Men of Steel – Page 33 – HeartQuest 101

Give Me Revelation

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Scott Chafee

I am a fan of listening to Christian radio, and the station in town for me is 90.7 FM. I often hear a group called Third Day who has a new song out entitled Revelation, which is on target regarding the topic of seeking direction from God. Check out these lyrics:

My life has led me down the road that’s so uncertain,
And now I am left alone and I am broken,
Trying to find my way, trying to find the faith that’s gone.
This time I know that you are holding all the answers,
I’m tired of losing hope and taking chances,
On roads that never seem to be the ones that bring me home.

(Chorus)
Give me a revelation, show me what to do,
Cause I’ve been trying to find my way, I haven’t got a clue.
Tell me should I stay here, or do I need to move?
Give me a revelation,
I’ve got nothing without You,
I’ve got nothing without You.

My life has led me down this path that’s ever winding,
Through every twist and turn I’m always finding,
That I am lost again,
Tell me when this road will ever end.

(Chorus)

I don’t know where I can turn, tell me when will I learn?
Won’t You show me where I need to go?
Let me follow Your lead,
I know that it’s the only way that I can get back home.

Do you ever feel like that? These are powerful words of a man in desperate need to hear from God; one who desires to make the right choice. You might notice that the theme verse for my site is Jeremiah 29:13… I like that, “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.” He’s not in a cosmic hide and seek game, but He will only be found by those who earnestly seek Him. If one only wants to casually look for God, no wonder He can’t be found.

So, just how do we find direction in life? Psalm 119:105 is a good starting point. Get into God’s Word, it helps us develop a heart like His and gives us wisdom to make good choices.

How often do we pray for direction and wonder if God ever heard our prayers? At times I pour out my heart to God in prayer seeking His will for some area in my life. Then I hear nothing; just silence, like my prayer never made it past the ceiling. So, not wanting to wait, I press on ahead in my own strength, failing to sit and wait. After all, there’s no time to wait, because I need to act now, someone needs an answer.

Yet, when I examine Scripture, God consistently teaches us to sit, pray, and wait.

Jesus began His ministry by fasting forty days alone in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11).
He spent an entire night alone in prayer before choosing His twelve disciples (Luke 6:12).
Esther fasted and prayed for three days before she took the bold and courageous step of going before the king on behalf of her people, knowing it could mean her death (Esther 4:8-16).
Elijah went into the wilderness for forty days to hear the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-18).

What do these great people of faith teach us? In order to know God’s leading and to hear His voice, we must listen and wait. Maybe we think God is silent because we never take the time to sit in God’s Word and simply wait.

Do you need direction right now? Try following these steps:

Read God’s Word: 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says that Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. The Spirit of God was actively involved in the writing of Scripture. It is the authoritative Word of God written to speak truth into your life.

Study God’s Word: 2 Timothy 2:15 says that we are to correctly handle the word of truth. When you study the Bible, He plants His Word deep within your heart. His Spirit then takes the Word and bends your heart in His direction, enabling you to hear His Voice.

Pray God’s Word: Isaiah 55:11 says that God’s Word will not return to Him empty, but will accomplish what He desires, and it achieves the purposes for which He sent it. When you pray in faith, you hold God’s Word back up to Him in prayer. You put Him in remembrance of His Word, and His promise is that Word will not return void, accomplishing that which He purposes and pleases. George Muller taught me to pray the Scripture back to God. He spoke the Scripture back to God in prayer with boldness. You must be using the right words when you quote God’s own words back to Him!

How does God want to move in your life? Are you seeking revelation? Tell God that you haven’t got a clue and you need His intervention.

Search His Word for verses that speak to your situation. Write them down on a card, commit them to memory, and pray them back to God. Wait and watch for God to do a mighty work. Share your with the Men of Steel. We can celebrate God’s faithfulness with you.

