Thinking Christian about Manhood: A Conversation with Vince Miller

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I am here with Vince Miller. He's my guest today. He's the author of 31 books. He's been in ministry for 29 years. He's a speaker. He's an author. And he focuses on men's ministry. And so today, what we're going to be talking about is his new book, Essential Elements, Forging Godly Men, but also just what it means to be a godly man in general and diving into that topic as much as we can over the next 45 minutes or an hour. So, Vince, welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks for coming on. Well, thanks for having me. And, man, you have the best voice for a thinking Christian podcast, brother. I mean, this is great. I appreciate it. Yeah, I always tell people I've had this since I was like seventh or eighth grade. So if you can imagine a little kid with this coming out of their face, that's... That is... Did they call you Dr. J back then, too? I mean... I did not get a lot of Dr. J's, but in college, I got a lot of love doctor, you know, that was the... Yeah, I had the Barry White thing going on there. So, yeah. Well, you could do Thinking Christian love, too. I mean... I could, yeah. Next podcast, next podcast. Yeah, there you go. So, Vince, tell me, I mean, this is the first time we're meeting. We had a little bit of pre-interview kind of casual conversation, but tell me a little bit about yourself. How'd you get started in ministry and maybe men's ministry in particular? Yeah, so it really begins with my childhood. I think that's where a lot of our stories begin. I was raised in a non-Christian family and my grandfather came along, who was a Christian man, and implored my mother to allow me to come live with him. So I moved into his house when I was a teenage boy. And it was right then that I was exposed to Christian parenting, discipleship, Christian direction, and for five years of my life while my grandfather invested in me during basically the last years of his life and the beginning of my spiritual life. He just poured into me and his relationship and love and example of Jesus Christ is what led me right into ministry. I was desperately searching for a father, for love, and he modeled that to me, but I came to discover it wasn't just his love, it was his father's love, who we know as our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And I came to discover through my grandfather and a lot of conversations that there was a reason that he loved me and took me in the way he did. It was because of this man named Jesus. And it was really that that drew me to ministry. So it's been about 30 years since the event of that moment, since I gave my life to Jesus Christ and I just felt compelled to share the message that my grandfather shared with me with other men, young men, grandfathers, fathers, husbands, etc., so that they might know that there's a father out there who loves them and that father is the father of all creation, our Lord, who wants us to be a child of His and follow Him all the days of our lives. So that's a little of my story. I do have one wife and three grown children. I have one grandchild and I just call speaking and writing my ministry. Yeah. You know, I mean, you've been at this for a long time and I'm assuming that that sort of central message of fatherhood and wanting to have, you know, our Lord and Savior as our father is pretty consistent across those 30 years. But what else has changed? What have you seen sort of shift and change within men's ministry over that time? Yeah, there's a lot that has changed in the last three decades when it comes to just ministry, how we think about ministry, how we do ministry. I think, obviously, on this particular topic, manhood and our search for understanding manhood is more difficult today than ever before for several reasons, obviously, with the rise of social media. You know, we have instant communication that's bombarding us with all these amplified voices that I believe promote conflicting ideas about masculinity. I believe the decline of strong male role models in families, workplaces, communities, even the church has complicated that challenge. I believe that there's a lot of young men like me out there without those role models who are hungry and desperate for those things. There's a lot of other a lot of other peripheral issues, obviously, as well. I mean, I'm sure you've encountered these on your podcast, but there's a lot of these other peripheral issues at play into all this. But I think those are two big issues that are before us today when we talk about manhood or masculinity. It's interesting because when I've thought about discipleship, one of the things I usually start out with when I talk about discipleship is that you're going to be discipled by someone. And so if the church isn't doing it, if it is not Christian discipleship, it's going to be some other form of discipleship. And what I hear you saying is that you have something very similar with that from a godly man sort of standpoint in the absence of these godly role models of people who are really shepherding young men into godly manhood. Now, what we have is a proliferation of options for them to glob onto. They can find someone that is maybe living a lifestyle that seems attractive to them initially, and they can follow after that person and really take up their characteristics. And so there's more room, more opportunity, maybe for imitation. Whereas previously, I mean, I grew up, I'm an Xer, so I grew up without the Internet, you know, it's like the men you saw were the men in your hometown, right? You might see, you know, Stallone in the movies or something like that, right? But, you know, those images of manhood were not as diverse and not as easily accessible as they are today. Is that a fair way of putting it? Yeah, I, since we're on a thinking Christian podcast and we're trying to think about how to find our way