Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · June 18, 2006

Second Sunday After Pentecost

Prayer of the Day

Gracious God, Father and Mother of us all, be with us in this hour of worship as we commemorate the best qualities of the men in our lives.  Grant this, we pray, through Christ our Lord, our Leader.  Amen.

Scripture

2 Timothy 2:1

You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

Message

Four Steps to Becoming a Man

Rick Frost

It is Father’s Day in the U.S.A.  It is a day, which I have said elsewhere, should be, along with Mother’s Day, a universal – not just a national – holiday.  It should be a religious holiday, not just a secular or civic one, because when we remember these two very powerful people in our lives, we are called to be reminded of how indebted we are, for good or for ill, to those persons who gave us birth and gave us a start.  Everything we value has its roots, for good or for ill, in those two people.

The fact is, being a dad, as you know, is powerful stuff, because a father leaves an indelible mark on the souls of his children as well as his grandchildren.  Barry Brazelton, former chief of child development at Children’s Hospital in Boston says, “Of all human relationships, the bond between a father and a child is one of the most powerful and complex.  Yes, we look to our mothers for unconditional love, but we usually seek to validate our existence through the approval of our fathers, and without it, we tend to live the rest of our lives feeling cheated.”

When you are a kid, there’s not any more powerful word in the English language than “Dad.”

Hear the story of Sophia Loren.  She is a woman, as most of you know, who had all the beauty, all of the wealth, all of the notoriety any woman could ask for.  But this is a woman who only saw her father six times in her life.  She says, “He shaped me as a person more than any other man.  It was the dream of my life to have a father, and that is why I saw him everywhere.  I spent most of my life looking for substitutes.  I’ve received many wonderful gifts in my life, but my most treasured possession is the only toy my father ever gave me – a little blue car with my name on it.”

Today’s message is a challenge to the males among us, because I believe that being a male doesn’t make you a man.  Being a male may have given you children, and I do believe if that has been a gift of yours, becoming a good dad is a project some of us still have out ahead of us.  Some of the people in this room have had strong father figures in your lives, and some of you did not.  Some of our fathers were absent.  Some of our fathers were awful.  Some of our fathers were awesome.  Sometimes they were a mixture of all three.

There is a fascinating story in Scripture about a very real man named Paul who essentially re-parented, re-fathered a young male named Timothy.  We don’t know much about Timothy’s father.  All it tells us in the New Testament is that he was a Greek.  We don’t know whether he was still alive.  We don’t know whether he died young.  We don’t know what happened to him.  We do know that Timothy was raised by two very faithful and wonderful women, Timothy’s mother and his grandmother.  But quite frankly, all you have to do is read those two letters in the New Testament, and you begin to see every indication there is a vacuum in this young man’s life.  He was timid.  He was weak in some ways.  He was physically unfit in many ways, and he was easily intimidated.  Then along came a man named Paul who took Timothy on as his disciple and became like a father to him.

In Philippians 2, Paul says, “As a son with his father has Timothy been with me.”  It’s a relationship that started when Timothy was young, and it bloomed and blossomed over time.  Later – much later – Paul would write these words that when he needed to send an emissary to his churches all over the Mediterranean world, he would often send his best.  And his best person was Timothy.  He says, “For I have no one else like him.  He has genuine interest in your welfare.  He has proven himself to me.”

Now, I had a Paul in my life.  His name was Richard, and he lives in another state far from here, but he was, in fact, my minister, and my mentor, and my spiritual father, who from the time I was 15 on took me under his wing and in new ways introduced me to my heavenly Father.  In many ways he taught me how to grow toward becoming a young man.

I have since seen, and I believe this, that moving from being a male to being a man is a process.  It’s a progression.  There are stages we go through.  There are steps we take.  Roger Thompson has named them well.  I want to share four of them with you on this special day.

Ladies, we are going to talk with the guys today.  You can listen or overhear, but this is for the guys.

The first stage, guys, is to recognize, to own, to acknowledge that you are Unconsciously Incompetent.  I know that is cold, but we are just going to talk “straight talk” today.  All right?  It’s not your fault.  It’s not my fault.  We are just born that way.  It’s a guy thing.  We are Unconsciously Incompetent.  There are areas of our lives we just don’t know, and I don’t know that I don’t know.  I’m unconscious about some things.  The longer I live, the more frightening that becomes.  This is maleness at its most dangerous level.  It is maleness that damages, at times, in ways we don’t even know that it damages.  It’s maleness that is abusive and violent and arrogant.