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How to Build and Maintain Integrity

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Scott Chafee

This week I was thinking about Craig’s comments about the honor code at the medical college and it made me consider the quality of integrity. People always talk about it but we can’t always get a handle on just what it is. John Maxwell has some wise words on the topic:

Integrity is important in building relationships: It is the foundation upon which success is built, along with respect, dignity and trust. If integrity is weak, success is impossible. I believe integrity is about the small things, often when no one is watching. Sort of like king David talking about the kind of shepherd he was when no one was looking (1 Samuel 17:34-37). We would not even have this story had David not revealed it! He was alone, and his true character was shining. It might have been too easy to say, “It’s only one sheep, why risk my life over one stinkin’ sheep?” David had integrity.

Consider these thoughts on integrity:

Integrity is not determined by circumstance: like your household or your upbringing. Circumstances are as responsible for your character as a mirror is for your looks… who you see only reflects who you are.
Integrity is not based on credentials: some people want to be judged not on who they really are but on some status they have achieved. These guys want to lead out of their credentials rather than the strength of their character. No title, degree, award or license can be a substitute for one’s character.
Integrity is not to be confused with reputation: Solomon once said that a good name is more desirable than great riches (Proverbs 22:1). D. L Moody once said that if I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of itself. We will struggle with maintaining our integrity if we do all the right things from the outside (without a changed inner strength).

Questions to help measure your integrity:

How well do I treat people if I gain nothing?
Am I transparent to others?
Do I role-play based on the person I’m with?
Am I the same person in the spotlight as I am when I’m alone?
Do I quickly admit to wrongdoing without being forced to do so?
Do I put people ahead of my personal agenda?
Do I have an unchanging standard for moral decisions, or do circumstances determine my choices?
Do I make difficult decisions, even when they have a personal cost attached to them?
When I have something to say about people, do I talk to them or about them?
Am I accountable to at least one other person for what I think, say or do?

Do what you should before you do what you want: Zig Ziglar once said, “When you do the things you have to do when you have to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.” If you know what you stand for and act accordingly, people will trust you! Great advice from a visionary leader.

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Why Does God Wrestle With Men?

Posted on March 25, 2009 by Scott Chafee

The Men of Steel looked into this topic; how often do we wrestle with God?

Last time I wrote about Jacob wrestling with God (Genesis 32:24) because wrestling is a man thing, lots of testosterone. I regularly listen to a syndicated Christian radio station called K-Love, and they play a song called By Your Side by a group named Tenth Avenue North. Here are the lyrics:

Why are you striving these days
Why are you trying to earn grace
Why are you crying, let me lift up your face
Just don’t turn away
Why are you looking for love
Why are you still searching as if I’m not enough
To where will you go child, tell me where will you run
To where will you run
‘Cause I’ll be by your side, wherever you fall
In the dead of night, whenever you call
And please don’t fight, these hands that are holding you
My hands are holding you
Look at these hands and my side
They swallowed the grave on that night
When I drank the world’s sin, so I could carry you in
And give you life, I want to give you life

What does this have to do with wrestling? I sense this song pictures us wrestling against God, while He wrestles with us to help us realize that we need Him more than we could ever imagine. As men we are often striving, trying, and fighting the hands holding us.

I suppose that God also wrestles with us so that we will discover what we are made of. He already knows what He created us to be and He knows what we’ve done with His creation. He’s waiting for us to discover who we are, so He wrestles with us so we will know His power and our weakness, His wisdom and our error, His strength and our frailty.

God wrestles with us to make us realize that we are wasting our lives; that we are mistreating our wives; that we really aren’t the “greatest” or the center of the universe.

God wrestles with us to make us see that we need to persevere and not quit in life, our jobs, our marriages, our spiritual lives, or our church.

God wrestles with us until we face the facts. He doesn’t sugarcoat what He has to say. He wrestles with us until we admit, “Yes, I’m unstable. Yes, I’m making excuses. Yes, I was wrong.”