through it, I tend to categorize it. So I'm going to say I agree with you, but let me say how I agree with you. You know, to me, masculinity is predominantly a social construct. Manhood is a biblical construct. And let me play this out very simply and logically, which I think your listeners would love. If you want to understand something that's created, you go back to the creator to understand that thing, right? Like if you want to understand a watch, you go back to the creator of that watch to understand the thing created. It's very basic, simple logic. If you want to understand man then, the appropriate response is not to go to the social construct of manhood or masculinity. The appropriate response is you go back to the creator of that man. And that creator was God, as declared by the Bible. And he had a purpose and intent for man. Man chose not to live by his design or intent or by his purpose. Therefore, that's why we got into this problem in the first place is we have social constructs because we have followed our own way, right? So we can choose to follow the ways of the world, but they don't lead to fulfillment. In fact, they point us to the one thing that's true about all of us. We are sinful and broken. In fact, the Bible is very clear about that, that all humanity is sinful and broken. And, of course, I believe that the Bible gives us depictions of this all the way through the Old Testament, that there's these hopeful images of what a man should look like, but every one of them has a fault. Every one of the heroes of our faith had some sort of human failing or depravity. And that is, I believe, until God got mildly irritated with us and provided his own man. And that man was Jesus Christ. He is the prototype of men. And he came living as men should live, the perfect man. Not only that, he died and rose again so that we might have life as men, remaking us into the men that we were designed to be back in Genesis, in the beginning chapters of Genesis. So if we run with a biblical construct on how we think about manhood, we will turn back to that God who remakes men. But, you know, man, like you said, society is full of constructs of masculinity. You can chase after them, but they are going to be the most unfulfilling way to ever live your life. And that's what I learned from my grandfather one day, is I learned that there's one way. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And now...

You're finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide, or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. ...to live life, and that's the way of man. And then there's another way to live life, and that is to follow the man. And so that's what I discovered, and that's the way I live my life today. And that's what I'm trying to do for other men is to show them that path to the man so they become the men that God designed them to be. That's a really helpful distinction, I think, between manhood and masculinity. I like that. I mean, I agree with you. I think we have to go back to the beginning and understand that part of being a human, but also part of being a man, is being dependent and in relationship with God. And so we weren't built to be autonomous ever. We were always built to be dependent upon God. And so that dependence should have brought forth obedience instead of brought forth rebellion, and we pay for that every day in subtle and not so subtle ways, right? Very interesting. How do you... So in your book, you're talking about these essential elements, right? What are some of those essential elements for manhood when you take people back and you say, okay, let's follow Jesus. What does that look like? Specifically for men, I think, because Jesus is sort of a model for all humanity, but then also he was male. And so you've got this interesting sort of teasing out, I assume, that you have to do to say, nope, this is the model for everybody. This is the model for men. You know what I mean? Like, how do you go about teasing some of those things out? Yeah, that's good. You know, I think one of the failings we have when we approach this particular question or an answer to this question is we think that Jesus is the ultimate model for authentic masculinity. We even call it that. But he's far more than that, isn't he? You know, we capture these little images or these icons of who Jesus is and we call that a depiction of masculinity. And it misses the point, doesn't it? I mean, you know, Jesus is more. Yeah, it seems to. You know, or like, for example, I think a lot of people, Aristotle did stuff like this. We we grab for character attributes or virtues, right? And we claim that those virtues are what make a man. And then we do the same with Jesus. We grab on to all these different virtues that he has, hoping that they'll make us some form of man. But Jesus didn't come preaching life built on virtue. Because, man, we tried that and failed that miserably. He came preaching a very different message. And you could also grab a hold of, you know, Jesus was a man. And yet displayed, like, you know, emotional depth and vulnerability. And we can grab onto those too, his emotional intelligence. Grab onto those. But, you know, Jesus, bottom line of Jesus is he's, he's the Savior. He saved us from sin and every attempted virtue we could and could not make. Every vulnerability that we have and don't know that we don't have, you know, every issue that we have emotionally, he saves and rescues us from that because he becomes, he becomes the, just the sacrifice for our sin. And in him, that's where we see the beauty of this model. He lives perfectly what God hoped man would be. He is the sacrificial offering for all humanity on the cross for our sin so that we might have what a restored relationship with God. And so in my understanding of the gospel, at least how I talk about it in essential elements is Jesus is the story of the gospel driving us back into a relationship with the, with the father where