Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

Today we’re wrapping up our Mirrors series. Mirrors is a two-part series that we started on Mother’s Day. We talked about five different mirrors from the Bible that are reflections of a godly woman. Since today is Father’s Day, it’s our turn, guys. We’re going to look to the Bible for some reflections of what a godly man should look like.

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs with men today. I was talking to a woman a few weeks ago and she started talking about today’s men and she said, “I remember the day when men were men and we women were darn glad of that.” I took the liberty of cleaning up some of the expletives from what she really said, but you get the point.

Ladies, when you’re looking to get married, you’re looking for a man. A man that will love you, protect you, and fight for you. A man who will work hard, lead your family, and stand strong during tough times. A man with hands tough enough to swing a hammer and gentle enough to wipe away the tears of a crying child. That’s the man you’re looking for. And the old joke is becoming more true every day. Men are like parking spaces. The good ones are already taken. There is a shortage of good men in our culture. Tragically, there is a shortage of good men in the church. Today, 60% of all Christ-followers are women. Godly men are a dying breed.

Maybe this is because, as Christians, Jesus is our model. And we have a pretty warped idea of the kind of man that Jesus was. As Mark Driscoll said, “Tragically, the word has gotten out about Jesus that somehow he is a marginalized Galilean peasant hippie in a dress rocking out to the Spice Girls driving around the Middle East…hoping to meet nice people to do aroma therapy with while drinking herbal tea. That’s not the guy we’re talking about.”

The Bible consistently portrays Jesus as a warrior. He is the King of kings and he is the Lord of lords and he’s coming back and if he you haven’t submitted your life and your eternity to him, then he’s coming back to kick your tail. That’s the tough, masculine, warrior side of Jesus that often gets ignored by the church and is misunderstood by our world. And because this is true, the picture of a godly man has gotten been blurred. So today we’re looking to the mirror of God’s Word for a clear picture. A clear reflection of what a godly man looks like. And guys, I hope you’re wearing pads and cups, because being a godly man is a contact sport. This stuff isn’t for wimps.

For the sake of integrity, you need to know some of my content today comes from David Fairchild, pastor of Kaleo Church in San Diego. He’s got some great wisdom and insight into this that has really been a blessing to me and I wanted to share some of it with you. And since I’m not only preaching this message but it will also be posted on our website, I want to keep this all above board and tell you that not all of this is original with me.

Now let’s jump into it. If we’re going to raise up more godly men, we need to know what a man of God looks like. We’re going to look at three different mirror reflections from the Bible.

Mirror #1 – A godly man makes sacrifices.

The blood of selfishness is coursing through the veins of men in our culture today. A lot of men are the center of their own universe and everything and everyone is supposed to revolve around them. The first question they ask is, “What am I going to get out of this? How does this affect me? Do I like this? Does it please me?”

Think of some of the trends you see among men today. They are rooted in selfishness.

A lot of times women get accused of being the materialistic ones. Shop til you drop. Things like that. And I’ve met a ton of selfish, materialistic women…but guys, we can be just as bad, if not worse. Generally speaking, a woman might buy a pair of shoes that she doesn’t need. A guy will be a car that he can’t afford. Which is worse, guys?

Men in our culture are notorious for pursuing bigger and better toys. They’ve always got their eyes on the new car, the bigger truck, the new golf clubs, the new motorcycle, the bigger TV, the new boat. And when one of our buddies gets a new toy, we drool over it like a dog over his food dish. We’re jealous, we’re greedy, and we lust after what our buddy has. We wish it was ours. It should be ours. We think things like, “He doesn’t deserve that. But I do.”

And then when we actually get something newer, or bigger, or better, we can’t wait to show it off to our buddies so we can see the jealousy in their eyes and continue this cycle of selfishness.

But this selfishness in men isn’t confined to materialistic greed. It extends way beyond just stuff. In a recent poll of 1,000 Christian men, 500 of them admitted to being addicted to pornography. That’s 50% Christian men that admit to being a porn addict. There are men in this church, men listening to me right now, who are struggling with pornography. And guys, if this is you, let’s be honest about this struggle.

Why do men become addicted to porn? At its root, it’s because they’re selfish. What do you have in pornography? You have this woman who is there whenever you want. You click to bring her up on your screen. Click again and make her go away. You can also peruse around until you find a woman that looks the way you want her to look. You want a blonde, click til you find one. Brunette, keep clicking. You want bigger this or smaller that, keep clicking.

