Masculine Mandate Quotes

Of all men, Christians should work especially hard, giving more than an honest day's work for a day's wage.

Our calling in life really is this simple (although not therefore easy): We are to devote ourselves to working/building and keeping/protecting everything placed into our charge.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

Our society tells young adult men to deprive themselves of God's provision for their physical, emotional, and sexual needs so they can remain as immature and self-absorbed as possible, for as long as possible. You know what the Bible says about this: it just is not good.

A. W. Pink rightly says: Humility is not the product of direct cultivation, rather it is a by-product. The more I try to be humble, the less shall I attain unto humility. But if I am truly occupied with that One who was "meek and lowly in heart," if I am constantly beholding His glory in the mirror of God's Word, then shall I be "changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor. 3:18).24

Indeed, this is what modern and postmodern masculinity has been all about-men behaving like little boys forever, serving themselves in the name of self-discovery. (Can we imagine someone like Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill talking about going on a quest to find his masculine self? They were too busy changing the world.)

Sweden had paternity-leave policies in place for years but found that few men were taking advantage of the benefit. While women felt comfortable taking time off to be with baby, men worried that they would look less dedicated to their careers if they did the same. So the Swedish government implemented a “use it or lose it” policy, mandating that the country’s thirteen-month parental leave cannot only be used by one parent – the other parent must use at least two months of the leave, or both lose those months entirely. Today 85% of Swedish fathers take paternity leave. The policy has helped redefine notions of masculinity and femininity in the already-egalitarian country.

Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.

Christian men who are not yet called into formal church office should never complain that they have nothing to do. We all have much to do in our own hearts and lives, and the requirement for well-qualified men to serve as leaders in the church is always urgent and vital.

any Christian man who wants to serve the Lord, in any role and at any level, must begin by devoting himself to God's Word. A man who is weak in the Word of God will be of little use for service, for we cannot truly serve God effectively in our own knowledge and strength. But God's Word stirs up in us the faith and spiritual strength needed to serve Him.

God's curse on the man draws him unwholesomely away from the woman, even as God's curse on the woman draws her unwholesomely toward the man. This is why most marital counseling sessions are some variation on this theme: Wife-"You don't pay any attention to me." Husband-"You are too demanding and nag too much." God has cursed the marriage relationship with a poisonous desire for control by the woman and a self-absorbed focus outside the relationship by the man.

For our marriages to regain the love and unity God designed them to have, it is not merely a matter of wives submitting to their husbands in the Lord. Husbands, in fact, have the first and greatest responsibility. As we gain insight about our wives through our shared lives together and our attentive and cherishing interest in the affairs of their hearts, we must nourish our wives with God's Word, and with our own encouraging and upbuilding words informed by Scripture.

To be clear, male leadership in marriage does not mean the husband does everything or even that he decides everything. Rather, it means he typically initiates and always leads those shared discussions with his wife by which the various aspects of marriage and family life are decided and planned. The wife's opinion is vitally important, and a godly couple should be a close-knit team. But there should be no area of family life in which the husband does not serve as leader, facilitator, and overseer.

To be a man is to stand up and be counted when there is danger or other evil. God does not desire for men to stand by idly and allow harm, or permit wickedness to exert itself. Rather, we are called to keep others safe within all the covenant relationships we enter. In our families, our presence is to make our wives and children feel secure and at ease. At church, we are to stand for truth and godliness against the encroachment of worldliness and error. In society, we are to take our places as men who stand up against evil and who defend the nation from threat of danger.

He is still calling on men to cause good things to grow and to keep precious things safe.

It is the male arm around the shoulder or pat on the back that God allows to have the quickest access to the heart of a child or employee. Men who are seeking to live out the Masculine Mandate will be nurturers.

This biblical mandate to work—here with the emphasis on cultivating and tending—explodes a great misconception regarding gender roles. We have been taught that women are the main nurturers, while men are to be “strong and silent.” But the Bible calls men to be cultivators, and that includes a significant emphasis on tending the hearts of those given into our charge.

Not surprisingly, the model of the leader as shepherd fits perfectly the work-and-keep Masculine Mandate of Genesis 2:15. God placed Adam in the garden to work it—to make it grow—and shepherds are leaders who nurture and inspire the hearts of those who follow. God also called Adam to keep the garden—to stand guard over it—and it is the shepherd-leader who protects those under his charge, keeping one eye always on the flock and the other alert for predators. Good shepherd-leadership, then, will always resemble Adam’s servant-lordship as the flock, like a garden, grows and bears fruit of all kinds under the watchful protection of the shepherd.