we can find all our resources. And Jesus tells one very specific story that makes this very, very clear. It's a story of the prodigal sons, right? Where here's the father, he's, he's the resource for all things, whether you're going to reject the father by self-centeredness or self-righteousness, he is there with all the resources you ever need for your identity. You can't find your identity through, you know, self-centeredness or self-righteousness. You can only find your identity as a man of God through the father. And that means that it's not about you being the perfect son. It's about you finding the savior who offers his life for you so that you can become a son of the father through Jesus Christ. And if we could, if we can grab a hold of that and see it, it's not about character attributes or qualities or virtues, man, that that's the beauty in what Jesus did. It's beyond all that. It deals with the core of our identity and brokenness as men. I like that. I mean, I think I was just reading an article this past weekend on the image of God and it's ties to sonship or kinship in some way. And I think a lot of times we, we get caught up in, well, the image of God is about us having rationality or it's about us having an interior life or even it's about, you know, us being co-regents, vice-regents. All of those are probably elements of this, but I think that the concept of that filial relationship, that childhood, you know, we are children of God. That aspect of it is just so crucial that we not lose because it's essential to what it means to be God's image. And if we're going to be made in his image and in his likeness, that ultimately entails that we are his children. And then everything we do sort of post that revelation that we are his children really derives from being his children in the first place, that we are now displaying his image and his likeness. Yeah. Yeah. Let me respond to that because what you're saying is exactly where I head in this particular book, but I had this, I had this big awakening as a father. And I, you know, I was married young. Me and my wife were married young. We had children when we were young. And I, I was always concerned as someone who had come from a fatherless home, that I would end up being a bad father. So I became very consumed with trying to figure out how to be the perfect husband, how to be the perfect father. And there's plenty of books out there on how to be a great husband, how to be a great father. And they all have these tactics to them. But let me, let me just relieve all men listening today that there's a better way to think about this whole thing. So one day as I was reading, obviously Ephesians, the Bible is reading Ephesians one, a number of other texts too. I came to discover that there is really only one father of all mankind. I may play the role temporarily in this life as a husband and a father and maybe a grandfather and great grandfather, et cetera, et cetera. But my identity first comes from being adopted. Ephesians one, as a child of the father. And if I could embrace that identity that I'm first the son, then it puts everything in its right place. But get this, it even gets better because if I start in my family, so I have a wife and three children and one grandchild in my family, in my family, if I start to look at my family as my brothers and sisters in Christ, as I should, based upon Jesus's teaching, here are my mothers. Here's, here's my mother and brother, right? Exactly what Jesus said. Here's my family, right? They're not waiting outside the house. They're right here with me. If I can understand my spiritual family as my first family in relationship to the father, then I start to realize that it's not a beat about me being the perfect husband or the perfect father. It's about pointing my family to the one who is the perfect husband and the perfect father. It also relieves me of a lot of obligations that I put on myself unduly that I'm not trying to fulfill. Now don't take that too far when you think about my wife as my sister, right? But there is a beauty and understanding that it's my responsibility to

drive her to the father like I'm supposed to drive myself to the father, like I'm supposed to drive my son to my father, my daughter to the father. And it drives them to a perfect father. And as I am leading them there, then I can allow my imperfections and my failings to kind of come out without this sense of insecurity around them, thinking I got to be the perfect father or the perfect husband because I'm driving them to the one who is perfect. And guess what? That draws them to God and him, which is what I'm supposed to be doing in the first place, driving them to the father. And it drives them toward interdependence on him in a very beautiful way and relieves me of the obligation of thinking that I've got to be perfect in any way. If we could live our life with that kind of thought process, that worldview, as we're thinking Christian, man, think of it. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. The absolution of that and the joy of being able to do that. You know, it's really I'm really happy to hear you say that. I mean, I think it's one of the things that I emphasize is Christians are not responsible for fixing the broken world. We're responsible for living faithfully in a world so broken only God can fix it. And I think what I'm hearing is a resonance in the realm of fatherhood to say, look, my responsibility is not to be the greatest father ever. My responsibility is to live faithfully before the greatest father ever in order that my family can respond to him, not necessarily to me. Like, we want to point beyond ourselves. And it feels like to me a lot of the times when we get into these conversations about manhood, what it means to be a man, we are the focus, right? Like, we're the ones who need to be something different. We're the ones who have to pick up these characteristics. And we're trying to shape