A Godly Man — Steven Brubaker

Thirty years ago when I was a volunteer with Choice Books Northern Virginia.

Remember going into a—I was on a book run and walking into a drug store, and there as I went to walk in the front door, I noticed a lady behind me. So I did what my mom had taught me to do, and I held the door open. And this lady walks through, and as she walks through, she lets me have it. She was angry.

And she told me in no uncertain terms that she really didn't need a man to hold a door for her. She was perfectly capable herself. And she continued along that vein for a while. And I went on, but I thought, you know, what kind of world do we live in? Is this—should I be—maybe I shouldn't hold doors for women anymore. That same day, though, I thought, you know, I'm going to give this one more chance. And so the next time I was walking in, maybe the next store, I was walking in, and there was a lady behind me. And so I held the door open. And as she walked through, she turned and gave me a nice smile.

And then she said these words: "The age of chivalry is not dead."

A question for us: How are men portrayed in general society today? How do people basically think about men in our world today? I'd like to hear from you.

Bumbling fools. Bumbling fools. That's what men are. Anyone else? Pigs. Pigs.

Others? Inferior. Inferior.

So when we look, when we listen to the news, when we hear people talking about men, these are the images—this is the basic understanding of what a man is in our society today. Is that right?

Steve Bannon, a previous former high official with the Trump administration, was quoted recently as saying that the anti-patriarchal movement is a powerful force that will undo thousands of years of recorded history. What is he saying? He's telling us that there is a—there is the spirit of the age. The movement that is strongly permeating Western society today is a movement to say that men should not be in areas of responsibility or authority.

And he is telling us—I don't know how reliable he is—but he's saying that that movement is so strong that it's going to win the day in the next 30, 40, 50 years.

Now, I agree with the way that you are characterizing the mood, the dominant mood today, whether it's in comic strips or children's books, television programs, movies. My understanding is that the media today is portraying men as brutish, unreliable, self-centered, sex-crazed.

And if you really want to get something done and done right, you ask a woman.

I'd like to turn to Ezekiel chapter 22. And I'm looking in verse 23. And Ezekiel is writing here, and he says, "And the word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, say to her, 'You are a land that is not cleansed or rained upon in the day of indignation.'" And then in verse 25, "The conspiracy of her prophets in her midst is like a roaring lion."

So here's the first of four groups of people, the prophets. And he says, "They're like a roaring lion looking for prey." And then look in verse 26, "Her priests have done violence to my law." So we have the prophets acting like devouring lions. We have priests doing violence. Verse 27, "Her princes in her midst are like wolves."

And verse 29, "The people of the land have practiced distortion and committed robbery." Now, we have some alliteration going on here. We have the prophets, the priests, the princes, and the people. And all four are described in rather dismal language.

And then we have in verse—so we have this really difficult situation. I mean, things are going down in a hurry. I'm about to say south. They're going down in a hurry.

And in verse 30, it says, "And I sought for a man." God's speaking here. "I sought for a man." In the midst of this chaos, in the midst of this really problematic time, I sought for a man.

Now, it goes on to say, "I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall." God is looking for men. God is looking for real men. God is looking for godly men. Men of action. Men who will take responsibility. And that really is the theme of my sessions here this weekend. Men who take responsibility.

God says, "I'm looking for a man. A man among them who should build up the wall." And I'm going to suggest two walls where there are gaps today that men need to be taking responsibility. One of these walls is the wall of the home.

The wall of our families. A second wall where we need to be taking responsibility is in the church.

But God said, "I'm looking for a man. A man who's going to stand in the gap." The gap is a place where no one is taking responsibility. That's why it's a gap. But real men, godly men, take responsibility even when no one else does.

They refuse to make excuses. God says in verse 30, "I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall, stand in the breach or the gap before me." The man we're talking about is a godly man. And I'm just going to use a triangle to represent God here. A man who's under God, who stands before me for the land. On behalf of the land is saying this is a man who's about more than themselves. This is a man who's about something of transcendent value, something beyond just what they can get out of things themselves.

And so in our sessions these days, first of all, we're going to talk about taking responsibility for ourselves. That's our first session. The second session will be being a church man, taking responsibility here. And third session, taking responsibility in the home. Now, I use the word taking.

I'm not sure that quite communicates the right tone. Perhaps a better word is accepting. Accepting responsibility because God is the one who is calling us to be men of responsibility. And our job is to accept that call. This is not a call we're giving ourselves. It's not something we're just deciding on our own. This is responding to a call of God to be responsible.

