Hello everyone. Tonight, we’ll be embarking upon a series about what I like to call whole-life stewardship. As Christians, we tend to focus on topics that are specific to the function of the church. This would include things like: evangelism, encouragement, admonishment, relationships, and such. We also tend to focus on topics of devotion, like prayer, the Word, the character of God and our relationship to sin. These topics are central to the life of the Christian and deserve their time.
Yet, we are not monks. We do not live in a world of prayer, reading the Bible and relating to people in the church. We have families, jobs, and bills to pay. The reality of living in this culture means that we have to pick a job and work away from the home. We will likely have to buy a house and a car at some point to live in a major city. We will have to make trade-offs of attending our kids’ soccer games or going to church. Should we go on vacation? How often is too often? How do we relate to our non-believing family
These are all topics that we often do not approach, because they are too practical. They do not seem to relate to spiritual life. They hard to make definitive statements about. If you’re like me, you see topics like this as a mere minefield to avoid if possible. It is likely that you think of work and money as fodder for idolatry. Likewise family obligations can excuse someone who wants to withdraw from Christian community. And there is no doubt that this is possible! Yet, we cannot afford to be hostile to and defensive about everyday life. That will cause us to spend the majority of our days resenting our situation. We may also not pay proper respect to areas of life that deserve it.
The truth is that God does care about our conduct at work, as well as how effective we are at it (Col 3:23). He cares about our families and our commitments to them (Eph 5:28, Eph 6:4).
As men of our generation, we have a special concern in this area. We live in a culture that is growing hostile to masculinity. Our culture deifies women and insults and belittles men. Female teachers discriminate against male students. Female teachers grade male students lower than female. The trend reverses when the handwriting and names are unavailable to them. Reminders about historic male oppression and toxic masculinity are everywhere. The celebrated males are borderline eunuchs wearing t-shirts saying: “The Future is Female”.
Traditional masculinity must be reclaimed in the face of a culture that is hostile to it. Try searching the words “traditional masculinity” on google. You will find little other than condemnation. Yet, traditional masculinity is, at least in America, Christian masculinity. We do not need less of it. The problem is we have so little of it to begin with.
Because of this relentless and disastrous beat-down we’ve faced in the cultural conversation, it is tempting to be ashamed of our God-given ambition and aggression. We’ve been taught that we should be scared of that which is most specifically male. But fighting against injustice, standing firm in the face of overwhelming odds, and overcoming seemingly impossible challenges is what we were made for.
We are men. We must provide in the face of starvation. We must be the first to lay down our comfort, our money, our time and our lives if need be for our wives, our families, and our community.
The relentless assault on masculinity in our culture has led a lot of men to become passive and feminine. We are not immune to this pressure. The man revels in conflict, but does not hold grudges. The woman fears open conflict and makes her opinion known through social ostracization. The man ribs his fellow man to push him on to better performance. In a hunter-gatherer culture, the male tendency towards insulting in a friendly way was a way to criticize without causing a mortal conflict or a permanent rift in the community. We are built to mock one another, and it serves a healthy and important role in male relations. If we think that’s mean and we avoid it, that’s the feminizing impulse. Women do not deal with their conflicts in this manner and have never done so. They do so through social ostracization and solidarity against the offending woman.
We are losing our ability to be authentically male. We have imbibed the cultural view of men as oppressors to such a degree that we have essentially neutered ourselves as a sign that we are not one of the bad ones. Ultimately this leads to a lack of drive, a lack of confidence, an adversity to risk-taking and a general inability to stand firm in the face of opposition. This means that when we face failure, rather than becoming increasingly steadfast and brave and aggressive, we retreat and feel sorry for ourselves. We do not fight for our standing, we plead for it. And when we don’t get what we want, we sulk and retreat to our basements to fill our lives with porn and video games and whine about how unfair life is and how hard we have it.
We need to stop whining! We are brave and powerful men! We have the blood of a thousand generations of warriors running through our veins. When we face opposition, we rise to it and put it to shame! We don’t retreat apologetically; we press on and win the day! You stand up for what you believe! You take sober judgment of your obstacles and you overcome them and make the rest of the world look pathetic.
That is the story of Daniel. Daniel was in the worst possible position you could imagine. Kidnapped as a young man, pressed into service of a hostile foreign invader, constantly called upon to denounce or reject his faith and ultimately thrown to the lions for his steadfastness and bravery in the face of opposition. Not only did he overcome all of these things, he did so in a godly way and became the pre-eminent member of the kingdoms that had tried to break his spirit. He retained all that made him authentically a child of God and excelled in every area he was called to.
We’re only going to have time to look at Daniel 1 tonight, but reflect on all of the times where Daniel faced opposition and stood bravely against it, not only overcoming, but excelling in all that he did.
We all know that the world system is corrupt. We all know that there is a tendency to idolize the everyday minutiae. Unfortunately, for us who already feel a tendency to retreat from challenges, this could give us a license to retreat from our failures and even avoid trying for success because we think of those things as unspiritual. For many Christians of our generation, I fear that we see everyday life as a sea of temptation best avoided, rather than a series of obstacles to be overcome.
Do you think it is important to be the best person at your job? Do you feel the drive to be the indispensable employee who makes their company tick? Are you committed to being the best so that those around you will speak of you as the lynchpin of their team? Do you believe God will support you in doing so? Or do you think that a job is largely a distraction from the more important “spiritual” things you have to do?
The temptation to treat everyday life as something unimportant or beneath you is really just a way of abdicating responsibility. This is like the college group kids who felt like failing classes because they had so many disciples was somehow a badge of honor rather than a pathetic waste of time and money. You need to take care of your business and your family, while not abdicating your responsibilities to the wider community of believers and to the unsaved masses.