Not only that, but once you find the woman that pleases you, she’ll do anything you want, at your convenience. It doesn’t cost you anything. You don’t have to bring anything to the relationship. You don’t have to talk to her. You don’t have to listen to her. You don’t have to care for her needs. You don’t have to give anything. She is an object that is there to satisfy your desires, and when you’re done with her, click and she goes away. There’s an incredible selfishness in pornography.

This same selfishness easily carries over into a man’s relationships. There are guys who view their wife as a short order cook, a launderer of clothing, a washer of dishes, and a cleaner of houses. There are so many husbands who treat their wives like a maid, and then when the lights go out they selfishly expect to have their needs met in the bedroom. So their view of their wife transitions from a maid to a prostitute. Do what I want when I want, but don’t expect any response from me in return.

When it comes to fatherhood, this same selfishness is on display in the lives of a lot of men. Time Magazine reports that up to 40% of children worldwide are growing up with no father in their life at all. In the United States, more than half of divorced fathers will lose all contact with their children within a few years. After 10 years, as many as two-thirds of divorced fathers have completely drifted out of the lives of their kids. According to a 1994 study by the Children's Defense Fund, 49% of divorced men will default on a child-support payment. By comparison, only 3% will miss the payment on their used car.

The root of all this? Selfishness. It’s hard to be a father. It gets even harder when divorce enters the equation. And so, because it’s just too hard, fathers are leaving their children behind at an astounding rate…all because of their selfishness.

Let’s pull in some Bible teaching on this issue. 1 John says, “This is how we've come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves.” (1 John 3:16, The Message)

Following Jesus means living a life of sacrifice. The needs of others become more important than your needs. The desires of others become more important than your desires. A selfish Christian is really a contradiction in terms. The Bible never, not one time, gives us permission to live a selfish lifestyle.

There is a trend among those of us with the Y chromosome to look out for ourselves, to live a hedonistic lifestyle where our pleasure is our goal. But the godly man is called to a higher standard. He is called to live a life of sacrifice.

Since a lot of guys here today are family men, or will one day be family men, let’s look at this from a family perspective.

The Bible says, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” (Ephesians 5:25, ESV)

Fellas, God’s call on us is to love our wives just as Jesus loved the church. How did Jesus show his love for his bride, the church? He died for her. Jesus died in our place without looking to what we could give him in return. His love is completely sacrificial. It is 100% giving, looking for 0% in return. And this is our model in how we are supposed to love our wives, and by extension, how we’re supposed to love our kids. Selfishness is not part of the DNA of a godly husband and father. His heart beats with sacrifice. He will give up anything to make sure his wife knows she is passionately loved. He will go to the ends of the earth to make sure his kids know that he’s never leaving them, that they always can rely on their dad’s love, strength, and support. Your family needs to know that you are going to live unselfishly and make the necessary sacrifices for them. They need to know that by what you say and what you do.

Let’s move on to a second biblical reflection of a godly man.

Mirror #2 – A godly man guards his eyes.

Job 31 sets the standard for the man of God. And it’s a high standard.

Job writes, “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.” (Job 31:1, NIV)

I have made a covenant, a commitment, a promise, an oath not to look lustfully at anyone other than my wife. I will guard my eyes and not allow them to wander to any woman that I am not married to.

A lot of Biblical scholars believe that the book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible. And even in this ancient book, Job admits to his struggle with lust. This is nothing new. Lust didn’t start when Hugh Hefner started Playboy. Lust didn’t begin when Al Gore invented the internet. Lust has plagued men for as long as there has been men.

But Job knew that the man of God cannot follow the cues of his culture. Our culture tells us, “A little window shopping isn’t going to hurt. It doesn’t matter if you look at the menu as long as you have your meals at home.” In other words, you’re just looking. Looking is harmless. Guys, that is a lie born in the depths of hell.

Jesus said, “The light of the body is the eye…” (Matthew 6:22a, KJV) In other words, your eyes affect everything else in your body and in your life. You can live in the light of God or the darkness of our world, and it starts with your eyes.

This is why it’s so critical that we guard our eyes. We’ve already talked about pornography a little bit, but the church cannot address this issue too much. The statistic that 50% of men in the church are porn addicts should rock us to our core. Our silence on this issue is sealing our fate, and it’s time to break the silence guys.

