Manhood Begins with "M"

That same word in the Septuagint appears in the book of Ephesians chapter 6 verse 4 where Paul says, fathers, bring up your children in the instruction. Godly father who refuses to model apathy and instead models godly character and conviction and commitment is a man who is willing to set the standard, he is willing to enforce the standard, he is willing to model the standard and he is willing to confront when the standard is violated and then he personally is willing to confess when he himself fails to meet the standard. Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart.

Stephen Davey is the President of Wisdom International in Cary, North Carolina. Today we're beginning a series of four messages specifically for fathers. Stephen called this message, Manhood Begins with M. It's time for men who know Jesus Christ to model godly character, godly conviction and godly commitment to their relationships in the home and community.

Unfortunately, those are the very things that Eli failed to model in his generation. Keep listening to learn how you can pursue a lifestyle that honors God. I shared with one of my staff that I thought I'd do something a little different today and preach on the subject of fathers and they looked at me and then they asked me from Romans chapter 3. He was serious. He was sure I could find it in there and I told him no. I couldn't find it in there.

I looked. But we're going to look at another book of the Bible. I am convinced that manhood begins with the letter M in more ways than one. In true biblical manhood, the M stands for modeling.

Modeling biblical character, modeling godly conviction, modeling godly commitments. Have you ever thought about the fact that no one has ever been given the opportunity to choose their father? God decided that. Some of you had fathers who modeled biblical manhood with those kinds of character and convictions and commitments.

Many of you, I would dare guess, didn't have that. Beyond the fact that no one ever chose who their father would be since the conceiving of a child in the scriptures is attributed to the act and providence of God, no one really chose to be a father. God decided that too.

He arranged that. Standing in that delivery room, if you have been there, you held that newborn baby as I did a few times and you probably had the same sensation sweep over you that I did. At some point you found yourself saying something like what in the world do I do now? You didn't say it out loud.

You didn't want your wife to panic after what she'd been through, but you thought it. Being a father is on the job training, isn't it? And by the time you have a few things down, the subject of your experiments is gone. The truth is being a godly man is a goal. It isn't in general really an achievable goal. It's a pursuit with great passion. Even the great apostle Paul, whom we would say without hesitation was a godly model of a man, wrote, not that I have arrived or I have already become completed, but I press on.

I haven't made it. I haven't arrived, but I press on. So I want to address the men here today who want to press on. I want to preach a sermon to all the men today and all the ladies said, Amen. Go get them, Steve. Boy, do they need it.

I'm so glad they're here. What does it mean to put the M back into manhood? What does it look like to model godly character, godly conviction, godly commitment? Do you know that in the Old Testament there is not one narrative of a father with children that is positive, not one.

And so we learn from those models that have been given to us by what they did and we learn what not to do. So what I want you to do is take your Bibles, if you would, and turn to the book of 1 Samuel and chapter 2. We'll pick up the story here in the life of Eli, a man who was both judge and priest.

Those roles, having been combined in the life of a man who would have been voted most likely to be a godly model, a godly father. And yet we catch our first glimpse of a looming, coming disaster in this family just after Hannah and her husband drop off little Samuel to work under the leadership of Eli. As soon as they leave, the Bible sort of pulls back the curtain and gives us a little insight into what was really happening here. Look at verse 12. Now the sons of Eli were worthless men. They did not know the Lord.

Now stop for a moment. Eli's sons were priests by occupation. That meant they spent their day handling the things of God.

They spent their days ordering and arranging the offerings and the sacrifices and ordering and arranging the worship of God. But the text announces rather bluntly they did not know the Lord. In other words, they managed the things of God, but they did not know God. They could talk about God, but they didn't care about God. They could find their place in the Old Testament scroll, but they didn't listen to the word of God. They could lead people in the worship of God, but they really didn't love God.

People would have said, looking on, Eli, you're a success. You are a man of God and your son's after you. You're important to God, but God lets us in on the fact that his sons are worthless to his cause. In fact, they have been modeling ungodly manhood for years. And the remainder of the paragraph in this text just gives us the details of several, at least two categories of ungodly sinful living instead of spiritual living.

First of all, they were models of greed and dishonesty. Look at verse 13, the middle part there. When any man was offering a sacrifice, the priest's servants would come while the meat was boiling with a three pronged fork in his hand. Then he would thrust it into the pan or kettle or cauldron or pot, all that the fork brought up, the priest would take for himself.