God wrestles with us so that we will start searching for Him and hunting for what He wants us to find. Man is a hunter by nature. God’s commands to the first man were to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion … over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

To subdue means to control or conquer, to have dominion means to maintain one’s conquest. Deep inside of men is the need to subdue, the need to conquer, the need to track down and bring something into dominion. There’s a hunter inside every man.

We may be hunting for a contract or business deal.
We may be on the hunt for a woman.
We may be hunting for the perfect new house or car.

Sometimes we don’t even really want what we’re after; we’re just hunting because it is our nature to hunt. Fishermen often catch fish, unhook them, and throw them right back. They say, “Look what I caught,” and then they toss that fish back into the lake. That doesn’t make the man any less a fisherman. It means that he is merely fishing for the sport of it, not for dinner. He is just “hunting.”

Unless we allow God to step in and give us the right goals and guide our “hunting” instinct, we can spend our entire life hunting for the wrong things. Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). He promised that if you seek for it, you’ll find it. (Matthew 7:7). I hope that the Men of Steel can help each of us navigate through this thing called life.

Excuses or Obedience?

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Scott Chafee

Terry Rae delivered a fantastic message on March 15 on Moses and obedience, After the initial shock of hearing God’s voice in a “burning” bush, I can imagine Moses listening to God (Exodus 3:6-9) and thinking, “right on, you know it’s tough back there, it’s about time You did something about it.” Then God adds one more phrase, “Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh” (Exodus 3:10). Now it gets personal.

Then Moses asked some important questions about his mission, and he brought up some fairly reasonable concerns as to why God would want him to be the deliverer of God’s people. What’s the bottom line? God is calling Moses to obedience.

One of the problems I have constantly faced as a follower of Jesus is the mistake of believing God owes me some sort of an explanation every time He commands me to do something. This has caused me at times to expect God to explain Himself instead of me simply trusting Him enough to do exactly what He says.

I am learning that if I am to be the follower God wants me to be, then I need to be obsessed with obedience rather than expecting an explanation from Him! Imagine if there was an explanation every time God wanted you to do something. He could say, “You need to do this…and when you do it, the following will take place…”

But, I believe one of the reasons He doesn’t waste time with an explanation is because it would lead to negotiation on our part. We would hear His plan and try to “improve” it because, after all, we’re smarter than He is, right?

God’s plans are so much higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9, Ephesians 3:20) and if He were to try to explain Himself to us, our limited human minds could not handle it. There’s another misconception about God. That His work is all about us! In reality it is all about Him and His Kingdom. That’s why He owes me no explanation.

When we want an explanation, and try to enter into negotiation, it seems reasonable that it will always lead to frustration. There are lots of frustrated believers out there, and it could be because we refuse to obey His voice for no other reason than it doesn’t make sense.

God’s commands don’t always make sense, and we may never know why He asks us to do certain things, but, if we believe He is in charge, then we must believe that every single one of His commands are right. We must believe that He is holy, just and good; and whatever comes from my obedience must also be holy, just and good. God doesn’t owe us an explanation. The fact that He commands us at all or even uses us to do anything amazes me.

So, what is it that you have been putting off? Anything you’ve been asking God for an explanation about? What is it that you know He’s commanded you to do, but it absolutely makes no sense? Stop expecting an explanation. Listen to what He says and then do it!

Saddle up your horses for the great adventure! What a way to live!

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God Wrestles with You… Alone

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Scott Chafee

The Men of Steel looked into this topic; how often do we wrestle with God?

I am still fascinated and challenged by the wrestling match between God and Jacob, the father of the twelve sons of Israel (Genesis 32:22-28).

I feel that God encounters men in a lonely place where He can deal with us personally. He wants to be alone with us, rather than in the context of cliques and clubs that can keep us from hearing Him at all. When God gets a man to the point of dealing with the deep issues of life, He does so one-on-one. It’s just you and God.