So God is looking for men. Men who take responsibility.

And we're saying that that kind of person is one who, first of all, takes responsibility for themselves. Now, I want you to help me out here a little bit. What does it mean to take or to accept responsibility for ourselves? What does that mean for you?

Standing alone. There's a time when taking responsibility for yourself may mean that you're going to be in that gap by yourself.

Okay? Who else? Stop making excuses for your actions. Stop making excuses for your action. Admitting you make mistakes. Admitting you make mistakes. So it involves some self-reflection. Maybe along the lines, in some cases, of what Pete was talking about this morning. Understanding yourself. Understanding what the factors are that are giving shape to what you're doing.

Good. Who else?

Realizing that I'm under God and accountable to Him.

Taking responsibility for myself involves acknowledging that under God reality.

So as we accept responsibility, it puts us in places in which we can be challenged. And criticized. And criticized.

I was fascinated with the first couple of responses because they really just outlined what I have to share here this morning.

A man that takes responsibility for themselves, I'm going to suggest that there's three major components to that.

First of all, they admit the reality.

Second, they make no excuses.

And third, they make every effort. Let's unpack those three together. First of all, if we're going to take responsibility for ourselves as men, it means we're going to admit, acknowledge the truth about ourselves.

It means we're going to acknowledge where we fail.

Our sins, our bad habits, our addictions.

I was talking with one of the leaders of one of our boys' camps some time ago, and he was saying how that when young men come in, not to be campers, but to be chiefs, our 21, 22, 23-year-old young men going into the camp setting, he said, "I no longer ask them, 'Do you struggle sexually?'" He said, "I ask, 'How do you struggle sexually?'" And my experience at Faith Builders is very similar.

All of our students are involved in mentoring groups. And it's not long as these groups start meeting and we start talking. And by the way, our groups, say, in mine right now, there's five young men and two from the staff, two men from staff that act as mentors for those groups.

And very quickly, they want to talk about—I shouldn't say they want to talk about—but as we start asking, "What's going on in your life? Where are you wrestling? Where are you struggling?" all of them go right there.

Admit, if we're going to be men who are taking responsibility for ourselves, we're going to admit where we fail, where we struggle. We're going to admit where we have questions, where we have doubts, where we're afraid. When we get depressed, we're going to admit our anxieties.

We're going to admit the truth about how we're doing with our commitments to God and to the church, to our children, to business associates, to our neighbors, employees, how we're doing with our commitments, how we're doing with our relationships. That's part of taking responsibility, acknowledging the truth. I remember a story that David Wilkerson once told, how that he was—I believe he was having some revival meetings or something like that at a community. And where he was staying, they had supper for him after services one night. And after supper, he dismissed himself. He said, "You know, I really should go to my room and spend some time in preparation." And they were very gracious, "Sure, go do that."

And so he went to the room, and he said there was a television in his room, and he turned it on, and he said, "You know, for the next hour," he sat there watching some sports game or something. And then he's immersed in this, and then he hears footsteps coming down the hall, and he realizes his wife is coming. And so he quickly turns the television off, and he goes to the chair, and he kneels down in front of the chair in prayer. And while he was praying, the Lord helped reveal to him the true condition of his heart.

Taking responsibility means we acknowledge where we're just putting on a show for people.

We face the reality. So we not only admit the truth about ourselves, we also invite the truth from others. Invite the truth from the people around us. One of the best ways for us to find out how we're doing with our wife or with a friend and so on is to invite them just to tell us, "How am I doing?"

To be open to correction, to have that kind of a spirit, that kind of a demeanor that invites correction. Proverbs tells us that better is open rebuke than hidden love.

Or as the CEV says, "A truly good friend will openly rebuke you."

Part of being responsible, admitting the truth about ourselves, but also inviting the truth from others. And that can be really, really difficult.

Better than just being in the kind of relationship where people can maybe speak truth to us is to actually live our lives in a way that's transparent, that's open, where people can see what's going on on a regular basis.

I call this functional transparency. Live our lives so that others can know the reality about us without us telling them what the reality is. Compare with me the difference between, say, accountability groups, and I'm all for those, but accountability groups where I come in and I might sit down with a group of men and I'll say, "Here's some things that's true about my life." That's disclosure. Okay? I'm disclosing the pieces maybe I want you to know that I'm willing to let you see. Compare that with putting my computer in the living room with the screen toward the open part of the room so that my wife and children can see what it is I'm doing on it.

That's functional transparency.