Porn has a damning effect on your family. Some of you men have a picture in your mind of what a woman should look like and that picture isn’t your wife. Pornography does nothing but feed that dilemma.

Some guys get used to looking at pornography, but they think that when they get married they won’t need it anymore. The problem is that the pictures of the women in their mind don’t leave that easily and you begin to compare your wife to a porn star.

You’ve been staring at tall, petite, black, brown, Asian, blonde, brunette, red-headed girls that have comic book body proportions thanks to their surgeon, and you now have a totally unrealistic composition of all of these women in your mind. And you use those pictures as the standard to judge your wife. Your wife does not and cannot look like that!

She’s competing with good lighting, plastic surgery, and PhotoShop. She’ll never win. Your expectations are so unrealistic because those women don’t exist. They are touched up images of an imperfect woman, and without makeup, good lighting, and the aid of a computer geek she can’t even live up to her own post-production image.

Isn’t it strange that just a couple hundred years ago the plump, light skinned, healthy woman was considered a hottie, and the lean, tone, tanned skinned field worker was considered homely. Culture has a way of changing our taste buds.

So guys, what should your perfect woman look like? What is the God-given standard for beauty? Your wife! If your wife is tall, then tall is your thing and should be the most attractive to you. If she has red hair, then red hair is your favorite hair color on a woman. If she is curvaceous and healthy, then that is what most attracts you.

Every man here at Amelia should consider his wife the most beautiful woman in the world. If not, then you have the problem, not your wife. Your ideal woman should look like the woman God has gifted you with, not some 14-year-old anorexic on the cover of a magazine.

Men, do you compete with PhotoShop? No. Does our culture have a different standard for us than for women? Absolutely. You’re not fat. You’re “husky.” You’re “barrel-chested.” You’re “healthy.” Men don’t subject themselves to that same standard, yet they expect their women to do the impossible and look like the girls on billboards, magazine covers, and the internet.

Men, the next time you want to criticize your wife’s body, take off all your clothes and look in the mirror. That should shut you up quickly. If it doesn’t, get some glasses. Grab some Windex and clean the mirror. Then take another look. Most of you will not be on the next cover of GQ or Men’s Health.

Paul says something interesting in the New Testament. He writes in 1 Timothy 5, “Treat…older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity.” (1 Timothy 5:1-2, ESV)

Guys, this command covers every woman in the world except for your wife. If the woman is older than you, think of her like your mom. If she’s younger than you, treat her like your sister. Kind of throws a new spin on porn, doesn’t it? When viewing pornography, you’re either drooling over your mother or ogling over your sister.

If you’re thinking, “Ok, that’s gross,” that’s the point! Now you’re looking at the issue through a godly lens. Our prayer needs to be that this sin of lust will disgust us as much as it disgusts God.

Guys, if we don’t pray that prayer, if we allow our eyes to go unguarded, then we’ll become calloused to what we’re looking at. Leering at that woman in the office won’t be enough. It’ll lead us to some bikini pics on the internet, but that won’t be enough. We’ll start surfing porn sites, but eventually that’s not enough. You can see the pattern here. The high that comes from lust always comes back with diminishing returns. You’ve got to keep upping the ante to get the same rush. It eventually leads guys to a bed that is not theirs with a woman that is not their wife.

Proverbs 6 says, “For these commands are a lamp, this teaching is a light, and the corrections of discipline are the way of life, keeping you from the immoral woman, from the smooth tongue of the wayward wife.

Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes, for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread [a loaf of bread was payment for the prostitute], and the adulteress preys upon your very life. Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being scorched?” (Proverbs 6:23-27, NIV)

Some guys want to have a lap dance with fire but they don’t want to get burned. It doesn’t work. If you are led astray by an immoral woman you will get burned.

Some guys don’t know that the woman who will sleep with you after three drinks is cut from the same cloth as the one that will sleep with you after you pay her $50. She’s just cheaper. Men, stay away from women that call you to their bed.

We have to understand that this all comes back to our eyes. You don’t fall into another woman’s bed without lustful thoughts. And you don’t have lustful thoughts without lustful looks. It all comes back to guarding your eyes. If a woman is not your wife, then you are to look at her like a mother or a sister.

