill in for you. Winning your spiritual battles matters. You will celebrate...

Summary

This episode continues our study of the armor of God and finishes looking at Eph 6:15, where we’re told to put on, as our shoes, the readiness of the gospel of peace. Most Christian men want to be contagious Christians. We know that sharing our faith is something our Lord wants us to do and when we do seize opportunities to talk with others about Christ the experience pumps joy and energy into our walk with Him. We also realize that if we are to lead our homes well, our wives and ki...

Episode Summary.  Often Christians think of evangelism like this: It is having the courage to overcome every piece of emotional intelligence we’ve learned about relationships, and intruding into the life of a co-worker, neighbor, or stranger to tell someone, who doesn’t want to hear it, the gospel message that they are a sinner in need of a savior, and then being willing to suffer rejection if we are accused of being preachy. If that is what sharing our faith looks like, who would want to do it? But this view is NOT BIBLICAL. It has major...

Summary: Do you ever feel like our side is losing in the spiritual battle—that the powers of darkness and evil are winning? Perhaps more specific to our own lives, do you ever wonder why the Christian life is so hard, why sin so easily ensnares us, why our whole-hearted resolve on Sunday to love Jesus better by obeying him more has given way to blatant sin by Sunday night? Today we continue our series, Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons. Paul tells us that to fight evil we must put on the breastplate of...

Episode Summary:  Is our mission today, as Christians living in America, to recover America as a Christian nation? As we process what happened in the last election and the storming of the Capitol since, Christians are divided. Eschewing passivity, many believers feel impelled to speak up on the social media to fight a movement rooted in ungodliness, which they see shaping our culture. They are appalled that younger Christian leaders either don’t seem to see this happening or seem to lack the courage to speak up about it. Other believers are horrified at the views they hea...

Summary: This episode continues the series, Winning Spiritual Battles Because We Use Our Spiritual Weapons. Every guy who reads this blog would stand at the door of his house with a shotgun to protect his family physically. But most Christian men feel inept and inadequate at fighting to protect them, spiritually. As we saw last week, Jesus told his disciples the ultimate weapon for defeating Satan is prayer. But if we are going to use this weapon effectively in spiritual battle, we need to understand it. This...

Summary: As we seek to run well the race marked out for us, i.e. advance the righteous reign of King Jesus in our own lives, God has ordained one, primary offensive weapon that overthrows the kingdom of darkness:  PRAYER. Jesus said to Peter, “Satan has demanded to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you “(Luke 22:31-32). One veteran missionary writes, There is nothing on earth that Satan so fears as prayer. He cannot triumph over prevailing prayer. Satan is more afraid of your praying than of your pure life or zealous witne...

Summary: In the last episode we observed that no one can nurture a child as well as his own or her own mother can. Similarly, no one can be the father to your children that you can be. Our job as fathers is to help our daughters flourish—to become all that God created them to be. This episode examines two ingredients required by every daughter’s heart for her to be able to thrive.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Summary: In today’s world, many of our female loved ones are engaged in a very personal spiritual battle about their identity and calling as women, and how motherhood fits into that calling. This episode shows how the mistake of overvaluing motherhood will hurt them and how undervaluing motherhood can be devastating. Only the biblical worldview gets this balance right; so that is our topic today.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Episode Summary: Our calling as men, to help others flourish, means helping our daughters and granddaughters build confidence in the way God created them to be female. Gender differences are profoundly related to our sense of identity. Before helping men know how to winsomely explain the biblical worldview of gender, the podcast identifies two big obstacles that routinely prevent others from being open to the biblical worldview. This episode then articulates the glory of God’s design of humans as male and female. It then suggests questions men might asked their daughters or granddaughters to open their he...

Episode Summary: As we close out this Fatherhood Month series, we return to the Andrew Tate phenomenon that is impacting teen guys in our churches, with which we began this series. Tate says, “There is zero advantage to marriage for a man. If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married, there are absolutely none.” But, in fact research proves Tate completely wrong. Married men and women who have children are in fact happier, wealthier and more fulfilled than their single and childless coun...

Episode Summary: This past week, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law, which blocks all transgender medical treatments on those under 18, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. This ruling is an encouraging sign; but it is also a reminder of the torrential flood of polluted messages coming from social media, shouting for the past twenty years that gender identity is fluid, different gender roles are unjust, and same-sex attraction is normal. This entire month our podcast focus is providing help to our boys to withstand the cultural pressure squeezing them into its false, destructive views about ma...

Episode Summary: To aim low, when it comes to our efforts to guide our sons into godly manhood is to fail them and to fail the Lord. Toxic, self-centered, masculinity is real in this world; it has harmed countless women. Its only cure is the gospel of Jesus Christ which transforms. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Cor 5:17). Answering Jesus’ call to Christian men to show the world his power of Jesus to fix broken manhood, restoring it...

Episode Summary: Jesus closed his most famous message, the Sermon on the Mount, with the warning that those who ignore his words build their lives on the worst possible foundation—sand. Our sons, daughters, and grandchildren who build their marriages and families by ignoring God’s design of created gender differences and assigned gender roles build on a foundation that is bound to collapse, sand. In contrast, said Jesus, are those who build their lives on obedience to his Word, which would include God’s delineation of created gender differences in Genesis and assign...