Compare with me the difference between pornography today that's easily accessed on smartphones or on the computer, where I can do that in the privacy of my room or my truck. Compare that with a number of years ago where if I wanted pornography, I probably had to go down to a store and actually buy it from a person. That's functional transparency. We're living in a time that has made it so easy for us to live private lives.

If you and I are going to be godly men, we're going to have to take responsibility here in the realm of admitting the truth, living the truth about ourselves in a way that people can see. One of the big problems with technology today is not necessarily pornography. That's one of them. But it's not. It's the amount of time that we waste on these things. That is a huge issue. And so again, functional transparency. So somebody can see, "You know what, Steven? You spent X amount of time on your computer in this kind of site." For me, I'll tell you, where I can waste time is news. I'm a news junkie.

But I can waste time there. There's an inappropriate amount of time to be spent on things like news. So let's face the reality about ourselves as a step toward taking responsibility. A second way that we take responsibility for ourselves is to make no excuses. One of you mentioned that. Taking responsibility for myself means that I don't make excuses for the state that I'm in, for the problems that I'm facing, and so on. Now, if you're like me, that's not natural.

If I fail and others see that I fail, my natural response is to make an excuse. And I'm good at it. I have a lot of them right there ready to use. If I'm late, well, I had an important phone call, or my wife or my children or the clock wasn't working or the time changed.

There's plenty of excuses.

It sounds something like this, "If only," then that's the formula. "If only my employees would just get to work on time, then I wouldn't get so angry.

If only," then where it might sound like is, "I can't help what I do." Excuses. And we have these different categories of places where we make excuses. It might be in terms of God. "God made me this way," or "God did this, God did that. That's my problem." We can make excuses there.

An excuse I hear a lot has to do with parents. "If my parents would have raised me better, if my parents would have disciplined me," or "If my parents wouldn't have disciplined me," one or the other is often mentioned.

So that's, "If they would have done better with me, then I wouldn't have these problems that I have."

That's one part of the parental excuse. The other part has to do something like this, "Yeah, that's just the way Brubakers are.

My dad was that way and my grandfather was that way. That's just the way Irish people act." It's making excuses.

And I find that I can and I do excuse in myself what I'm quick to condemn in the next person.

So taking responsibility means that I admit, I admit to, remember our first one, we face the reality, we admit the reality, I admit the many factors in my life that I can't change. I can't change who my parents are. I can't change how they raised me. I can't change whether God made me an inventor or made me a writer in terms of some of that core makeup. I can't change. So part of taking responsibility is admitting the reality on the one hand, and then realizing that I can choose my response to those factors.

Someone has said it this way, that between stimulus and response, there is a gap. There is a gap in which we can make choices.

And men who take responsibility for themselves are working right there in that arena to make godly and wise choices. You see, if you get rid of that gap, if you get rid and basically all you have is stimulus and response, then psychologists will tell us, "You're a behaviorist," and that everything is determined. Anything you do, if somebody does this, you have to respond that way. That's behaviorism.

But if those two, the stimulus and response are separated, and in between there is where we have the ability. And it's a narrow gap sometimes, but we have the space to choose how we're going to respond to that stimulus.

And that takes me to our third characteristic of men who are taking responsibility. And in order to develop this, I want to go to 2 Peter.

2 Peter 1.

Before I go there, I just want to finish this section on make no excuses by talking about Calvin Miller. Calvin is or was a pastor and writer. And in his memoirs, in his autobiography, he talks about how difficult his childhood was. He said his father was an alcoholic, and he seldom saw him. But when he did, his dad was drunk, and his dad was showing up at the home in order to try to find money. That was a dominant experience of his dad.

And he tells about how one Thanksgiving he and his siblings were looking forward to the turkey because mom, functionally a single mom, had been able to save up enough money to buy turkey for that year's Thanksgiving. And don't you know, dad comes home on Wednesday.

And Calvin said, "I don't know why she did it," because she knew better, but she took the money for the turkey and she gave it to Calvin's dad and says, "Here, would you take this down to the store and buy turkey for Thanksgiving?"

And of course, they didn't see him for weeks.

Now, what you have here is a man that could blame an awful lot on a father like that. But what I saw in his memoirs was a man who was really trying to acknowledge the reality of that, how that affected him, how that influenced him, but then not to make excuses, to say, "I still need to take responsibility."

And in one of the chapters, he wrote about how God had called him to try to name how his father had blessed him. And that's what he did in that chapter. Gave his father five bouquets, five roses, five ways that he had benefited from his father.