ourselves into something culturally, maybe, that is impressive, whether it's, you know, the more success oriented sort of prosperity kind of ideas or whether it's the, even the servant leader, humility kind of, oh no, I'm a touchy feely kind of guy. You know, I'm in touch with my emotions, those kinds of things. Either one of those poles is shadows of the truth as opposed to actually being the truth. And so I'm interested to hear you maybe talk through, how do you think about, you mentioned the virtues, you mentioned about cultivating the virtues. I'm assuming you're not opposed to cultivating virtues, but that that cultivation is not an end in and of itself. It's something that maybe happens along the way. Is that a, am I reading you right there? Yeah, I think that's very fair. I tend to look at character attributes, virtues, qualities, kind of the aspirations of even wanting to be a leader and being a great father as tools, not as the end. You know, if we, we can turn, humans can turn, not just men, but humans can turn anything into an idol. We can pervert an idea in scripture and use it for our own means to accomplish something selfish. And this is why I love the ingenuity of some of the parables of Jesus. Specifically, let's just come back to the parable of the prodigal sons. You know, the older son in the story was just as perverted in his thinking about the father. Of course, we understand this because, you know, there's a younger son who comes back and threatens his inheritance because the father reinstates his identity and his sonship. And of course, the older son has to be upset about this because of what the father did, because it would obviously threaten his inheritance too. But what the older son fails to understand is that this father is the father. He has endless riches. There's no end to his riches if we really understand that that father is God. Therefore, this younger son coming home doesn't threaten his riches. But what it does threaten is the way that he has thought about his life and what he has thought is that he can gain his inheritance by means of self-righteous action, by being the perfect child, having the perfect virtue, doing the perfect thing, having the perfect character. He can, by that means, gain his wealth and riches. But you see how we do that? We can do it by self-centered, but we can do it by self-righteousness. And I think Christians, especially devout Christians, studious Christians, can be very, very guilty of this because we use these things in the wrong way. How I tend to talk about character and virtue, even, I would say, basic steps of the faith, like basic disciplines, like just take prayer, Scripture, worship, etc., right? All those activities are merely means to draw us into a relationship with God the Father. They're not means of righteousness, necessarily, because Jesus is the means of our righteousness. They are tools that we use to draw in closer to God that sometimes we can turn into idols. It's why some people worship the Bible. You know, worship the Bible. We call that bibliolatry. It's why some people worship, you know, character virtues in their life. You know, we call that self-works-based righteousness. You know, we have names for all these things because we have turned the tool into the means and we've got to, we really need to push back on that, that desire, that urge within our own hearts, that desire to have more because, you know, these desires and urges that we have within our heart when we move from, we move from our own self-centeredness into a new life of righteousness, we can easily slip into self-righteousness if we're not careful, utilizing and misusing the tools that God has given us to grow in our relationship with Christ. And it's wonderful to have character. It's wonderful to have virtue. It's wonderful to see spiritual fruit in our life. But when we fail to see that that fruit is a manifestation of God's trunk and the roots of his life, then we fail to see the beauty and the joy of living out the spiritual life. So how do you counsel men to develop those? I think this is one of the things that I've always struggled with. I understand it in a way very similar to you that you do. You know, I don't think, one of the analogies I usually use is I was a personal trainer for five years while I was working through my MDiv. And so, you know, there's a temptation to think about it like personal training, right? You're trying to go into the gym and you want these incremental steps that you're taking and you recognize that you're going to grow stronger as you increase the resistance, as you increase the weight, as you just continue to do it consistently, right? Now, all of a sudden, you're living into something, fitness in this analogy, that is going to have certain benefits to you. You're going to start realizing those benefits. You're just going to start getting stronger. And there's a part of me that looks at that and I say, well, you know, if I'm going to become a more godly man, if I'm going to become a stronger disciple of Jesus Christ, I almost have to go through that similar process. There's going to be a growth curve here. I think the big difference is that it's not always as guided as it might be in the weight room, right? Like I can set out a series of exercises and a series of weights and it can be very well-planned and, you know, you work that program and it goes. From a Christian perspective, when we're growing, we're almost always hit with different odd scenarios that are well outside of our control that now we're having to learn to respond within or we're learning to respond faithfully within those situations. So as you're dealing with men, how do you, how do you mix those? How do you, how do you help them understand that this is an effortful process, but it is not an effortful process alone. It needs to keep that sort of organic feel to it. Okay, that's a super great question. And I hope your listeners appreciate it.