Thus they did in Shilad all the Israelites who came there. Now, according to the law, the priests were to receive the breast and the shoulder of the animal as their portion after it had been ceremonially waved before the Lord. So in a very real sense, meat was the priest's paycheck. In that economy, that's how they lived. And because of the steady flow of worshipers, they had plenty of meat to eat and God would have arranged for them to just have enough. But the sons of Eli, the text says, sent their servants out to the pot while it was still boiling. And they would stick a big fork into the pot. They took whatever they wanted.

That's not all. The fat, according to the law, was considered the best portion. Therefore, it was burned on the altar to God. Look at verse 15. Also, before they burned the fat, it's the key thought, before the priest's servants would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, give the priest meat for roasting, as he will not take boiled meat from you, only raw. In other words, he wants it before it starts to separate. He wants to get as much as he possibly can. And if the man said to him, verse 16, well, they must surely burn the fat first and then take as much as you desire, then he would say, no, but you shall give it to me now.

And if not, I will take it by force. You see what's happened here? Eli's sons have converted the priesthood into a form of organized crime. And the priest's servants are the hitmen. The sons of Eli are modeling greed and open, corrupt dishonesty. The sons of Eli despise, verse 17, the offering of the Lord. Look there at verse 17. Thus, the sin of the young men was very great before the Lord, for the men despised the offering. The Hebrew verb despise doesn't mean to hate. It means to ignore.

It means to treat with utter disregard, to ignore the value of the offering. They had utter disregard for the things of God. By the way, most men don't hate the Bible. They just ignore it. They probably have their own copy.

They just don't ever read it. That's the idea here. Secondly, the sons of Eli were modeling not only greed and dishonesty, but immorality and arrogance. Turn over to verse 22. Now, Eli was very old and he heard all that his sons were doing in Israel and how they lay with the women who served at the doorway in the tent of meeting. And this is where I'd really not even like to expound or talk about it.

It's pretty self-explanatory. But how utterly corrupt and disgraceful this was. It was tragically openly hypocritical.

They knew the word. They and these women who served with them, they were serving God, but they were involved in gross immorality. This is another way of saying you are truly measured for who you are by what you do in the dark.

What you do behind closed doors is who you are. And all of this has been given to us to sort of set up the explanation of Eli's failure as a father. Now, I will add that a godly father can have an ungodly son. The Old Testament is filled with instances. You cannot make your child a spiritual person. You can make them civil, but not spiritual. That's the work of God's Spirit. But he's sort of giving us a behind the scenes look and you'll see in a moment perhaps why these men found it so easy to live this way. These men were leading in worship, but they were frauds.

They were spiritual hypocrites. I talked to my brother some time ago, my youngest brother. He's a financial planner and for some time he worked for another accountant while he was earning his MBA and sort of doing the grunt accounting work and paying his dues, so to speak. And while he was there, he and his wife joined a small Baptist church and they got involved immediately in helping in any way they could, serving, teaching Sunday school and my brother even lit a little music. They soon discovered, he told me, that this was a church that had a wealthy layman in it who had dictated and dominated every pastor and the body for some 30 years. My brother told me the intriguing thing was that he had already been told by this man with a measure of pride and arrogance that he had been able to cheat the government out of full taxes for years. This man led the worship service.

This man opened in prayer. He was a fraud. Like the sons of Eli, a model of arrogance, dishonesty and greed. Now the question I automatically ask just reading a few passages like this and maybe you're asking the same thing, that is where in the world is Eli? Where's Eli?

Their father. Well, you're about to discover that Eli was there all along. In fact, he was modeling two ungodly characteristics himself.

First of all, he modeled spiritual apathy. Look back again in verse 22. Now, Eli was very old and he heard all that his sons were doing in Israel, the Hebrew verb to hear. He heard indicates that he heard it over and over and over and over again. He heard about it enough to know that it was going on. He had been hearing about his son's immorality, their greed, their corruption, ungodly behavior for a period of some time. And finally he speaks verse 23. He said to them, why do you do such things?

The evil things that I hear from all these people, know my sons for the report is not good, which I hear the Lord's people circulating. Now, Eli should have defrocked them. He should have stripped them of their role. In fact, according to the law, he could have stoned them to death for these gross violations of their office. But what does he do?

