Footprints in the Snow (Ep #1, The C3 Man)

This week delves into the sacred act of reclaiming biblical manhood and the pathway there.

Christ Community Church Little Rock
A community transformed by grace sent to transform the world for the glory of God.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, this wouldn't happen with Justin Tower. Can we give it out to Jesus? Good morning, men. Can you guys hear me? Well, good morning, men. It's great to see y'all. It's actually incredibly great to see you guys. Where's Brandon in the room? Oh, right here. If something needs to be tinkered with, I know you don't need my permission, but please come on in and save me. I found a wedding ring over there somewhere, guys. That's not cool. So whose is this? Who came in and thought it'd be cool to just let the hair down in men's group? Yeah, you're now you're shamed. Great way to start the morning, Justin. Shame someone in the silence. Well, man, it really is so good to see you guys. Like Toby said, my name is Justin. I'm an associate pastor here, and uh I just want to give credible credits due. You came through the wind and the dark, and you found your way up here, and you've committed to a full semester of gathering here to unpack and define and apply Mandam. That is no small thing. Now we had 66 guys register, so thank you, which means a lot of you guys did not. I guess I'm just gonna keep the theme of shame going on. Uh no, but genuinely, like it does help the start to you do not have to. And so it actually thrills my heart to see that you're here uh without registering. I say it because I I hope everybody got one of these books. Everybody get a field manual. This is gonna be our our guide through this semester-long kind of kickstart, this journey. So, yeah, you can hop up now. Uh, go grab one of these. As we get started, I really want to orient you to it because men, listen, I work really hard on these, and it's not you know hard work for the sake of hard work, it's because I believe that what we put into these things this semester is what we'll get out in tenfold. Uh so everybody can kind of grab theirs, open it up. There's a general, yeah. If you just want to raise your hand if you don't have one, Tokyo, bring it, bring it to you. There's a general rhythm to this book, it's not complicated at all, and so I don't want to sit here and insult your intelligence, but I do just want to bring your attention to a couple things. Uh, a couple pages in, you'll see a schedule. So I'll start out with uh housekeeping. I I did make one error that I'm aware of. In your book, you'll see 321 and 328 that were off for spring break. Those are actually Sunday dates, which makes no sense. Okay, so to correct on the screen, and I know the screen is a little bit small, okay. What you're gonna watch over the next several weeks is this room just kind of blossom. Okay. Our uh production company that's been helping so much with the sanctuary, they're gonna move their efforts to EC next couple weeks. It's gonna be great. This is still better than what the Apostle Paul had, okay. So we're not gonna complain. If you don't squint, that's fun. But these are the actual dates where of Tuesdays that we'll be off. And so just make note of that. Um but as you work your way through, men, you're gonna see that there's space each week for you taking notes. I would encourage you, men, to take notes. Then that you'll find discussion questions that you'll talk about with your group after each teaching. And then you're gonna find further work where you're gonna take this home with you, and you're gonna do the hard work, answer these questions, whether it's a bullet point, or you maybe you're just putting your heart out. And then each week you'll find that there's an activity to do. I've given you four options each week, and you will do one of them at least. And I want you as a table to hold each other accountable for the week. They're not really hard, but they're meant to just get you going, to apply what we're learning throughout the week. Uh, and then towards the end, you don't have to flip there now, you're gonna find something called my manhood plan. And this is gonna be kind of a capstone thing that we put together that'll go into our last week together, where we have this kind of celebration ceremony. And uh we're gonna talk more about that as the weeks unfold. I don't say those things uh to overwhelm you, but kind of syllabus day, just to kind of plant a seed and uh let you know we are going somewhere. Okay, and if you have questions, then uh please come find me afterwards. Well, I I found myself in an awkward incident about two years ago. Okay, I live down the hill, Chenal Hill. Uh there's a Walmart. Across from that Walmart is a pond. Uh one time I lived in the neighborhood kind of behind that pond. I was driving home and I saw that there was a car in the pond. And I thought, that's weird, right? But people were people. It wasn't the craziest thing. Sometimes things happen and you end up in a pond. You know what happens. So I just kept on driving. I didn't want to rubberneck, drove in my neighborhood, and then I realized that there were cops in my neighborhood out of their cars, kind of walking around, kind of searching. And I had this instinct come over me, this is my neighborhood. What's going on in my neighborhood? And so I rolled my window down and I'm like, officer, what's going on here? And he said, Well, we had a guy steal a car, crash it into a pond, and now he's loose somewhere in your neighborhood, in this neighborhood. And I thought, this neighborhood? My