Ask yourself, “Who are you really?” When nobody’s looking … when you aren’t “prepared,” when all the camouflage has been removed, when you don’t have an ego to defend or anything to prove, when you aren’t concerned about your status? Who are you?

When God is ready to do open-heart surgery, He brings you to an “alone” place. Nobody invites a guest into an operating room, and neither does God. His work on you will be done in private.

When God begins to move in your life, you may feel very uncomfortable. I believe the first response of any man at that time is to surround themselves with more people. We feel restless, frustrated, and lonely in our spirits. We feel a greater need to have somebody with us, to protect us, shield us, walk with us, and encourage us. We will soon discover that the presence of other people doesn’t meet the deep longing we have. The loneliness and restlessness we feel in our spirits is God’s call on our lives. He is reeling us in for our one-on-one encounter with Him.

You can be surrounded by people … and still be alone.
You can have sex with your wife … and still be alone.
You can have dozens of close friends … and still be alone.
You can have hundreds of friends on Facebook … and still be alone.

It’s like we finally admit that we are lonely and need something that other people can’t provide, and then we discover we need Someone to fill a part of us that nobody else seems to be able to fill—that’s when God steps in.

I suppose that when we feel alone, it means that somebody we thought we could count on for protection has disappeared. We feel isolated, separated, and alone. When we feel left alone, our hope is usually that someone will come along and comfort us. In fact, we expect that “comfort” is what a loving God would do to a man who is left alone. But God says that He is not coming to comfort us, but to confront us. God came to challenge Jacob, and to wrestle with him (Genesis 32:24). Jacob’s first reaction was, no doubt, “Oh, no, not You too!”

Everybody is wrestling me.
My wife is wrestling with me.
My children are wrestling with me.
My boss is wrestling with me.
My creditors are wrestling with me.
My co-workers are wrestling with me.
My church is wrestling with me.
My own mind is a wrestling match.
And now, You, too, God?

The Bible says that the wounds of a friend are faithful (Proverbs 27:6). A true friend is one who “wounds” you for a good reason. What he says may hurt you, but in the end, it helps you. What he does may seem painful to you, but in the end, you’ll thank him for doing it because it was for your own good.

A good friend doesn’t agree with you all the time. No matter how brutally you object, a good friend will stand right up in your face and say “You’re still wrong.”

You don’t have real help until you have someone who will confront you about what needs to be changed in your life. That’s why I feel strongly about Men of Steel. We each need other men to stand up to us, and to force us to face our sin, to confront us about our lies, to make us uncomfortable about our bad habits, to move us away from mediocrity, to challenge us toward excellence. I value your participation each Saturday! I pray that each of us will find another man in whom we can invest our lives, and that someone else will seek to invest their life in us.

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The Value of Listening

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Scott Chafee

According to John Maxwell, these are the benefits of listening to others:

Listening shows respect: It’s a mistake to try to impress others, trying to appear smart, witty or entertaining to the other person. If you want to impress others, focus on what they have to offer! Be impressed and interested rather than impressive and interesting.
Listening builds relationships: Dale Carnegie wrote that you can make more friends in two weeks by listening to people than you can in two years trying to get people interested in you (in How to Win Friends and Influence People). David Schwartz, in the Magic of Thinking Big, wrote that big people monopolize the listening while small people monopolize the talking.
Listening increases knowledge: It’s amazing how much you can learn by listening to others. Beware of thinking you have all the answers and being the expert. Continue growing and learning. None of us has arrived. Many people in authority begin to listen less and less.
Listening generates ideas: people love to contribute to the process, and have their leaders share the credit for ideas. Even if an idea doesn’t work, it might encourage other brainstorming ideas that will work.
Listening builds loyalty: if you don’t make it a practice to listen to people, they will find someone else who will: employees, spouses, children, friends, colleagues. Good listening will draw people toward you.