He basically continues to allow his sons to operate, ripping off the people and fornicating with women and the whole nation suffers. The truth is Eli has heard and he has heard and he has heard. And all the while he has stubbornly placed his hands over his ears and over his eyes. Eli consistently refused to discipline his sons.

Now, would you know that I said Eli refused? I didn't say he refused to discipline his sons consistently, but he consistently refused to discipline his sons. No parent consistently disciplines. No man consistently fathers. No woman consistently mothers in a godly fashion. Consistency and parenting shouldn't be in the same sentence.

If you're listening to somebody talking, they've got both of them in there, they haven't come clean. Part of the problem is that it begins so early, this issue of discipline and it has a myriad of forms and the children start very young. Your little toddler at a very young age toddled over to that little shelf and reached out his pudgy little hand toward that curio and looked back at you and you said, no, no. And he never took his eyes off your eyes and he grabbed it. By the age of two, he decided you weren't tough enough to take him on.

I love the words you've probably heard. Mark Twain, who evidently had kids, said when your child turns two, put him in a barrel and feed him through a knothole. He went on to say when they become a teenager, plug up the hole. The truth is Eli never really tried. You get the feeling all he ever did was say, oh, no, no. That report that I hear, that isn't good.

You shouldn't do that. Look over at chapter three and verse 13. That's where we get real insight from the Lord's perspective. This is the message that God delivers to little Samuel.

Remember, Samuel will deliver to Eli. Verse 13, I have told him God is speaking. I have told Eli that I am about to judge his house forever for the iniquity which he knew because his sons brought a curse on themselves. And notice he did not rebuke them. See, God held Eli responsible for his son's sins. No, he held him responsible for refusing to confront their sin. That same word in the Septuagint appears in the book of Ephesians chapter six, verse four, where Paul says, fathers, bring up your children in the instruction.

Same word. The confrontation of sin before the Lord. Godly father who refuses to model apathy and instead models godly character and conviction and commitment is a man who is willing to set the standard. He is willing to enforce the standard.

He is willing to model the standard and he is willing to confront when the standard is violated and then he personally is willing to confess when he himself fails to meet the standard. Eli failed to confront his sons. He was given three warnings, by the way, and we don't have time to get into them, but the first was public in general. We already read about the people coming to him saying this is happening. The second warning came in the form of an unnamed prophet who said, Eli, your sons are both going to die on the same day.

God's going to judge them. And what did Eli do? Did he warn his sons?

No. The third warning came from Samuel that we just looked at as God came to Samuel and told him about the verdict that would come against Eli and his sons. There's a man by the name of Robert Lewis who wrote a book called Raising a Modern Day Night and he defines biblical manhood by saying, first of all, that a godly man resists passivity. That is, he gets involved. He refuses apathy. He gets involved with his world and the lives of his family, his children, his church, his world around him. He refuses to put it into our vernacular. He refuses the urge to be a spiritual couch potato, a spiritual deadbeat.

He shuns apathy. The very thing Eli modeled, he heard it and he heard it and he heard it and he didn't do anything about it. The second thing Eli modeled and perhaps the most devastating to his sons was hypocrisy. One of the most insightful passages related to Eli's fathering is found in chapter 2 where God is speaking to Eli. Look back at verse 29 where he says to Eli, why do you kick at my sacrifice?

In other words, why do you disdain it? Why do you kick at my offering which I commanded in my dwelling? And honor your sons above me by making yourselves fat with the choicest of every offering of my people, Israel. Did you catch that?

Yourselves fat. Eli was eating the meat that his sons were bringing home. You know why his sons disregarded their father? Because while at the same time he was saying, no, no, you really shouldn't do that. He was saying, pass the meatloaf. At the same time he was saying, you know, that really belongs to God.

Oh, that's my favorite kind. I can think of nothing more devastating than hypocrisy in the life of a man. While he should have returned the meat to the sacrifice, he ate it with his sons.

Listen carefully, sir. Maybe the reason your son doesn't respect authority and you're struggling with that is because he hears you talking, criticizing and bad mouthing your own boss. Maybe your son doesn't respect girls because they see, he sees how you belittle your wife.