And what I saw on that was a man who was really working hard not to make excuses, but to make an effort to, in the midst of that stimulus, to make a response that was healthy and good. And that's the kind of thing that we're called to hear in 2 Peter. If you'd go to 2 Peter 1:8, it says, "For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Now, what kind of qualities is he talking about? Oh, isn't this what we want? We want to be men who are fruitful, men who are productive, men whose lives matter, whose lives count. And that's what Peter is saying can happen if these qualities are present in us. Well, what qualities is he talking about? We back up, back up, and we see starting there in, let me have it in my notes, but let me pull it up here in the scriptures.

So in verse 5, "For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love, for if these qualities." There's the list.

There's a total of eight. There's one plus seven here.

And he's saying, "If these qualities are a part of our lives, we're going to be people that are productive. We're going to be people whose lives count." So let's pay attention to the list. Here's a list that gives us plenty of opportunity to take responsibility for ourselves. In fact, notice the language, "Make every effort, giving all diligence." Make every effort. That's taking responsibility.

This isn't a little effort. This is making every effort.

And then it says, "Add to or supplement your faith with virtue." Now, the first, I said this list is a one plus seven. The one here is faith. That's the first in the list. We're going to settle on that one for a little bit.

So what faith is being described here? It says, "For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue." What's the faith talking about? Again, if we just let our eyes go back, go back, go back, we see faith mentioned in verse 1, "To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ."

Peter is saying we need to be men who, first of all, are anchored in confidence in Jesus Christ. That's the starting point. Now, maybe to help us understand the significance of that, I want to take a—I want to go another direction for just a moment.

Have any of you read the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Okay, a couple of you have. Stephen Covey, who'd be a businessman, he's also Mormon, is the author of that book. And it's been a wild bestseller for years and years and years. And there's much to commend the book. He gives seven habits. It could just as well be called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Men. It's about taking responsibility. In fact, his first habit is to be proactive, which is about making good choices.

Now, so he gives

seven habits. Good. And again, I find his habits to be biblical habits. Things like, "Seek first to understand and then to be understood." That's a good habit. He talks about beginning with the end in mind. That's a good habit.

But he spends a fair amount of time talking about what's underneath those seven habits. And he says that in the West, particularly in America, we, from the time of the Revolutionary War up through the 1800s, up into the 1900s, that the foundation for doing virtuous, for living virtuously, he said, primarily was an appeal to ambition.

Make something of yourself. That was the foundation out of which you would do good things. So a good example of a book along that line might be Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. See, you develop some skills and some habits so you can get what you want.

That's a selfish ambition. And Covey is saying, "That's not a good—that's not a good foundation upon which to build virtuous habits." So selfish ambition. And Paul in Philippians says the same thing. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.

So Covey says, "Nope, that's not a good foundation for these seven habits." What he says should be the seven—should be the foundation.

He says there needs to be timeless, timeless principles.

That, he says, is a good foundation for virtuous life.

Now, I want to suggest to you that while this is a step up from this, it's not what Peter's saying.

Peter says, "Add to your faith these seven qualities." He's saying the foundation upon which to build this kind of life, it's not selfish ambition. It's not even timeless principles. It's on Jesus himself. It's on confidence in him. It's trusting him.

It's the first commandment, loving God. That's the foundation upon which we then seek to add virtue and knowledge and so on.

And then Peter comes along and gives us, he says, "Add to your faith in Jesus, add virtue." And he says, "Add knowledge."

And he says, "Add self-control."

And what I intend to do today is just look at these three and what the implications of those might have for us to be men who are taking responsibility for ourselves.

But our starting point for taking responsibility, for making every effort, using Peter's language, our starting point here, and I didn't leave quite enough room, but I'll still stick it in the margins here, our starting point is love for God.

Trust in God.

Men who are taking responsibility are making every effort to anchor themselves right here.

But Peter's not done. He says, "Add to your faith virtue." Now, virtue is moral excellence. And another way we can talk about that, it's making godly and wise choices. That's what we say. Add to your confidence in Christ. You have a relationship with him. You're putting your faith in him. Now, add to that this capacity to make godly and wise choices.

So make godly, wise choices. That's virtue.

Now, we can't just snap our fingers and say, "I'm going to now, starting as of now, make godly and wise choices."

The church, over the last 2,000 years, has given guidance on how we grow in this. And it's offered two major paths to this. The one we generally talk about as the spiritual disciplines. But I'll go ahead and put some of the words down. It's confession, which is admitting the reality.