neighborhood? I'm defender of this neighborhood, officer. What can I do to help? I didn't actually say that, but this is just you know the blood starting pump. He said, Well, my neighborhood is all hills. And he was like, These hills are a lot. Maybe you could drive up and find them. I was like, Yes, sir, officer, I'm on it. And so I start driving my red Subaru up the hill, and I'm just ready. But then I start thinking, how will I identify this criminal? How will I even know if it's him? And I'm driving up, I look left, in between two houses, right next to the air conditioning unit. I see a dude leaned up against the wall, and he's just heaving, just sucking wind. And I'm like, that's probably my guy. And so I turn my look at him, and we have this like human moment where like I'm looking at him, he looks at me, and I kind of look at him, and he looks at me, and it's just like, you know, I'm thinking, dude, I don't want to do this. Like, I don't know you. And he's looking at me and he's like, dude, come on, we're cool, right? And then I just kind of lift up my hand and hold it on the horn for like 10 seconds. And he's looking at me, and then his eyes just get wide, and then he's like, oh crap. And he jumps back over the fence as the cops close in, and I drive home, defender of the neighborhood. It was amazing. I got a badge and everything. No, I did not. But it was really easy to identify this criminal. But as you think about identifying a man, it gets a little trickier. How do we identify a man? What are the indicator points? The Bible shows us Amanda, ultimately in the person of Jesus. But we know what good men do, we know what good men don't do. Literature, movies, we know what good men do, we know what bad men do. But how do we like form it into a definition? How do we form it into a framework, a pathway that we can agree upon as men, as a community of men in this place at this time, so that we can pass it down to the next generation of boys. That's something that we honestly don't have. And I have this quote from John Elbridge. He's an author. He's taking this Alaskan trip. I'm gonna read this for y'all, okay? I promise. I know it's hard to see. He's taking this Alaskan trip, and his guide is showing him these bear tracks through the woods. And so he kind of, this is what the guide says. This one, this track, is probably centuries old. For as long as the bears have been on this island, they've taken this path. The cubs follow their elders, putting their feet exactly where the older bears walk. That's how they learn to cross this place. And then John Elbridge reflects on that and he says, I was following a proven way laid down by those much stronger and far more prepared for this place than me. See, we we have a problem, then we do not have bear tracks like this. We don't have this proven, laid down by stronger and far more prepared, like a framework, a pathway for us as boys, as young men, as growing men to follow the journey. And instead of whining about it, we're going to get after it this semester, and that's what we're gonna work on. For the next four weeks, we're gonna really try to define manhood rooted in Genesis 2. And we're gonna let the cross kind of leak down onto the garden. And then for the next six weeks, what we're gonna do is we're gonna define what that means to be for us here at C3. And we're gonna really use our four values as a church to guide us today. And then we've got two weeks where I want to get specific into other things. Um and that's a guarantee. We're not gonna have it all figured out by the end of the semester. That's not the guarantee. But we are gonna start that journey for us and for those who come after us of laying down a path, of developing a framework. And that starts with a definition of what a man even is. I've been asking people for the last three or four years, some of y'all in this room, what is a man? If you just stand right here at the microphone and give us a definition, I'll tell you, I doubt you could do it. And I know it because I've asked so many of you guys. We spread out a bunch of great qualities and attributes, but it's yeah, that's what a man does, sure. But like, what is a man? What is the biblical man? We are gonna form a definition. It's not gonna be perfect, but it's gonna get us started this semester. That's a guarantee. I have a few guarantees. Okay, they're in your book. I'm gonna read them to you because it's a total failure if we get to the end of it, and these are not true. Biblical manhood, number one, will be clarified and made accessible. Number two, we will become familiar with our garden and will know how to flourish it. We're gonna use that language. Number three, our strength will increase and be rightly directed. Number four, my bride. And even those of us who are not married have a bride. We're gonna talk about that. We'll be uplifted and understood, feeling loved. Number five, our church will further establish what we expect of our men and how we will pass down manhood to the next generation. Uh then we're gonna anchor ourselves, like I said in Genesis 2. I put the whole text in your booklet. Uh Genesis 1 is this big swath of creation, it's everything. Genesis 2 is this zooming in on God, on the wild, on Adam, on Eden, and then on Eve. And that's where we're gonna spend the majority of our time, especially these first four weeks. And from this, we're gonna make and then memorize a definition of the biblical man. Okay? But where I want to start, I want to meet all this where we're at, if we're in Genesis 2, we have to ask the question, and I want to be