Because this is a careful line, I think, some Christians struggle to understand how to walk, right? So I would always point them to Galatians chapter 5 because Paul really gets into this issue. You know, if you turn back to Romans 7, he actually gets into it there as well. He says, I do the things that I don't want to do, the very things I don't want to do, I do. Therefore, I feel like I do do all the time, you know. So, you know, I think Paul presents this dilemma of like, I have to give effort, but I don't know how to give the new effort so I get the new outcome, right? And I do think it's important to understand how to do a squat in the gym, okay? Like there is an appropriate way to do that. Otherwise, you're going to end up hurting your back, create knee problems, all that kind of stuff. So I see the application in personal training there as well. But it's a different type of effort. So if we turn over to Galatians chapter 5, Paul's going to answer his doo-doo problem back in Romans chapter 7, essentially. So he's going to say something of this nature. He says, but I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. So instantly there, I see that there's a different way to walk. The way we walk is we don't walk in the old way we used to walk, which was by the flesh. Now we walk by the Spirit, but this is not intuitive always for new believers in Christ. In fact, I think some believers just apply the old rhythm of their old life. They become Christians and they think that they get a fresh start on life rather than a whole new life with a new way to walk. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. And I know this is true because Paul wrote the book of Galatians to a group of Judaizers. So this is Jewish Christians who are stuck back in their old religious ways. What they were doing in Galatia, which is some of the first churches that Paul ministered to, if you remember, Iconium, Lystra, etc. This is Paul's first missionary journey. Paul preaches the gospel there to Gentiles. Then these Jewish believers infiltrate these churches and they're starting to apply old rituals from Judaism into Christianity and telling Galatian Christians they need to do these behaviors too. So it'd be like someone walking into your gym and saying, look, you're not doing squats right. You need to do this with squats, right? So Paul's going to attack them and he's going to say, it's ridiculous for you to say that these Gentiles need to be circumcised. And then he's going to actually tell them to go all the way. It would be better if you just cut it all the way off, right? So he's trying to teach them. It's not about circumcision of the flesh. It's about we have to do something inward. And then he lead them to not walking by the commandment of the old. Very specifically, they were taught in the old law to walk by the law. So here in Galatian, Paul says, walk by the Spirit. Boom. This is a worldview changing moment. Talk about thinking Christian. This is a new way to think for everybody, but walk by the Spirit. Well, how do I walk by the Spirit? Well, Paul tells him in Galatian 5, how to walk by the Spirit. There's a new way to walk. Here's the old way that you walk. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, on and on and on he goes. But then he goes, but with the contrast word, the fruit of the Spirit. And we know this fruit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law. So that's not lawlessness. That is a new experience and new produce because fruit is a produce. So all this begins with our desires. It's not something necessarily done in the flesh. It's something done with our intent and our desires. So my encouragement for all believers, men in context specifically, is to not walk in the flesh. It's to walk by the Spirit. It's a new way to walk. And this means to walk by the Spirit that we've got to be in the Scripture where we find an anchor for truth. And then we listen to what God would have for us from the Scripture, adjusting our life to the Spirit and what the Spirit wants from us. The problem is that most people don't do life this way. Most people don't consult God's Word. What they do is consult their feelings, their latest emotion, their will, but not the desire of the Spirit. This is a new way to walk. But if I broke it down real simply into fundamental steps, I would say to a guy or to a gal today who's listening, the simplest way to do it is to wake up today, begin by reading God's Word, ask God, how do you want me to adjust my life to this Word today? And then do that. And then repeat it tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next. And then pretty soon you'll learn a new way to walk. What we tend to do is we tend to think we've got a new lease on life when we became a Christian and we just try to apply principle-based teaching to our life, doing it by our own effort rather than really getting to know the Spirit, which, by the way, is the power of Jesus that raised Him from the dead that lives within us that gives us new urges, new desires, and new intent to live by the will of the Father. And this is awkward because it's not as intuitive, is it, to walk in this new way. So we have to learn how to do it. And you've already hinted at it. The best way to do it is to do it with a group of other believers and learn how to walk this way and to put ourselves in the company of other people who