The 5 Masculine Instincts

1 Timothy 4:16 KJV (WS)

16 Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.

The Real Work Ahead

Introduction

Ernest Gordon was captured with a group of British officers as they attempted to escape from Singapore on a fishing boat.

He was placed with the others in one of the harshest Japanese work camps.

He and the other prisoners were the ones tasked with building the Burma railroad.

The men were regularly beaten, starved, and tortured both physically and psychologically.

He later wrote, “As conditions worsened, as starvation, exhaustion, and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived became poisoned by selfishness, hate, and fear. We were slipping rapidly down the slope of degradation.”

He said, “Existence became so miserable, the odds so heavy against survival, that, to most of the prisoners, nothing mattered except to survive.”

We love to hear how men, pressed to the edge of existence battle nature and enemy to defeat the seemingly inevitable.

Gordon’s picture of survival is more honest.

Surviving became animalistic.

“Everyone was his own keeper. It was free enterprise at its worst, with all the restraints of morality gone.

Morality was abandoned as each man lived only by the instinct to survive.

Miraculously, Gordon got saved in these godless conditions.

Many of the men did.

Stories began to spread of a different kind of defiance.

“There was a movement, a stirring in our midst, a presence.”

Gordon tells his story in his book, “Through the valley of the Kwai.”

In one episode he says, “The men were returning from work one day. As usual, they were made to stand at attention until their supplies were inventoried. One shovel turned up missing.”

The Japanese officer became irate, demanding to know who had stolen the shovel.

No one would confess to the crime.

The officer threatened to kill the entire work detail.

Finally, a single man stepped forward.

The officer rushed to the man and brought the butt of his rifle down on the man’s head.

He fell lifeless to the ground.

As the rest of the men were dismissed, word came that there had been a miscount, there was no missing shovel.

What allowed this man to overcome even the instinct to survive for the sake of something beyond himself?

Why would he die for men who would have happily picked his pockets to save themselves?

What this study is really about.

The challenge to rise above our own self-interests; to mature into something more than just your instincts is a challenge.

The willingness to live beyond yourself doesn’t simply appear when you are pressed against the fence.

Without having matured to recognize your instincts and how to counterbalance them by faith, you will act by their logic and remain trapped by their demands.

Sarcasm will leave you immature and constantly offended.

Adventure will leave you restless and ripe for betrayal.

Ambition will leave you exhausted in your demand for more and its endless blaming of others.

Reputation will hollow out your soul and leave your façade vulnerable to collapse.

Apathy will lead you to disengagement as life is drained away.

You cannot wait for the pressure to develop some maturity; the work must begin now.

“He that will be a hero, will barely be a man. He that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.”

Few things are more rewarding than learning to discover a world beyond your instincts.

A world of Christ’s better way.

This study is about more than the 5 instincts of masculinity.

It’s about the process.

It’s been about challenging all of us to think more deeply about our lives.

It’s been about acquiring the character necessary to counterbalance our instincts with the truth of the gospel.

We must heed Paul’s words to Timothy.

1 Timothy 4:16 “16 Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.”

Watch your life.

Honest self-knowledge may be the most lacking bit of information in our supposed age of information.

We have become less and less articulate regarding the things within us.

Though we would like to blame social media or video games or streaming, none of these are truly to blame for the impulse to ignore self-evaluation.

Sinful men have long been prone to ignore the things that they would rather not know.

We must learn to take heed to ourselves.

We must be cautious in this endeavor, as well.

The pursuit of self-knowledge can easily become an obsession.

Self-obsession usually leads to two outcomes.

You become like Narcissus and you fall in love with your own reflection.

You become obsessed with taking your spiritual temperature.

You get stuck in an endless loop of your own abilities.

Eventually, you will give up and go back to ignoring what you seem incapable of overcoming.

Self-knowledge isn’t enough.

It will either inflate you with pride.

Or, it will deflate you with guilt.

C.S. Lewis warned us about men who motivated maturity this way.

He warned about appealing to a boy’s pride, or as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently.

Many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is by pride.

It is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and family since the world began.

What we really need is something bigger than ourselves.

We need enough self-knowledge to get us searching for something better than ourselves.

We need not advice but news.

Good news.

News of what has already been done for us.

Watch the teaching.

Timothy needed to take heed unto himself, but also to the teaching he had received.

Paul is not referring to Timothy’s ability to share doctrine.

He is referring to the actual teaching he had received.

The message of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and return.

