We’ve spent a lot of time over the last four weeks talking about men’s responsibility to use their bodies for their intended purpose (Challenge 29). The attention we’ve given to this topic over the last few weeks has given us time to reflect on some broader ideas about responsibility.
Namely: We’ve gotten really bad at it.
Whether it’s in how we consume, (media, alcohol, food in general), how we interact with others (Politicians shifting blame, many of us making excuses at the doctor’s office, failing to confess our sins to others), or even our relationship with ourselves (Narcissism is on the rise in the United States and social media and the rising influencer culture has turned self-aggrandizement into practically a cottage industry), painting ourselves without agency, without fault, and with apathy has become the cultural norm. The bleak skull of nihilism now seems to grin, and Gen Z has embraced a life without meaning as a joyful life philosophy
There is a grim pessimism seeping through the modern world. And strangely it seems to be coming from the youth up. Ordinarily youth are the firebrands the instruments of change and action, the ones who look at a broken world and say “Life shouldn’t be this way,” and try to change it. Cynicism used to be only an old man’s disease. Now, in the words of the old joke, apathy is our biggest problem…but who cares?
Well, we do. Or we should. And here, let me be as clear as I can be about what I mean and what I don’t mean. Christians fall prey to this apathy and bitterness just as often as non-Christians, maybe (dare-I-say) even more so. Our nihilism presents differently, in angry comments about a government that will never care about its citizens, about opponents who will never understand what we’re trying to say, in defeatist retreats from the world and from those in it who need the good news of our merciful savior. All this is an attitude that denies our responsibility to the highest authority.
This is an individual responsibility, first and foremost. Paul in Corinthians, speaking on food offered to idols reminds the members of the church there, “Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. 15 I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. “ Our corporate participation in the Lord’s Supper is the joining of many individual members into one body, each individual participant instructed to “examine yourselves therefore.” Paul does not instruct us to examine one another before entering into worship, but to examine our own hearts. This is a weighty responsibility to be placed on every individual member of the church. We do not (once we have been joined to a church in membership) hand over our autonomy to the pastor or elders of our church, but we submit ourselves to their teaching, instruction, and discipline, so that we might be better able to take full responsibility for our actions, better able to look into our nature, conscience, faults, failings, and shortcomings to recognize Christ’s work in us as we, through his power and blood, are justified, and “enabled more and more to turn from sin and live unto righteousness.”
What does this individual responsibility require of us as men?
Enjoy Responsibly.
Man’s chief end, in the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Those are active verbs, there, to glorify and to enjoy. James instructs to be doers of the word and not hearers only. The Christian life is an active one. I say nothing new here, to be sure. Old truths are needed more than new solutions.
At Forging Honor our intention is never to tell you how to live your life. It’s not even to define what it means to be a Christian man. We firmly believe that is for you to discern from Scripture how God is calling you to “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before the Lord.” Our mission here is to empower young men to actively participate in their Christian faith, to recognize that a great deal can be accomplished by the man who is awake and at the ready, and to help create a culture where the good news of the Gospel, our only comfort in life and death, is undeniably evident in every step we take and every word we speak.
My father is fond of an old story from World War I. A captain in the British army is walking along the mud-soaked trenches in the middle of France when he pass another soldier he has never met going in the other direction. The captain stops the soldier and asks him, “What is man’s chief end?” The soldier replies, “To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” The captain smiles and says, “Ah! I knew by the way you walked you were a Westminster man.”
Apocryphal or not, it’s a powerful testament to how a truth believed soaks through into a life lived. In the midst of a hellscape, there are those who meditate so deeply on scripture, who know their sin so fully, see their savior so clearly, know their heavenly destination so firmly, that walking among the decay, the decadence, the despairing and the damned, they shine a light of a soul loved by a merciful God who calls to sinners, poor and needy, “Come to me and I will give you rest.”
Let us pray our words are marked by kindness and compassion, our lips moving always in praise, our hands grasping onto the vocation to which we are called and grabbing on to the lost so they might be snatched from the pit, our feet quick to run to those in need and in despair, and may our lungs be filled always with refrains rejoicing in our freedom from sin and our liberty to live as active citizens in God’s kingdom.