It is not sufficient for fathers to send their children to church, Sunday school, Christian camp, or private Christian school. You must read the Bible to your children yourself. Obviously, our children must see some correspondence between the Bible and our lives. But even as we work out our own Christian growth, we must read God's Word to and with our children.

our basic mandate as Christian men is to cultivate, build, and grow (both things and people), but also to stand guard so that people and things are kept safe-so that the fruit of past cultivating and nurturing is preserved.

That is the Masculine Mandate: to be spiritual men placed in real-world, God-defined relationships, as lords and servants under God, to bear God's fruit by serving and leading.

This should remind us that the primary threat to the safety of our loved ones is always our own sin.

If we want to be the men God is calling us to be—men who are rightly admired and respected by those we love, men who faithfully fulfill our duty before God—then we will make as our motto and watchword the Masculine Mandate that we as men have received from God: We will work and keep.

God took a part of Adam, so that the woman corresponded to him, but then God made her a little different, fashioning Adam’s rib into the woman. The word for “made” or “fashioned” indicates special artisanship, which we see in the beauty that women bring into men’s lives. Because God made the woman from man and then fashioned her to be different, she is precisely fitted as a helper for man, and beautifully so.

It is necessary to state up front that authoritative positions of leadership in the New Testament church are to be held only by men. Women can and should play leading roles in the church, for a church with a strong masculine presence will have a strong feminine beauty about it as well. But the positions of authority—the roles of teaching and ruling—are restricted to men. To become convinced of the truth and authority of Scripture, and then to read the plain words of the New Testament, is to come to this conclusion easily and naturally.

Set out for us there is an excellent agenda for any Christian man to follow: personal godliness, self-control, knowledge of truth, and a good reputation within and outside the church.

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing" (Zeph. 3:17).

Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret. Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.” The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.” Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs—beliefs that have become mandates. If these statements seem true, it’s because everyone has been so well programmed. Human qualities are not gendered. What is gendered is permission to express certain traits. Why? Why would our culture prescribe such strict gender roles? And why would it be so important for our culture to label all tenderness and mercy as feminine? Because disallowing the expression of these qualities is the way the status quo keeps its power. In a culture as imbalanced as ours—in which a few hoard billions while others starve, in which wars are fought for oil, in which children are shot and killed while gun manufacturers and politicians collect the blood money—mercy, humanity, and vulnerability cannot be tolerated. Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society. So how does power squash the expression of these traits? In a misogynistic culture, all that is needed is to label them feminine. Then we can forever discount them in women and forever shame them out of men. Ta-da: no more messy, world-changing tenderness to deal with. We can continue on without our shared humanity challenging the status quo in any way.

To be clear, the Bible never commands us to strive for greater levels of masculinity or femininity. Instead, we’re called to greater levels of Christlikeness. We don’t ask, “Am I fulfilling my mandate to become a ‘biblical’ woman or man?” Rather, “Am I imitating Christ?

Rita Segato has reminded us that behind the relentless war against women, which is being waged with equal ferocity inside homes and on public grounds, lies the “mandate of masculinity,” which negatively affects women and men alike, albeit in different forms and with different lethal risks. Defined as men’s perceived duty to dominate in order to belong to a brotherhood whose main aim is control over women’s bodies, the “mandate of masculinity” helps us understand that while violence against women may appear to be sexual, it is, above all, a matter of power.

So man is to work and, generally speaking, he is to marry.

Therefore, the humble working man, toiling faithfully at his job, nurturing and shepherding his wife, and seeking to bring up his children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, conforms to God's picture of a real man.

Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader You despise, the racists said when the president Was black and I’ll be damned if I ain’t saying it too. Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty, Stupidity, an idiot’s threats & gangsta narcissisms threading Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs?

Anger is a serious issue for many fathers because a child's disobedience is seen as an affront to the father's authority and honor. But sinful displays of anger only undermine a father's authority, tempting a child to hold the father in disdain and contempt.

He calls us to do this by being leaders and servants in the ultimate cause of displaying God's glory and bearing the fruit of God's love in real relationships.

Anthropologist Rita Segato has reminded us that behind the relentless war against women, which is being waged with equal ferocity inside homes and on public grounds, lies the “mandate of masculinity,” which negatively affects women and men alike, albeit in different forms and with different lethal risks. Defined as men’s perceived duty to dominate in order to belong to a brotherhood whose main aim is control over women’s bodies, the “mandate of masculinity” helps us understand that while violence against women may appear to be sexual, it is, above all, a matter of power.

One of the core dangers of the toxic form of masculinity rampant in our culture is that it smothers difference and distinction. It flattens us into tropes and caricatures. It mandates adherence to a narrow orthodoxy of acceptable masculine traits and behaviors. It offers a kind of blunt confidence in belonging, a shelter from ambiguity, and takes in return nuance, feeling, and real freedom for exploring, defining, and expressing our own identities.