Paying attention to your life needs to be offset by equal attention to what God has done and is doing.

My life makes the most sense when it is set into the context of His salvation.

Only through a growing knowledge and application of the gospel are we able to know ourselves.

By knowing ourselves we come to appreciate the remarkable power and grace of what God has done for us.

As Paul says in Romans 1:16 “16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”

The gospel invites us into a bigger and better world.

Just as you can lose your way with watching your life, you can also lose your sense of the gospel’s power.

Do you remember the conflict between Peter and Paul in the book of Acts?

Peter had come to visit the church in Antioch.

He had stepped out of the traditional Jewish boundaries and was sharing meals with gentiles.

Paul was also in Antioch eating and worshipping with gentile believers.

Both men understood that the gospel was reshaping these boundaries.

But, when prominent men from Jerusalem came to visit, Peter began to draw back from his gentile relationships.

Paul was furious.

Galatians 2:11–14 KJV (WS)

11 But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. 12 For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. 13 And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation. 14 But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?

Paul could have accused him of racism; instead he accused him of wandering away from the gospel.

Paul had to encourage Peter to take heed unto the teachings.

It is always these two steps working together.

Self-knowledge. Gospel-knowledge.

They keep us moving in the right direction.

Through honest reflection, we recognize vulnerability or insufficiency in ourselves.

So, we turn to the gospel to find correction.

Lose the gospel and everything turns inside out.

Chesterton said “It is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.

The gospel serves as a corrective force to each of the instincts we have looked at.

It is the gospel that gives you the security to embrace a self-suspicion necessary to overcome sarcasm and immaturity.

…that offers you a better adventure through deeper commitments and discernment.

....checks your ambition and teaches you to receive what you can’t achieve by learning to rest.

…exposes your pretending and teaches you the value of integrity.

…keeps you engaged with this story of sacrifice, rescuing you from your own apathy and pulling you back into a life of faith.

An infusion of character.

This is what it means to be a man.

This is what it means to experience the fullest of God’s created intent.

You must learn to know yourself.

You must learn to know the gospel.

Nothing Left to Prove

Introduction

Jesus once told the story of a land owner who came to pluck figs from a tree in his vineyard.

He was frustrated to discover that it still had not produced any fruit.

Luke 13:7 “7 Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?”

Fig trees are notoriously slow to produce fruit.

It can take up to 6 years.

Perhaps the owner had waited 3 years beyond that expected coming of age.

Pruning, watering, weeding, and waiting.

By his evaluation, it was time to move on.

The gardener responded, Luke 13:8 “8 And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it:”

That was the end of Jesus’ story.

A parable about spreading manure on a fruitless tree.

We are never told what came of it.

Did the tree ever produce fruit?

That answer was not Jesus’ point.

In a world ready to cut it down, Jesus’ parable speaks “let it alone.”

Jesus saw the potential that others missed.

The servant in Jesus’ parable was patient but not passive.

He spread the manure.

There is nothing exciting about manure.

It stinks.

It works.

D.H. Lawerence “The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”

But we want things now.

Lay hands on that barren tree, and let’s pray in a miraculous budding of figs this year.

I’m sure you’ve been frustrated by seasons of limited fruit in your life.

It’s going to take more than this series to change who you are.

By God’s grace, there is change.

Sometimes spontaneous and miraculous.

Much of the time change is painstakingly slow and nonobvious.

We may not like it but waiting is so often the way Jesus works.

Waiting is always the way that fruit is grown.

Jesus identifies himself with manure.

It is the gospel.

A compost of death to produce new life.

The death of Christ is the fertilizer by which new life emerges.

We spend our days raking more of that good news around the trunk of our lives and waiting to see what it produces.

Manhood is like that fruit.

The by-product of growing in Christ is character.

It is becoming the man that God created you to be.

Like that fig tree, we can’t do much more than enrich the soil and trust that it will work.

Nothing to prove.

Your job is not to convince yourself or anyone else that you are a man.

Stop worrying about it so much.

The fruit will come with time.

Enjoy it as it does.

The work lies elsewhere.

The man that you’ve been searching for is not yourself, it’s Christ.

2 Peter 1:3 “3 According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:”

All of the men that I respect don’t seem to care that much about proving it.

They don’t seem all that concerned about making sure others see it in them either.

They are quiet and secure.

They possess something that can’t ever really be proven anyway.

When we understand biblical manhood, we will find that it is something far better than what we thought we needed.

One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.