are learning how to do it as well. Great. It's interesting. As you're talking there, my mind went back to another interview I did recently on a gentleman who was writing on the beatific vision. And so this notion, particularly in the Old Testament, but also in the New, it's really throughout Scripture. But I think the Old Testament, there's a more frequent tangibility to it. But this idea that we are to, our desire should be to be in the presence of the Lord. And so we see Jonah going down into the depths and his cry is that he's no longer going to be able to worship with God at the temple. You know, we see Solomon rebuilding the temple and praying that God would come and dwell there. He pleads with God that he would treat this as a place where he would set his name and that when people come, he would listen. And there's this sense that the trajectory of the lives of many of the Old Testament saints was to simply be in the presence of God, that that was the end goal. And it just strikes me that everything you're saying, when we have that as our end goal, it reorients so much of the rest of the way we think. And that, you know, that folks, when they're struggling to say, I mean, I love the point, you know, they just get a reset on life and they start trying to live their life the same way, just with a little different attributes or a little bit different direction. It's like, no, that's not it. Like the whole trajectory has to change. It's a whole new thing that you're doing with new desires. And I think that, so I'm wondering. I'll get to a question. I'm wondering, you know, how do you talk about that goal with people? How do you talk about that reorientation of the trajectory of their lives, which would seem so crucial to even understanding how to walk with the Spirit? Because to do that, it seems to me that there would be not a rejection of any of your own ambitions or interests or whatever, but a surrendering of those and a placing them in secondary place to standing in the presence of God. That's so good because this text again kind of gives us a clue to that, that I think is obvious once you see it, you won't unsee it. So I'm back in Galatians 5 and for anybody following along today, I'm essentially focusing on, I believe it's Galatians 5, 16 through about 26 or so. I think it's the end of the chapter, but here's the image here. So I'm going to go back to my time. I grew up in California, so I'm going to reflect back on my time in California. Our home, my grandfather had a home with fruit trees in the backyard and one of those trees was a grafted in tree. All right.

I don't know if you know what a grafted in tree is, but you can take a, for example, a fruit tree, and you can cut a wound on it and graft in a branch from another fruit tree. So we had a grafted in tree in the backyard with a very thick, healthy trunk, and it grew lemons, it grew oranges, and it grew limes all on one tree. Because all you got to do is take the wound from one branch on one tree, create a wound on the base tree, wrap them together. That's essentially what you do, bind them together, and they will heal, and the nutrient from the roots of that tree moving through that trunk will feed that new fruit. So we had a grafted in fruit tree. Well, I think that's the image in this text here that Paul is painting. He says, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. You know, you understand. And what we tend to do is we tend to say, well, I need to be more loving, or I need to be more joyful, or peaceful. And there's nothing wrong with that, but the focus is not the fruit of the tree. The tree produces fruit, and fruit is a production of something else. The something else is the nutrients that are flowing through the tree, and the nutrients in the case of our life is the Spirit. You see, we can't do this life without God's Spirit. That's why Jesus left it with us. If we were to do this life by our own human ability, we would just fail again and again and again. And I think that's why some people feel stuck in repetitive cycles of sin. It's because they have never learned the power of walking in a Spirit-filled life. They've been given a Spirit, but they don't know how to resource that Spirit because they never learned to walk. They continue to walk in the flesh in a redeemed life. And that is not the way that Paul told us to live. Paul says, reject circumcision. There's no point in circumcision. You could do circumcision all you want. It doesn't make your spirit better, and it's not going to produce the fruit to eternal life. So he says at the end there, I think, you know, if we live by the Spirit, keep in step with the Spirit. But then he says this, and this is the clue. He says, let us not become conceited, provoking one another and envying one another. And what Paul means by this is this. He says there's a very careful line we walk in this life. When we walk by the Spirit in tune with the Spirit that gives us direction by the Scripture, never out of line with Scripture, but in line with it, we will produce a very productive life. Our life will produce all the fruit, like a multi-fruited tree. And our focus is not the fruit on the end of the tree. That's the joy of what God is doing in and through us. So I take the wound of my life, and I graft it into the wound of the trunk of Jesus. Let me ask you a serious question. 