If you’re struggling with lust, it’s time for you to quit rationalizing and start getting real. It’s time for you to get real with your wife and with an accountability partner. It’s time to fight for your wife and your kids by guarding your own eyes.

I told you earlier guys, this is a contact sport. Marriage isn’t for boys. It’s for men. It takes a godly man to be a real husband and father. It takes a godly man who’s willing to guard his eyes.

Mirror #3 – A godly man is an initiator.

You may be scratching your head a little bit on that one, but let me flesh this out a little bit. A godly man isn’t passive. He is proactive. A godly man makes things happen. He causes change. He initiates positive change.

God has set men up as leaders in the home. But what we’re seeing more and more are lazy, apathetic, wimpy men who are abdicating their leadership role. The statistic I shared earlier that 60% of Christians are women really bears this out. Men are leaving their post as the spiritual heads of the home.

God’s call on us is to be leaders. To initiate godly change in our families.

The Bible says in Ephesians 5, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” (Ephesians 5:22-24, NIV)

Some of you guys are thinking, “Oh yeah! That’s my favorite passage! Preach it!” Before you get too rah-rah on this guys, let’s think about this.

We can easily see how these verses from Ephesians impact our wives. But think about how they impact us as husbands.

A wife that is submissive to her husband’s leadership means that her husband is responsible for everything that happens in his family.

Whoa. All of a sudden we don’t want to cheer when we read these verses, do we? Because these verses are more about the husband than the wife. When your wife lives with the submissiveness of a godly woman, it means that she is entrusting herself, her kids, her everything to you. It’s all on your shoulders. And if that weight feels like it’s too much for your to carry, tough. Because it’s yours as a godly man.

We live in a culture that wants to entertain us to death. Understand that there’s nothing wrong with fun. I try to make everything that I can fun. But this is deadly serious business. If you want a life that is nothing but carefree fun, don’t get married. Don’t have kids. The godly man is going to approach marriage and fatherhood with the sober realization that he is going to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Yes, God will give you the strength to carry on. If you stay connected with him, he’ll strengthen you where you’re weak. But the point is that this is not a game. It’s serious business.

Men are called to initiate their family to move in the right directions. If your family is on a God-honoring track, it’s up to you to keep it moving that way. If your family is straying into ungodly territory, it’s your responsibility to right the ship.

Women are built to respond to men as initiators. Women become what their husbands invest in them. That is how they are built. They are built for response by a godly initiator. Women are built to be poured into. They are built that way physically and emotionally. When a man is pouring into his wife, loving her, praying for her, being affectionate, providing for her, being understanding and gentle, his woman will respond. They will become more confident, more self-assured, and more beautiful. The more a woman is loved, the lovelier she becomes.

Isn’t that true? How does a woman look who’s trapped in a loveless relationship? She looks haggard. Worn out. Her desire for life has just withered up. Why? Because she’s not being poured into. She doesn’t have a godly man to initiate her to be lovely, and confident, and fulfilled.

Dads, your children are built to be poured into. They become what you initiate them to become. Your girls will become beautiful godly women because you initiated it. Your boys will become strong godly men because they saw it in you. You initiated it.

There is a caveat that there comes a point where your kids make their own choices and they won’t always make choices you like. But men, it is your responsibility to do everything you can to initiate a right, God-honoring lifestyle in your kids.

Fellas, we’ve got kids in this church that can’t tell you who Abraham was. They can’t tell you if the book of Romans is in the Old or New Testament, or even if it’s in the Bible at all. They don’t understand basic truths of Scripture. They are not equipped to stand for Christ at school because they don’t see Christ modeled in their home. And to be bluntly honest, dads, that’s our fault. It’s not the fault of your kids Sunday School teacher. It’s not Brian’s fault as the youth minister. If our kids fall into these categories, that’s our fault as dads.

It’s time for us to get into the game men. It takes a man to heed what you’ve heard today. It takes a man to unselfishly sacrifice everything he wants for what his family needs.

It takes a man to resist the temptation of lust; to guard his eyes; to look only at the body of his wife; to buck against our culture and live with purity.

It takes a man to initiate right, godly change in his family; to take seriously and soberly his leadership role in his family.

Guys, the only question that remains is, “Are you that kind of man?”

Mike Edmisten

Tags: Father's Day, fathers, husbands, lust, men, pornography, selfishness