Episode Summary: Andrew Tate is a former is a kickboxing-champion-turned-social-media-influencer who has become popular among young men for his views on modern masculinity. He has over ten million followers on X. Regarding his influence on American Christian teen boys, Nancy Pearcey, author of The Toxic War on Masculinity, wrote recently on X: A former graduate student of mine now teaches at a high school, and she sent me an email saying, “All my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. They are even including quotes from Andrew Tate in the yearbook.” I asked, “Where do you teach?” She answ...

Episode Summary: The great theologian Augustine prayed famously, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” King David would have been the first to affirm Augustine’s observation about human nature in general and his own longings. He begins Psalm 63 with the words. You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you. David knew that he was created to enjoy a love relationship with God. But the event from David’s life that we study in this...

Episode Summary: YESTERDAY’S spiritual passion doesn’t supply TODAY’S spiritual energy. Fired up hearts through Scripture inspiring us or by seeing God’s hand answering our prayers ignite our passion for the moment or day. But all too quickly that passion cools, as the rain from a new day’s storms hits—circumstances that go all wrong, obstacles that make simple tasks harder than they should be, our own disappointing failures. Spiritual passion seems to dissipate quickly, and before we know it, we are discouraged, disheartened, and unmotivated. This episode looks at one of the lowes...

Episode Summary: In the beatitudes, Jesus paints a portrait of spiritual vitality and health into which Christ’s kingdom members are being transformed. But at the root of that transformation process is cutting out the cancer of sin. Such excision of sin requires both confessing it, the first beatitude, and grieving over it, the second beatitude. The combination of these two attitudes is called repentance. The problem is that Christians can be lured into a kind of shallow, incomplete repentance that is destructive. It might be compared to surgery to remove the cancerous tumor that mi...

Summary: Early in Jesus’ ministry, on a small mountainside outside of Capernaum, Jesus picked up his verbal pen and painted a portrait of human life when it is restored to the way it is intended to be, by his power to overthrow sin. This portrait of kingdom life begins with eight heart attitudes that comprise righteousness. Today we examine the second of these beatitudes, not only because it is so fundamental to spiritual flourishing, but because it was clearly portrayed in King David’s heart after he was confronted with his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uria...

Summary: This episode continues our series on the life of David by examining his battle to fight the temptation that survey’s reveal is at the top of men’s temptations—overcoming lust and, if married, directing their sexual desires totally towards the wife of their youth. We study David’s fall and the lessons we can take away from this biblical example.

For Further Prayerful Thought: 

Episode Summary: The resurrection reminds us that the gospel is not just about our personal, private salvation and growth in holiness (which is called the two-chapter gospel.) Such a gospel leads to separating from the lost, forgetting their inherent value as those created in God’s image, and devaluing the (common grace) contributions they make to our culture. In contrast, the resurrection of Christ’s physical body reminds us that the true gospel story has four chapters: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. Christ-followers are called to be part of the greatest mission in the history of the world, Chri...

Episode Summary: Though we associate Jesus’ arrival on a donkey with children and palm branches, those actually with Jesus who shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” saw his arrival as the coming of the promised Messianic King who would fully and finally overthrow their enemies. This episode is devoted to better understanding the nature of Christ’s kingship and kingdom, which was not only misunderstood by the crowd and his disciples but is misunderstood by many Christians today.  

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Episode Summary: Since it is the nature of men to want to win in everything they do, Christian Christ-followers want to win as disciples. Paul defines this success as reaching spiritual maturity, but such a target on the wall can be nebulous. In I Samuel 24, however, David displays three striking marks of spiritual maturity that give us a clear example to emulate. This episode explains these three marks of spiritual maturity.

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Episode Summary. Many of us haven’t thought much about protecting our families, not just physically but emotionally. Feelings of depression, worry, bitterness, worthlessness, and fear can devastate our loved ones. One of the most eye-opening questions a husband can ask his wife is, “Are their fears that sometimes grip your heart?” This episode is designed to help us know how to cope with our own fears and know how to help our kids and wives deal with theirs. We will sit at the feet of David and see what he learned when terror filled his heart becaus...

Episode Summary. Christians find universal comfort in knowing that the Bible never flatters its heroes but exposes their numerous flaws. Such honesty inspires us with hope because we know that we ourselves are deeply flawed. Such a hero was David who had big successes but even bigger failures. This episode provides encouragement for all of us as we see David succeeding bigtime, failing bigtime, but always getting back up after he falls. 

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Episode Summary. Christian tradition records envy as one of the seven deadly sins, along with lust, greed, pride, gluttony, wrath, and laziness. God warns us, Envy makes the bones rot (Prov 14:30b). This episode examines how King Saul’s envy of David steadily eroded the health of his soul. It then examines how to attack four roots of envy that can grow in our hearts. 

For Further Prayerful Thought:

Episode Summary. This episode examines the most famous friendship in the Bible the bond between Jonathan and David. We study their example to see how we can enjoy stronger brotherhood connections ourselves, because experiencing such brotherhood bonds has always been God’s intent, as Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 explains.  Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep war...