Paul said it this way.  He said, “But even though I was once a blasphemer, even though I once was a persecutor, even though I was once a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance.  I was incompetent, unconsciously incompetent, and I acted in ignorance.”

As you know, a blasphemer is a person who has no reverence for God, or worse believes that he or she is God.  A persecutor is a person who pesters, who harasses, who injures, who causes others to suffer.

“And yet,” he said, “by the grace of our Lord, that grace was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and the love that are in Jesus Christ, one who came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.”

Now, don’t misunderstand. OK?  Paul is no dummy.  He knew a lot about God and God’s mercy.  He knew a lot about God as a Pharisee, but he didn’t relate to God until later.

In the letter to Titus, Paul says these words: “We were foolish then.  We were disobedient, enslaved in passions and pleasures, living in malice and envy.  We were going around hating others and being hated by others (Titus 3:3).”

Unconsciously Incompetent is maleness at its worst.  Look around you.  Look at the world today.  Where is the violence, the genocide, the injustice, the abusive behavior?  Who’s doing it?  By in large, it is males.  It is men who have run amuck, who are out of control, who are unconsciously incompetent, damaging themselves, and damaging everybody else that’s connected with them.  Folks, this is not the life God created for men.  It’s not the life he created for anyone.

Paul says, “That’s when I came to the point when I just signed over the deed.  I gave my life to the Lordship, the leadership, to the wisdom, the power, and the purposes of God.  Now, all I do is what the Lord tells me to do.”

I think that is where manhood begins.  We call it conversion.  We call it believing.  We call it transformation.  We call it discipling.  We call it spiritual formation.  Call it anything you want.  Many of us have made that decision somewhere along the line in our life.  We believe that Jesus is the Christ, and we want him to be Lord and leader of the center of our life.

That is great.  But men, let me ask you something.  Are you aware?  Are you conscious of the impact of the unconscious incompetent things we say and do, particularly with children?

A friend tells about growing up in a family where he happened to be the lucky one.  He was the one who was praised for his performance.  He was encouraged to do his best.  He was the golden boy, the one who the parents just thought was fantastic.  But he had a younger brother, and he was kind of a clumsy kid.  If he was handed a tool, he would drop it.  If he was given something, he would lose it.  If he got under a truck, it would fall on him.  He was just one of those kinds of kids.

When the aunts and the uncles and others would get together for Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving and all kinds of gatherings, this kid would walk into the room and the father would say, “Hey, here is my son who can’t do anything right.”  In his or her ignorance, everyone else laughed, too.  They repeatedly laughed, year after year, because that’s what he said every time.  Even the boy laughed.  And he literally became the prophecy his father shared.  He never did anything right in his life.  He barely made it through high school.  He quit more jobs than most of us could imagine having.  He went through a variety of marriages.  He was a human tumbleweed.  He was the impact of unconscious incompetence. 

Guys, know the impact of what you say and what you do with the little ones!

That brings us to Step Two.  Becoming Consciously Incompetent.  That doesn’t sound like progress.  Does it?  But listen.  It really is.  Here is how it works. 

Guys, you’re out there on the golf course.  You’re on the driving range, and you have this big bucket of golf balls.  You’ve got Big Bertha in your hands.  (That’s not a woman, by the way.)  You’re teeing up the balls, and you’re just pounding away.  Every one of those golf balls you strike hooks off to the left into the trees.  You become aware there is something you are doing that is not right.

There is a problem here, guys.  Most of us, including me, are not easily coached.  We just aren’t.  We really don’t like instructions.  We don’t like maps.  We just want things to work.  If they don’t work, we want to do something.  We want to stand up there and swing that club as hard as we can, and hit the ball as straight as possible a long, long way right down the fairway.  But, if it’s not working, then we have to become aware.  We have to be conscious there is something we need to do that we don’t know how to do.  This is very difficult for guys.

Picture a wife who sort of raises the decibel level of her voice.  It starts out like this: “Honey, something’s wrong here.”  Then louder, “HONEY!  SOMETHING’S WRONG HERE.”  Pretty soon she is standing on the kitchen table with the pots and pans banging, saying, “HONEY, SOMETHING’S WRONG HERE IN OUR HOME!”

But he doesn’t get it.  Then one day somebody shows up with a piece of paper, and it says the marriage is over.  He says, “What is wrong with her?”  He just doesn’t get it.