That's one of the ways we move toward this. Remember that gap between stimulus and response, making godly and wise choices. The way we become people who do that, confession, prayer, Bible meditation, meditation on scripture.

And I'm going to add one more, fasting.

Godly men, men who are taking responsibility for themselves, are taking responsibility in these areas, saying, "I'm going to be a man who's cultivating those disciplines in my life." Those are the disciplines that lead to moral virtue, to being able to make godly choices in the moments. A second resource that the church has offered as a way to grow in virtue is through fellowship.

In a word, it's hanging out with virtuous people. It's being with, in meaningful ways, other people who are virtuous, sharing our lives with other people.

One of the things that we do in our mentoring groups is to ask the men, and not just the students, but also the mentors do this as well. We ask each other to say, at the beginning of each semester of term, we'll say, "What's some habit you would like to cultivate in your life? A good habit. What's a bad habit that you would like to break in your life?"

And then to set an intention in those areas.

And we make it pretty specific because we've learned over the years that unless these intentions are timed, unless they're measurable, it's hard to talk about them. And we can't spend all of our time just talking. So here's what we do. We just say, "They have to be measurable. They have to be timed. And they have to be answerable as a yes or a no, a yes I did it or no I didn't." It can't be, "Well, I kind of, maybe sort of."

And so one of the first things we do when we get together each week is we'll go around the circle and everybody says, we ask them to set three intentions each semester. And it'll be yes, yes, yes, or yes, no, yes, or no, no, no. And everybody just quickly says that.

And then for all the no's, we go back and ask them to explain why it's a no. And they can say either if they're asking for mercy because they got sick and so they can't keep this intention to do something. And so they say, "I'm asking for mercy." Or they'll say, "No, I need a consequence."

And if they ask for mercy, the group can decide whether they deserve it or not. If the consequence is the end result, we have a little, we call it a bowl of consequence. And at the beginning of the year, we all made up some consequences and stick it in that bowl. And that's what you do. You reach in and you pull one of those out of there. And you read it. And it might say something like, "Help the maintenance man to do his work for an hour."

Or, "Offer to take the dishwashing duties for someone in the next week." It might be a group consequence that the group, the entire group, has to work together, spend maybe we have to spend the hour working with the maintenance man together.

So it's some kind of consequence. And I find that just that simple little exercise with a group of my brothers has, over the years, has been instrumental in embedding a number of new practices and habits in my life that are extremely valuable for me.

But that's part of this, being with other men in intentional ways. And that's probably where the hanging out language isn't the best here because it's, no, it's being together where we're talking meaningfully with each other. That's a way that that's a resource, a divine resource for us to grow in godliness, grow in our ability to take responsibility for ourselves.

The church is designed to be the center of our social circles, not the fire department, not even the biological family. It's the church. And when we spend meaningful time with brothers and sisters in the church, that is a way that virtue develops in us.

Peter goes on to say, "Add to your faith virtue and to virtue add knowledge."

Paul Little said that God cannot lead us out of pea-sized boxes of Christianity on the basis of facts we don't know and refuse to learn.

There are things that you and I need to know if we're going to be responsible men. There are things we need to know in order to love our wives better. There are things we need to know if we're going to help our children adequately. And Peter was helping us to think about some of those things in his session.

There are things we need to know if we're going to be effective Sunday school teachers. There are things we need to know if we're going to be able to address this relational problem that we have with our boss.

Knowledge and growth in knowledge is an important component of being responsible as men.

Some time ago, the drain field there at our house stopped working. And so what I did is I have a friend that works with this kind of thing. So I call him up and say, "What's going on? What can I do?" And he gave me some ideas. I also googled the problem, read about it there. I called up the septic officer in our community and I talked with him, researched a number of alternative solutions. I was growing in knowledge about that particular problem. I was trying to take responsibility for a difficulty I was experiencing. Knowledge was an important component in being responsible. That same thing is applicable in so many areas of our lives. We need to be men who are growing in knowledge.

I once heard a Mennonite brother argue that we really shouldn't learn in the realm of our spiritual lives and the realm of relationships and so on because he said, "If we don't know it, then we're not responsible." But that's precisely the issue here, isn't it? We're to be responsible. And yes, knowledge increases the level of responsibility that we have. Responsible men are men that are growing in knowledge, growing in knowledge of the Bible, growing in knowledge of themselves, growing in knowledge of their responsibilities.

It's part of what it means to be responsible. So reading, taking classes, walking along somebody who knows what it is you need to know, always of growing in knowledge.