How to develop good listening habits:

Look at the speaker: you know how it works, undivided attention; don’t shuffle papers, type on the computer, watch TV, do the dishes, focus on the person.
Don’t interrupt: interruption shows disrespect. People generally interrupt because, 1) they don’t place value on what the other person has to say, 2) they want to impress others by showing how smart they are, or 3) they are too excited about the conversation to allow the other person to finish talking. Check your motives.
Focus on understanding: universities have studied information retention and we tend to forget 50% of what we hear, and retain only 25% the next day. Increase in understanding helps retention. It’s more than just hearing the words.
Determine the need at the moment: men want to fix things, so the need at the moment is resolution. Women tend to want to share information and discuss things.
Check your emotions: don’t make the unsuspecting person a recipient of your unvented emotions.
Suspend your judgment: you can’t jump to conclusions and be a good listener at the same time. Wait to hear the whole story.
Sum up at major intervals: comment on what you hear by summing up what you have heard. If you truly understand the situation, the person will let you know. If you don’t understand, this allows opportunity to get it right. Summarize one idea before going on to the next.
Ask questions for clarity: top reporters are great at asking questions to get to the bottom of the story. They focus on understanding, suspend judgment and sum up what the person has to say.
Make listening your priority: no matter how busy you are, this practice of listening is essential.

Good suggestions for effective leadership at home and the office!

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How Can I Encourage Others?

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Scott Chafee

Believing in people before they have proved themselves is the key to motivating people to reach their potential. Everyone loves encouragement; to have others believe the best about you and your abilities.

Here are four facts about having faith in another person:

Most people don’t have faith in themselves. Many believe they will fail; the light at the end of the tunnel is a train. With even a little faith, anyone can do remarkable things.
Most people don’t have someone who has faith in them. People today are isolated; they don’t get support at home or from their boss. Ninety percent of inmates where told they will never amount to anything and will end up in jail. Even those closest to them do not believe in them.
Most people can tell when someone else has faith in them. Our goal should not be to get people to think more highly of us, but to get others to think more highly of themselves. People can tell when we genuinely trust and believe in another person.
Most people will do anything to live up to your faith in them. People will rise or fall to the level of expectation you set for them. If you express skepticism and doubt, they will return your lack of confidence with mediocrity. People thrive around those who have confidence in them.

How can you become a believer in people? We must believe in them and express that belief!

Believe in them before they succeed. Everyone loves a winner, so it’s tough to believe in someone before they have proven themselves. Every person has seeds of greatness within them, so when you believe in someone you allow those seeds to grow.
Emphasize their strengths. Leaders don’t have to exercise their authority and point out the deficiencies of others. Motivate others to see their potential and to focus on their strengths. Give others the power to succeed. Praise them publicly and privately for a job well done.
List their past successes. Knowing their strengths may not be enough, so listing past successes reminds them of their potential. King David looked back on his successes and had confidence in the future (1 Samuel 17:33-37).
Instill confidence when they fail. When people fail they have two choices: give in or go on. Some people are resilient and can get going, others are not that determined. Give them a push and inspire confidence. We can share our own failures to build their confidence, too. Success is a journey, not a destination. Babe Ruth said that we should never let the fear of striking out get in the way.
Experience some wins together. If you have the will to win, you’re halfway to success, if not, you’re halfway to failure. Work with people and allow them to experience smaller victories. Then hand over more difficult challenges.
Visualize their future success. A person can live 40 days without food, four days without water, four minutes without air, but only four seconds without hope. When you cast a vision, you paint a picture of their success.
Expect a new level of living. We all live under the same sky but we all don’t see the same horizon. Have faith in people, dream big dreams, and expand horizons. Putting faith in others involves risk.

This is a continuation of REAL Leadership, material from John Maxwell’s Leadership 101.