serious about this. Is this a fairy tale? Is Genesis 2 a fable? Because that's a common belief. There's even Christian denominations that say it's metaphorical. I just want to say from the outset that we believe 100% that the Garden of Eden was historical, that it was true. That's really what happened. Because our burden as pastors and as men of this church is that our belief in Scripture matches Jesus' belief in scripture. And Jesus believed that Adam and Eve were historical people, that yeah, there really was a talking serpent, that Satan does exist and he can take forms. We believe that as Christians because Jesus, our King, our Lord, our Savior, believed that. And I just want to show you this, I could spend a lot of time on this, I'll just go quick. There's a moment when kind of Jesus' enemies, called the Pharisees, they came up, and they didn't want to learn from him as a teacher. They just want to try to put him in a corner and embarrass him. And it's uh we read this in Matthew 19, and the Pharisees came up to him, Jesus, and tested him by asking, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause? Now, if we're gonna talk about divorce, well, obviously we're gonna talk about marriage. And so Jesus is gonna go back to the beginning, back to the creation mandate. And this is what he says, have you not read that he who created them, Adam and Eve, from the beginning, made them male and female, and said, and he's in a quote, Genesis 2, therefore man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. Do you see what Jesus just did? It's you read over it if you don't pause and pay attention. Jesus is connecting creation, the creator of Adam and Eve, to the one who said, who authored this in Genesis 2. So creation and authorship are the same. Another way to phrase it is Jesus is grounding the logic of his argument to these real people, these real enemies, in a historical Adam and Eve. It'd be like me going up to my wife and being like, hey, I love you as much as the two fairy is real. She's not here, but she wouldn't like that very much. You don't ground your arguments in fairy stories. Jesus links that as real as Adam and Eve were created, that same person wrote these words. And the person who wrote these words, which we believe was God, is the same person who created historically, biologically, Adam and Eve. And so we're gonna treat that as such. We're gonna move through Genesis 1, 2, and 3 as if it's real in the realest way, historically, because we believe it is, based on Jesus. Okay, let's get to Manda. Let's get to Manda. Um perfect. Alright, Genesis 2, verses 5 through 6 is gonna kick us off. Maria. When no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground. And a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground. So here we are at the beginning. There's a lot of unfinished. And what we see from the beginning, I'm gonna call it a primal truth. Our first primal truth this morning. What I mean by primal is ancient. Men at the bottom. As we work to define masculinity, manhood, what is at the very bottom of it? The man fills the gap. Absolutely primal to masculinity, men. Please hear me. Is that God uses man to meet a need? To finish the unfinished. To work the ground. We see that cause, and there was no man to work the ground. What do you think the man is supposed to do? And so there's this need, this unfinished work, and God says, Man, this is what man is doing. That is primal to masculinity. The opposite of this, of filling a gap, of meeting a need, is passivity. Aggressive passivity, not stepping in, not filling the gap. And that is the that's the bane of all of us, man. That's our default is passivity. The exact opposite because of sin to filling a gap. When a coworker is mistreated today, that's a gap. When your wife is being difficult today, and I don't mean that crass or harsh, that's a gap. When your son is daughter, they're in their room, they're down, that's a gap. At the bottom of what it means to be a man is we step into those moments. We fill the gap. We read, there is no man to work the ground. That's the problem at hand. And God is gonna soon make man, we're gonna read about that. But if you look at these verses, there is land on earth, but there is no rain, there is no bushes, there is a mist, and a mist was going up from the land, but it's not irrigated. This is a really weird version of planet Earth, and it's because it's not finished. We are in the wild. Eden does not exist yet. Eve does not exist yet. Adam does not exist yet. It's just the wild. God left earth unfinished. Which is strange because if you go back to the first verse of Genesis 2, it says, Thus the heavens and the earth were finished. So is it finished or is it not? Well, God finished his portion, but he intentionally left the land unfinished for man to dwell. Why would he do that? What we're gonna see is God's relationship to man is not one of slave, it's not one of tool, it's one of partner. And that's gonna be a big theme over the next several weeks, is our partnership with God. And God's that's still how it works today. God does his portion, and we do ours. It is not how salvation works, but it is how the Christian life works. Difficult things are gonna come up in your life, and you are aware of many of them right now. God is always faithful to do his portion of the work. But there's always space and a spot for us to step in and fill the gap as a men. Always. That's how our relationship with them works. That is manhood. And that leads us into our first clause of our definition. Okay? So we're gonna work on this definition