Being conscious of our incompetence is a big step, guys.  There is no such thing as the guaranteed, pre-packaged husband and father.  We are a kit to be put together piece by piece.  There are instructions, and we need to get them out and follow them.  Let’s fix some stuff.  Let’s grow.  Let’s become conscious of the things we need to change.

Step Three.  In becoming a man, it involves becoming Conscious of Your Competence.  Paul said this to Timothy.  He said, “Train yourself to be godly.”  That’s something we can do.  It doesn’t come naturally.  It doesn’t come easily.  It’s not instantaneous.  Lord knows!  But we can learn.  We can learn some new habits.  We can learn about our feelings.  It’s like maybe throwing a ball with your left hand when you are naturally right handed.  It’s like finding yourself in Brazil or Italy, and you have this whole language thing, and it’s not comfortable in the beginning.

But you can do it.  Practice.  Practice.  Practice.  Guess what happens when we practice?  We start to become competent.  Every guy in this room who is married knows this.  You can have the best intentions of meeting your wife’s needs.  But if you think for one minute her needs are similar to your needs, you are in for a whole pile of misery.  Isn’t that right?  You are! 

That is because our emotional needs, as guys, are sort of like a tackle box.  It has 500 little compartments in it.  We have a compartment for this, and we have a compartment for that, and we have some old compartments that have some junk hanging around that have been there forever.  We have some secret compartments that nobody but God knows about.  All day long we bounce from one little compartment to another.  It is fun, and we like it that way.  It’s neat.  We feel very at home and comfortable in our tackle box compartments, but a wife’s emotional deal is totally different, and it’s not a tackle box.

It’s more like a river, and it flows, and it flows, and it flows.  It’s an amazing thing – a woman.  You may have heard this.

One night a woman finds her husband standing over the newborn’s crib, and she stands at the door and silently watches him for a few minutes.  She is just amazed he doesn’t even know she is there.  She sees all of these deep emotions, mixtures on his face – disbelief, doubt, delight, amazement, enchantment.  He steps back and just shakes his head and says, “Wow!  That is amazing!”

She is touched by what she sees, at this unusual deep display of emotion, and her eyes are moistening and glistening.  She comes up behind him and slips her arms around him and says, “A penny for your thought.”

He says, “It’s amazing, really amazing when you just take the time to really look closely.  You wonder how anyone could make a crib like that for just 49 bucks.”

You are caught!  You’re dead!  You’re toast!  You’re still in the tackle box here.

Guys, what we need to learn to do is close the tackle box every once in a while.  Get into the river.  Become Consciously Competent even in a strange environment.  The reason we need to do that is because it honors the woman God has given us.  Some guys get it, and some guys don’t.

This piece came from the “Arkansas Democrat” newspaper.  (I’ll just let that speak for itself.)  The author writes:

“Women are very touchy about certain gifts, I discovered that after buying my girlfriend a catcher’s mitt for her birthday.  It seemed to me a particularly thoughtful gift, especially since she claimed she was not getting enough physical exercise.  Apparently she didn’t see it that way.  The minute she unwrapped it, she ran from the room sobbing.  At first I thought they were tears of joy.  I figured she was just overwhelmed at being the first in her crowd to have a mitt.  I mean… Gee Whiz.  I spent all of this time going through all these wonderful sporting goods stores trying to find the perfect gift.  I mean… It was top of the line.  I didn’t spare anything, and she calls me insensitive.  You’d think I’d given her a year’s subscription to Field and Stream, or a box of shotgun shells.  Everybody knows you save those for Christmas stocking stuffers.  Personally, I think she just has a lot of anger in her, and she takes it out on me, not that I’m trying to play amateur psychologist or anything like that.”

Guys, we need to become Consciously Competent.

Finally, Step Four.  This is the one that’s really good.  It’s sheer joy.  This makes all of the steps worthwhile.  It’s that stage where we start to become, by God’s grace, Unconsciously Competent.  We don’t have to think about it.  We call it the Fruit of the Spirit of God.  It’s the byproduct of changing some stuff that’s hard to change.  It’s the hard work of learning how to communicate, and to bless, and to feel, and to honor, and that stuff starts to just spill over into the life of a man.

When it does, by God’s grace, you might just become… the pride of your wife, a credit to your children, and a blessing to your children and to your children’s children.

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Father God, thank you for making us your choice.  Help us to trust in you in the daily things, ever moving toward who you have destined us to be.  Help us to rest in you, listen for your direction, and walk your way.  Amen.