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REAL Leadership

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Scott Chafee

This week I had been approached about the possibility of doing a series on leadership. There are certainly plenty of resources available so I thought we’d take a look at the top leadership guy, John Maxwell. I went to a REAL Leadership conference years ago and thought some of the things learned would benefit the Men of Steel in their professional lives as well as their families.

REAL stands for Relationships, Equipping, Attitudes and Leadership. Let’s take a look at Relationships:

Why are relationships important? They are the glue that holds team members together. Solid relationships are built upon mutual respect (you can’t make someone feel important if he secretly feels like a nobody), shared experiences (you can’t be relational with someone you don’t know), trust (as you respect people and spend time with them, trust develops), reciprocity (one-sided relationships don’t really last) and mutual enjoyment (as relationships grow, people begin to enjoy one another).

What do we need to know about others? People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I generally agreed with this statement until my friend Craig (an anatomy professor at the medical school in Norfolk) said “until you’re looking for a surgeon.” Great point!

Why do people fail to understand others? Fear (fear can be in most work environments, we must give others the benefit of the doubt and replace fear with understanding), Self-centeredness (this is natural for people, so try to see from the other person’s perspective), failure to appreciate differences (a team is no good if they all have the same skills, we need people who have talents that we don’t have), failure to acknowledge similarities (put yourself in the other person’s shoe and ask how you’d handle the situation).

Things everyone needs to understand about people.

Everybody wants to be somebody. We want to be regarded by others, to do something significant. Treat people as if they are important.
Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. People are your greatest asset, so love them, do good, be honest, help them, if better is possible, to do good is not enough.
Everybody needs somebody. Contrary to popular opinion, there are no self-made men or women Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. Give honor to those who helped you get where you are today.
Everybody can be somebody when somebody understands and believes in them. Go out of your way to make people feel special. Invest in them. Everyone has the potential to become important in the lives of others.
Anybody who helps somebody has the potential in influence a lot of bodies. You can impact a lot of people! The nature of influence seems to multiply.

Choose this day that you will seek to understand others. How will this impact your marriage, your family, your work environment? Next time I’ll write about the building blocks of relationships.

Refuse to be a Target

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Scott Chafee

The Men of Steel looked into this topic; how often do we wrestle with God?

Men, if we don’t confront our frailty and capacity for sin, we will always have a target on our back, just ripe for the enemy to shoot his flaming arrows into and make us fall – Ephesians 6:16. Beware guys; this is another depressing post about being on your guard against the enemy. This is part three of the wrestling match series.

I read a great book years ago called, Ordering Your Private World. Years later the same author wrote another book called, Rebuilding Your Broken World. The basis for the first book was to help Christians order their lives in such a way that they live on purpose and for God. The second book was written after the restoration process the author went through due to a moral failure. He mentions the one thing he could never see himself doing was committing adultery… and that’s what took him down. A prominent pastor and author did not see himself as vulnerable to the enemy’s attack.

We need to admit to ourselves that we are vulnerable. There’s something in every man of steel that acts like kryptonite, which has a sole purpose of bringing each of us down. If you don’t believe that you can commit a certain sin, you remain vulnerable to it. Why? Because if we are so sure we will never do it, we never set up safeguards against it. Without safeguards, you are vulnerable to any sin.

You never thought you could get that angry.
You never thought you could get that aggressive.
You never thought you could have an affair.
You never thought you could be that weak.
You never thought you could be addicted to porn.
You never thought you could be an alcoholic.
You never thought you could leave your family.
You never thought you could be that hurtful.

For many men, they never thought they could… so they did. You’ve got to look square in the mirror and say to yourself, “I could commit every sin.” Whatever your problem may be, there’s always a problem behind your problem, and the Bible calls that problem sin.

What is it that makes a 40 year old married man try to act like he’s 20 and single?
What makes a man try to drown his trouble in alcohol or illegal drugs?
Why does a man need to prove himself by doing daredevil stunts?

