Do you want power or freedom or lasting, secure gain? You’ll find the best, and the only reliable, form of all of those goods in godliness. So, work to continually recalibrate your motives.
Form Transforming Habits
In order to do this, you need to form transforming habits, especially Scripture study, meditation, and prayer in private and with others. Donald Whitney’s book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life is a practical, challenging guide to these, as is David Mathis’s Habits of Grace.
If you’re not in the habit of regularly communing with Jesus through time in his word and prayer, here’s how I’d encourage you to start. Whatever your morning schedule looks like, get up a little earlier, even just twenty or thirty minutes. Read something in Scripture — could be a Psalm or a chapter of Proverbs, could be the passage your pastor is going to preach the next Sunday — and find something to turn into prayer.
What in the passage can you praise God for? What sins in your life does the passage reveal? What reason does the passage give you to thank God? What does it teach you to ask God for? Turn Scripture reading into prayer and even a short time with Christ can become a regularly refueling engine of daily transformation into his character.
Get New Models
Everyone has models. Even if you don’t consciously admit it, styling yourself as an intrepid individualist, chances are there are men you strive to be like. Whether in matters personal or professional, superficial or substantive, there are men you know, or at least know of, that you want to be like. And if you haven’t been self-consciously striving for godliness for the past several years, then chances are, you need new models.
So find the godliest men you can, get as close to them as you can, and learn as much from them as you can. That’s what the apostle Paul told the whole Philippian church to do: “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us” (Philippians 3:17). And again, “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:9).
Find Ways to Father
One nearly universal definition of manhood is to produce more than you consume (see, for instance Roy Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?, 195). It’s easy to see how that works in an economic, material sense: to provide for a family, you need to earn more than you use. You must be a generator of surpluses. And working hard so as to provide for others is a basic biblical imperative that especially lands on men’s shoulders (1 Timothy 5:8).
But this shorthand definition of manhood — that you produce more than you consume — doesn’t just apply to bringing home bacon. It has deep spiritual relevance as well. We all have burdens, and we need help bearing them (Galatians 6:2). We all have limited wisdom, and so we all need counselors (Proverbs 24:6). But a spiritually productive man is one who is a net burden-bearer, and a net wisdom-dispenser, a net exporter to others of spiritual good and gain. So strive to be a spiritual producer. Strive to have your desires so under control, your heart so aligned with God’s will, and your mind so transformed by his word, that you store up a surplus of spiritual help that you can regularly share out with others.
Another way to say this is, find ways to father. If you’re the father of children, train them in all God’s ways (Ephesians 6:4). If you’re unmarried and desire to be married, pursue the kind of holiness, competence, leadership ability, and maturity that will make you not only attractive husband material but ready and eager to be a father. Fatherhood, both natural and spiritual, is the distinctive shape of masculine maturity. A father provides and protects. What kind of man do you need to become in order to faithfully provide for and protect others in both material and spiritual ways?