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And I allow the Spirit nutrients to flow through me and it begins to produce fruit. Now, if I start to focus on the fruit, I'm going to think that I did the work, but I didn't actually produce that fruit. It was Jesus through me, through the Spirit, that produced that work. Therefore, let me not ever become conceited, provoking and envying one another. In other words, don't let the character or the virtue or the attributes of my life be the focus of my life. They're not. The focus is the Spirit, the power that gives me life. I need to walk by the Spirit because then God's will is accomplished in me and the fruit of my life is seen, but it's not about the fruit. It's about the Spirit that lives in me. If we could learn that very valuable lesson, we would allow our heart to submit fully to that Spirit and we would turn our attention from the fruit to the God that produces the fruit through us and we would end up giving him the glory, not stealing it for ourselves. Does that help a little bit? I think so. I mean, I think, you know, the question that arises for me, I'm wondering how often you end up fighting against what I would count as a very modern narrative, which is I can do anything. I have almost unlimited possibility. And the actual concrete life that I lead is the fruit of that possibility versus the way I think a lot of times the Bible presents it is your concrete reality is a gift and you're to live within that gift, right? I'm thinking of Paul's comments regarding, you know, if you're an eye, don't wish you were an ear. If you're an ear, don't wish you were a foot, right? Like, be content with what God has made you to be and fill up what you are with the possibilities that God has given you. But just as it says in Galatians 5, you know, don't be envious, right? Don't look to go beyond necessarily where God has placed you. Like, there's plenty of work to be done right here. But I think we so often discount the proximate, right? Because we're always looking out into the distance and saying, but what could be if? I'm not saying there's anything wrong necessarily with that, but there is a, I think there is something wrong if it's not rooted in a contentedness with where we are. And so I'm wondering how often, you know, with men, I'm guessing just from my own personal experience, there's a drive and a, I would call it an obsession with success, right? That often sort of guides a lot of my actions, getting less and less as I get older, but it was definitely there when I was younger. And I think the message you're suggesting, the way you're suggesting to go about living this, it would have run directly counter to that obsession. Do you get that a lot from men or am I overreading that? No, I think you're spot on. There's certain phrases that kind of trigger this kind of thinking. You know, there's that old man-up phrase. I just, it makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit, you know. You were a personal trainer. You got this. That's another phrase that I'm like, you don't got nothing, man. You can't, you're right, 500 pounds on a barbell on my back. It would crush my little legs, you know. I don't, you know, just saying those things doesn't, doesn't, you know, transform us into the ideal man, you know. I, I'm not Tony Robbins today. I don't believe that the power of positive thinking is going to drive us to the ultimate design that God has for our life. God has a very different way for our life. So right now, my daily devotionals that I write and film every day, we're going through the book of 1 Samuel and David. And David is in the years where he's running right now. He's between the time that he was anointed to the time that he's appointed, and in these 15 years, he's concerned about his life with Saul, King Saul, who's hunting him down every single day. But there's this beautiful moment where Saul takes in the last priest of Eli's family because essentially Saul has ordered that all the priests be killed, which is a sad moment, I know, but it leads to something beautiful. What happens next is this final priest who's there with David, he's going to walk with David all his life. He has taken the last ephod, which is the last law, the last religious cloth of the high priest, which has the Urim and Thummim in it, which is how they make decisions. Which means that two things, number one, Saul has killed all the priests. That's number one. So he has no way to contact God anymore. Number two, it means that David, who's not yet king, has the final priest who has a way to communicate to God. So in this very beautiful moment, David is trying to consult whether or not he should go off and fight these Philistines because it's going to put him back within reach of Saul, which means to put him between two enemies. Sorry, a lot of context here today. Oh, that's great. But right between these two enemies, David feels compelled to go live out his calling. That's what you're talking about right now, a calling. David feels compelled to go do it, but he doesn't do it by order of his will. His men, which, by the way, are about 500 men at this moment because he's an army of men who are beginning to follow him. His men turn and say,