It’s called our sin nature! This is the part of you that wants to do the bad stuff rather than what is right. When we accept Christ, this old nature is trying to fight back for control in your life. But it is this sin nature that is supposed to be put to death while we are made alive in Christ – Galatians 2:20. If we continue to sin, it shows where our loyalties really lie – 1 John 3:8.

If you’ve messed up… forgiveness is ready for all who submit to Christ, putting their faith in Him and allowing His Spirit to help us to repent of our sin. It’s a conscious effort to repent, which is to turn from sin and turn toward God. Remember that He is ready and able to forgive – 1 John 1:9. Restoration of relationships takes more time, because while we are forgiven for our past sin, the consequence of our sin may remain for a long time.

I’m glad that you are a part of the Men of Steel. It shows a commitment to being the best man that you can be, for God’s sake, for your wife’s sake and your kids’ sake.

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God Sparing Your Life

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Scott Chafee

The Men of Steel looked into this topic; how often do we wrestle with God?

Years ago at a youth conference (anybody remember Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts?), anyway, I saw a “campaign” button that read, “PBPWMGINFWMY.” Confused? It stood for, “Please be patient with me, God is not finished with me yet.” Men today need to listen to that advice. We want to be fixed, and want God to do it now. But the problem is that it has taken so long to develop the habits that have made us as “lame” as we are that it is going to take a whole lot of time to undo what we have built and start fresh on a new foundation.

Men, none of us has arrived. There is always more work to be done, more home improvement that can be accomplished, more areas in life that could be made better… don’t think so? Let’s go visit your wife! She will likely come up with a bulleted list, or pull out the hidden list she has been working on since you came back from the honeymoon!

God needs to work on each one of us. That should not surprise any man when he takes an honest look at himself… desiring to be the best husband and father he can be for his family’s sake. With all the mistakes of life, we should be grateful that God has kept us alive long enough so He can continue to work on us, in us and sometimes in spite of us. I’m personally grateful for what He has poured into me over the years.

Perhaps you can see God’s hand on your life. He’s brought you through some events in life that made you wonder why He ever saved you? Maybe at some point you were driving home drunk, just an accident waiting to happen… maybe you were arguing with your wife, just on the verge of getting physical… maybe you were friendly with a woman at the office and the flirtatious invitation to get a bite to eat after work was a bit too tempting. God was there, even when you did not realize it.

Some men are grieving over having already fallen, but remember God was still here, ready to forgive and help you get back on the right path. He continues to have you in His grasp. Pray as we have been directed in the Bible, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13).

If God had not been merciful to us when we were sinners, we’d all be dead! Some men have been through so much that they are amazed that they are still alive. Other men would have self-destructed much earlier. Some men get depressed too easily. Others become discouraged too easily. A few become suicidal too easily. Men need to reach deep inside to find their inner Rambo! Put on your camouflage face paint, tie a bandana around your forehead, and grit your hunting knife in your teeth… it’s time to fight! Fight the enemy whose sole purpose is to see you fall. Seeking biblical support for all this fighting? Check out 1 Timothy 6:12, and 2 Timothy 2:3-4.

I am reminded of another man, in the Bible, whose life was spared… the wrestler, Jacob (Genesis 32:30). This is the story where Jacob wrestled with “God” all night, and he eventually dislocated his hip in the process. Jacob came away with a limp, but he also came away a changed man; this event had a spiritual impact on his life. The point is that Jacob needed God. His name meant “deceiver” or “swindler” and he lived up to it. His brother was out to kill him for his treachery. But God was not finished with Jacob yet. His name is changed to Israel, which is the name that is echoed throughout the Old Testament, representing the people to God, specifically the twelve tribe of Israel.

Are you ready to rumble? God has brought you this far for a purpose. He wants to spare your life, if only we will submit to Him. How often have you found yourself wrestling against God, and after it was all over you were amazed that your life was spared? Change may not come quickly, but hang in there; God is not finished with you yet.

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