You fail to care for her. Maybe they have foul mouths because although they hear you pray at supper, they hear you curse under your breath at the referee at the game. Maybe they are among the 60% of churched teenagers who are sexually involved because you don't even grunt at disapproval at some movie where sex outside of marriage is glamorized in living color and they assume you really don't care.

Oh, you might say you do, but you really don't. Larry Crabbe, a well-known counselor and author, conducted a seminar in Colorado Springs where he asked 350 men if their own fathers were godly role models. Less than 10%, less than 35 men could raise their hand. Was your father?

The more important question, are you? The bottom line in this tragedy is that Eli was no different than his sons, and his sons were no different than him. I want you to know, and I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but our nation is in desperate need of godly men who put the M back into manhood, modeling godly character, conviction, and commitment. Modeling godliness for all of us to see. One of the reasons the older I get, the more grateful I am for my own father is that he has done this and is doing this. He doesn't really like me to talk about it.

In fact, they get my sermons and listen to my tapes while they're traveling and he's probably going to turn it off right about now. I told him the older I get, the more I'm glad that I had a godly example of manhood, not just a provider and not just someone who knew the language, but a model. You want to be that too?

I told him I wanted to be more like him before we hung up. Let me give you a couple of things we can learn in reverse from Eli's ungodly model. Modeling biblical manhood means, first of all, when you're tempted to dodge the assignment, you refuse.

It's easier to be apathetic, isn't it? But when the assignment presents itself and you know you must be involved in modeling, conviction, and character, and commitment, you refuse to dodge the assignment. Secondly, when you fail to measure up to God's standard, you repent. Confess, you apologize. Third, when you're offered the opportunity to communicate value and truth, you respond.

You share not just your beliefs, but your battles. You remember that company party that you had to go to? You remember you had to be there and you tried to be as polite as you could as you refused the offers to drink and you slipped away from more than one conversation to avoid the punchline of a dirty joke and you remember how you felt?

You felt like a relic from the Victorian age, a holy Joe. Have you ever considered how powerful that story would be to your son or daughter who at this moment is perhaps struggling with great peer pressure to conform? Have you ever thought how powerful that story would be to another man who is also struggling to be shaped by the world to blend in with the crowd? Have you ever thought how powerful that story would be given the opportunity for you to share it? Modeling requires that kind of communication.

So you don't dodge the assignment and when you fail, you repent and when you're offered the opportunity to communicate, you respond. It's time for men who know Jesus Christ to put the M back into manhood. Fathers, we have an additional resource to help you learn how to leave a godly legacy for your children and grandchildren. I'll tell you more about that in just a moment.

If you joined us late, you're listening to Wisdom for the Heart. This is the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. Now here's more information about that offer I mentioned. We have a free resource to equip fathers who want to lead their families in godliness. If you're a parent, grandparent, or plan to be one someday, you're going to want a copy of this resource. Ladies, you can feel free to go online and get a copy for yourself if you want to, but men, I really encourage you to take advantage of this offer. Stephen has written a booklet called The Enoch Example. It's a booklet that explores the life and legacy of an Old Testament character named Enoch.

Learn how your walk with God can impact your family for generations. This is a free digital resource that we're going to email to you upon request. You can request your copy right now and it'll arrive in just a few seconds.

Go to wisdomonline.org forward slash dad for information. Many people have told us that they find the last chapter of this book to be the most helpful. That's because Stephen and I take some time to answer questions that have come in from fathers. Those questions and our answers are the last chapter of the book. We do have a print version of this booklet as well and there's information about that when you visit the website.

But the digital book is free today and is available at wisdomonline.org forward slash dad. We recently heard from a couple of listeners who seem to be working very hard at leaving a godly legacy. Debbie wrote to say this, my husband and I, along with our two children and their spouses and our four grandchildren have each written out our testimony.

We did it in such a way that it could be shared in about a minute and a half. Even my little granddaughter who's eight years old is constantly reminding us that we must not soften the gospel because souls are in the balance. We're so encouraged by the lives and testimonies of our grandchildren.

It's a blessing to see the fruit of repentance and faith in their lives. May the Lord bless you and the Ministry of Wisdom International. Well, thank you for writing to us, Debbie. It was so encouraging to hear from you. Friend, if you'd like to send Stephen a note, you can address it to info at wisdomonline.org or call us at 866-48-BIBLE. We'd be glad to hear from you. Join us again next time for more wisdom for the heart.