Peter's not done. He says, "Add to your knowledge self-control." And just like virtue, self-control is not something we can snap our fingers. It's not a switch we can turn on. But there is a path that leads to increased ability to control ourselves, our passions, and so on.

Our middle son just graduated from being a chief at one of the boys' camps. And somewhere in his second year, he calls me up and he says, "Dad," he said, "when can you come and spend a couple of days out in the woods with me and the boys?" I wasn't too sure. This was part of my job description. But he was convincing. And so we arranged a time. And one of the things that was so impressive to me as I was out there with him and the 10 young men that he had responsibility for was how much attention was being given to the structure of their lives.

From the moment they woke up in the morning, the kinds of things that they were supposed to do, not just make your bed, but how you make your bed, structures, structures. And so when I asked them, "What's this all about? Why all these different practices, these different rhythms, these different things that you just always do it this way?" They said, "What we find is that when a young man with emotional upheaval in his life, when there gets to be some of these things he can bank on, some of these structures, that that kind of stability, that kind of structure makes a major contribution to self-control.

When those external things are present, it actually starts bleeding internally and increases the ability to be self-controlled.

If we're going to be men who are self-controlled, it means we're going to be men who take responsibility for our body. And that includes three categories: exercise, it includes sleep, it includes what we eat and drink. This is responsibility for our body. That's being men of responsibility.

The average American currently gets 6.8 hours of sleep. And that may sound like a fair amount. That's not too bad. But that's an hour less on average than what the average was in 1942.

And what I hear many people saying today, those in the medical profession and social services and so on are saying, "We are a sleep-deprived people." And that it is adding a significant amount to our problems. Responsible men see that they're getting the amount of sleep that they need in order to take care of their work responsibilities, their family responsibilities, and so on.

Men who are taking responsibility are paying attention to getting enough exercise. They're paying attention to their diet. Just had a person tell me recently something along the lines that Mennonites don't pay attention to their health until they're laying on their backs.

Well, I don't know how true that is. I hope it's not true of us. But responsible men are paying attention here. And that's part of this self-control that Peter is talking about. Also, part of self-control is the way we use our time.

Most men, this is a place many men struggle here, just being responsible for their use of time, particularly discretionary time, the time where you can decide what you do. I remember hearing a—it was a writer, N.T. Wright. He was an English writer who has, I think if you would stack his books up here, I mean, it would just be an incredible stack. And these are not lightweight books. These are books that most of us never read because they're thick tomes and very dense writing about theology and so on.

And he wrote all these in his spare time in the evenings because he had a full-time job as an instructor and he was also a pastor of a church. And someone asked him one time, "How is it that you were able to write this in the last 15 years that you were able to write that amount of stuff? Because it's clear you didn't—this was not just stream of consciousness, whatever comes to your head. You researched and studied significantly before you ever wrote this stuff. How did this happen?" And he said, his response was simple, "I don't watch television."

Now, we don't have television, or do we? The computer can be just as much a time waster as television and keeping us from the kind of productivity, the kind of flourishing, the kind of opportunities that could be available to us if we took responsibility in this realm of time. Well, in conclusion, God is looking for men.

Men who take responsibility, men who take responsibility, first of all, for themselves. And I'd like to give a picture of that. I got some of our good Georgia sand here. And this sand has everything in it to become this glass. In fact, this glass is nothing more than that sand, maybe a few trace elements added. But for the most part, you take that sand and you heat it up to 3,000 degrees and it becomes glass.

Men, you and I are a bit like this sand.

And we need to acknowledge the sandiness of our lives, the pieces, the places of our lives that have not been shaped and formed. Admit the reality. Don't make excuses for them. But then to bring that, to bring that into the furnace, into the crucible of God's work, taking responsibility to make every effort. And frankly, that making every effort feels an awful lot like 3,000 degrees sometimes.

But out of that, God can make a godly man, a responsible man. Lord, we bow before you and invite you to continue your work in us. Thank you for Jesus. Lord, we declare our love for you this morning. We declare how far we are from what it is that you want us to be and what you have in your mind when you think of us. Lord, we bring ourselves to you and we invite you to work on us and make us into men who can stand in the gap, men who are responsible, men who aren't making excuses.

But Lord, we admit that we can't do this without you. So our confidence is not in ourselves to be responsible. Our confidence, we're moving it toward you, moving it onto you to do these kinds of things to make us into the kind of men that we talked about this morning. We pray in Christ. Amen.