It was also yet another ticking package delivered to men’s hearts on how to do better, do more, sin less, and achieve more. Men love stuff like that—at first. Then they hate it.

God’s intentions for us are clear, and they are wonderful. But they involve learning, and I am not the Teacher. I know him, though. He has been training me for a number of years, and he is always eager to take on new apprentices, Warriors to train and share his way with. It is not a journey for the faint of heart, but it is unique, noble,

The names God gives us are more than mere compliments. They are identities—titles that define us, that say something important about us and are intended to inspire something deep within us. The bestowing of identity doesn’t happen just once to a man. There are too many roles and assignments in his life for him to be known or contained by one name

And above all, turn him to service. That is our greatest goal: to get a man to believe that love of God is earned through service rather than given freely.

The Father is at work authoring, perfecting, and rebuilding something. That something is actually a someone—you and me. The Father is building his sons into men, strong and good men who bear his image. It starts with a foundation of receiving love and advances through healing our hearts through all the means necessary for our becoming his Beloved

If a man is not settled, if he does not know he is the Beloved Son, he will get his butt kicked on a regular basis through discouragement, despair, anger, resentment, and depression.

When we fail to connect the themes in these stories with the themes in our own stories, then we miss the larger life for which we are being called. Often we miss our moment to step up and in to play the hero’s part because we don’t see and hear these moments of invitation. Opportunities to love well, fight well, and offer a true masculine presence,

Setting captive hearts free is no mere abstraction. It’s as real as the friend who struggles with alcoholism, the wife who bears the wounds of childhood sexual abuse, or the guy two seats over in church who is contemplating suicide. They’re why we fight: because they’re in pain, bound and brutalized by an enemy they can’t see in a war they don’t

I have found that the pace of the pen and the heart move well together. They seem to operate in third gear while the rest of my life is determined to lock into fifth. That fifth gear life is one of the great enemies of intimacy. Most men try to fit God into their lives rather than fit their lives into God. It doesn’t work. Think about it. Which is