together. We'll be done in a couple weeks. Uh but the first clause of our definition, are you ready? Draw roll. The biblical man is formed and placed by God. The biblical man is formed and placed by God. That's the first clause. It is not the whole thing. Go ahead and work on memorizing it. Where do we get these words from? This is why I'm excited about this definition. It's because it's all rooted in biblical language. Verse 7 Then the Word of God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. Each of these words of a definition we'll be able to squeeze, and more truths will come out. If we squeeze the word form, the biblical man is formed by God. What does that mean? Three things. It'll be our three points this morning. Man is formed by God, man is formed like God, man is formed for God. So as we think about man as being formed by God, man is not just that God formed man, it's how he did it. I know it's hard a room like this to like really try to slow down your heart and your mind to take a passage like this. But this is this quiet as a breath, there in the unfinished wild, you have God, the Creator, cupping dust, shaping this figure of Adam, and you have this form of Adam. He's not dead, he's not alive, he's just inanimate, and then breathe, breath through Adam's nostrils. And there's this moment where it's just quiet, there's this forming, the worker of the ground shall come. Himself from the ground. Adam is formed and then he's filled. He's filled with the breath of life. Man is formed by God. From God's view, if you can imagine God's view for a moment, I know he's infinite and he's eternal. He's focusing on everything in his infinitude, but he just has this total care, total thrill, total love in this moment to shape Adam, the first man. And then Adam, from his point of view, he wakes. I don't know how it works, but we know that neurons begin to fire as he becomes alive, his heart begins to pump, he locks eyes with his creator, whatever that looks like. And suddenly he's just, there's this sense of adventure, this sense of beginning. I imagine Adam, I'm speculating, just had a thousand questions. Once he came to consciousness, came alive. And then it just started this partnership and this excitement. This is all before sin. And then I want to, I just want to help you to grab onto the reality that this is your origin story. I know we were all born of you know mom and dad, okay? I'm not saying this is what happened to us, but this is our ancestry. The masculine ancestry goes all the way back to here. And we, in the same way, not the same way, but in similar ways, we are formed by God. You are formed by God. You were knit you. There at the bottom of your IQ, your eye color, your work ethic, you were formed by God. You are not formed, we don't believe in the Christian faith, that you were formed by chance as molecules in motion. You were once spaced ups to space goo to chimpanzees to who we are today. That's not what we believe. You're not an afterthought. You are not formed by neglect. Remember, God created this earth unfinished on purpose for us. You are not self-formed. It is not up to you to form your own manhood, to form your own tracks through the snow. We follow this God, and he will take us there. You are not formed by the approval of others. You are not formed by your wife. In fact, Adam will soon be rebuked encursed with these words, because you listen to the voice of your wife. Man is formed by God. Slow, intimate, with purpose. You. When uh the Tauber boys turn six years old, we do a little ceremony in my backyard. And we've now done this for my three boys. And I give them a knife, they have to make a fire, and uh the three, the couple months leading up to their sixth birthday, I teach them kind of secretly how to build a fire, so that on ceremony night I just say, Hey, build a fire. And they know how to do it. And we sit down, and there's really two truths that I want to share with them on that night. And the two truths are, hey, listen, you, son, are not a man, but we're starting that journey together. We start that journey right now. And the second thing is, I'm with you the whole way. It's actually my my job, my joy as your dad, to make sure that by the time you leave this house, you are a biblical man. Those are the two things. That's the whole point, and then we have a big meal and it's great, and you know, it's it's it's a ton of fun. But those those are the same truths that we're seeing, and we will see as we keep walking through Genesis 2 that God is having with man, that God is having with us. Hey, we're on this journey of manhood. We can call it sanctification, becoming more and more like Jesus. What we have to realize is that God is with us. We are formed by him, and he is completely with us. What is God doing in your life right now? He's initiating more and more into manhood. Every day, the hard things in your life, they're not by accident. The easy, the wins, the great things, that's God initiating us. He is with us. So, God's saying, we're starting down a road, we are continuing down a road. I am with you at the very bottom of who we are. We have to realize that we are formed by God. And then I just want to say real quick, I know that other things have formed us too. Okay? I know we have pasts, we all have childhood, we have grave regrets, big mistakes. The marriage of our parents, siblings, things that have happened to us, wins, great things. But I want to take all those things as significant as they are and put them in a bucket. And this is we can call it secondary formings. What I want to call your hearts to this morning is our primary forming, is God, who you are. Man is formed by God. Man is formed by God, man is formed like God. I'll run through this pretty quickly. The key word is image. We probably know this from Genesis 1. Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness. What does image mean? It means likeness. So God created man in his own image, and the image of God, he created a male and female, he created them. We are like God. But who is God? Throughout all history, all cultures have derived their concept of manhood from their God or from their gods. And we are no different. We just happen to have the real living biblical God that we believe and worship. But if the same thing is true, manhood begins with theology because we are made in his image. To understand ourselves, we have to know our Creator. And so this means that we resemble and we reflect God, and it's not just males, it's females. And it's not just Christians, it's all humans. We believe, as Jesus believed, as is taught and written in Genesis 1, that every human has the same intrinsic value and worth. We all have dignity, we all have eternity in our hearts. We are all made in the image of God, and we all have a purpose. And where I want to bring that into biblical manhood for this morning is that here we are in the wild. There's no mist, there's no bushes. God is in the wild. And then we have to realize that as men, we are wild. And a lot of us have forgotten that. A lot of us have become tamed and domesticated. Now the word wild can be taken a million different ways, so let me tell you what I mean. G.K. Chesterton wrote this. He was a Christian author, great thinker. He said, We talk of wild animals, but man is the only wild animal. And when he's saying animal here, he's not saying it from you know a secular humanist point of view. He's saying just like as creatures, like, let's talk about wild animals. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals following the rugged respectability of the tribe or tide. All other animals are domestic animals. Man alone is ever undomestic. And I think we can find some of that wildness again. Some of that thrill, some of those things that make us come alive. But I also want to make it for our C3 ministry, I want to make a point. Beavers will always make dams. You'll never find a lion and make a nest in a tree. Bees make honey, they live in hides. But what is the man? What do we do? Where do we live? But we've busted free. We are like God. We are formed like God. How I want to bring that to bear on us this morning, joy, I guess, by casting a little bit of vision. When I was in college, I discipled four guys younger than me. It was a ton of fun. But we would meet Friday mornings, a little Bible study in one of the common areas. And one week, another student came up to us and just said, Hey, I see y'all meet every week. I want to have what y'all have. Can I join you guys? So, absolutely, come on. And a couple weeks in, we were going through a book, and um that this guy said, you know, now that I've been with you guys a couple weeks, I I don't know if I can keep coming. Like, why? He's like, Well, my dad owns a salon. And I don't, can you be a man and own a salon? And I was like, Yeah, brother. Man is what? And you see what he was getting at. When you get a bunch of a group of men together, especially in the South, manhood can be defined as whiskey and cigar and early morning workouts, right? And I just want to make clear, because I see it in the text, and all throughout the characters of the Bible, we are going to have one definition of manhood. One. It's not gonna be perfect, but we're gonna cling to it. And that's what we're gonna work operate out of. One. But there are a thousand masculinities. There are a thousand ways to express that manhood. Do you see the difference? That might be semantics there. But we have men in here that love the elk hunt. That's great. Invite me, I'll go. Okay? We also have men that love video games and board games and jarring honey. We love men that what we have we have men that love all kinds of things. And so we don't want this to be a place where just it's kind of that one kind of man. We don't want everyone just to feel welcome. We want y'all to be welcome because we believe that there are a thousand expressions of masculinity within the umbrella of this one manhood definition that's not law, but it's just let's be like Jesus, right? Because you have like someone like David in the Old Testament who killed men, but also like played the the lyre, the harp, what do you play? Yeah, all the yeah, and that is an awesome, awesome thing. Well, men, as we close, let me just kind of point us to next week. Man is also formed for God. And this is not that God has need. It's it it is there is no indication in this narrative that this God is hurried or pressured or desperate. He left creation unfinished. Because he wants, he doesn't need, he wants a partner. But I want to pick up here next week that man is born for God, because that will make more sense as we learn more and more where God has placed man. And that's what we're gonna get into next week. So, men, we're just at the beginning. I went a little bit over, I'm sorry. Uh, this is your origin story. Next week, we're gonna talk about the single most important word for man that we can find at Genesis 2. The single most important word. That's next week. Please come back for that. Alright, I'm gonna encourage you guys to go to your groups now, to your tables. Uh, get after it, and we'll see y'all. We'll see y'all next week.