we shouldn't go to this town because it's going to put us in harm's way between both the Philistines and Saul. But you know what David does? He goes to this final priest. His name is Abiathar. He has an ephod. He tells him to consult God for him. He consults God, and God says, go, fight the Philistines. You'll be fine. Then his men protest, and he consults God one more time. And he goes and he fights and he wins. What I find fascinating about that is this is Old Testament stuff. This is David who has been anointed, not yet appointed, but has at times, you know, back then the spirit moved at moments in time. But David takes the moment to consult God, not his own will. He wants to know God's will versus his will. And he could have just said, I'm going to go do this because it's going to be good for my name. But he didn't do that. What he did was he consulted God, not just once, but twice to find out what God really wanted to do. And then he did what God wanted to do. He even was willing to put his will in check to ensure that it was really God's will by checking twice. And this is the way I think that we live in this life today. We have to learn that way of walking. David did it back in the Old Testament before we were ever indwelled by the Spirit. He just, he had this beautiful relationship of consulting God and trusting him with what God wanted to do while on the other side of the equation, there was still King Saul who annihilated, destroyed, killed all the priests and had no way to consult God anymore and just did his way. We prefer to do life like King Saul, which you don't want to live that way because he started off this, you know, this timid king, but became this, this terrible tyrant. And then you got David who, who lives a very different way. He just lives humbly understanding that God has got a calling on his life, but he wants to live that calling out, not by his will, but by God's will. And that's the way we, I think we do it. I think that's great. And I'll say, I'm teaching through first Samuel in a Bible study I do on Wednesday mornings right now. And I love the book. And I think one of the things that I noticed, even with, you know, David going to consult Abiathar and the Umim and Thumim and getting God's will, you see almost the exact opposite thing happening in the cave with Saul. Saul comes in to relieve himself and David's men are encouraging him to kill Saul. Like, oh, finally, God has given Saul into your hands. But in that moment, David has the wherewithal and the internal conviction that he should not raise his hand against the Lord's anointed. And he doesn't do anything. And so you constantly have David in between he and his men, right? And they represent sort of a, I would call them uninformed voices, right? Is I think a good way to think about it. They're uninformed voices. They're just sort of responding to what they see. They're not actually discerning anything. So they're just saying, this seems like a really horrible idea. This seems like a great, you know, hey, do this. Hey, do that. Yeah. Or in your, in some of your questions today, you've alluded to this, but we can apply it directly to that particular chapter is to say that these, these were God-fearing men because we know that they were God-fearing men. They lived according to spiritual purity laws, etc. David's men were different than other warring men, but they manipulated a promise of God to David for his benefit. And note this, this is an additional detail here that I think is so important. By David choosing not to take Saul's life, he put his own life and his men's life at risk. Absolutely. Because don't forget, there's thousands of men waiting outside that cave to take their life. What he's doing is he's choosing to put his life and his will in God's hand and trust God in that moment with his will, even if it meant risking his men and his own life. Now that's, that's a pretty supernatural moment when David walks out of that cave and his life is spared. I mean, actually by doing God's will, God spared all their lives, right? That's, that's fantastic. If we just lived that way, if we just lived that way, how, how many more times in our life will we see God do great miracles like that? I mean, that's a miracle. Yeah. One, it's an interesting subtlety that I think is, you almost have to experience in order to fully understand. And I think that as we, as we live out our Christian life, as we really seek to be faithful, what we start to realize is that within those situations, what we really are trying to do is respond to God and then to the situation or respond to God and allow him to direct the way we respond to the situation. But if we respond just to the situation, we're, we're limiting ourselves because we don't have anywhere near the resources. We don't have anywhere near the imagination that God has. And I think this is why God can do more than we could ever ask or think, you know? And so if we put ourselves in that spot and we say, well, what could I do? That's going to be a very different answer than God, what would you have me do? And, you know, that balance is an ongoing difficulty, right? I mean, it's a, it's not like I want to pretend that I have that mastered, but I think that's the right line of questioning when we're diving into that side. Yeah. Well, Vince, we're kind of coming up on time. I, I, I usually close out the podcast just asking my guests the same, every guest gets the same question. So what do you think we should be, what do you think the church should be thinking about in order to be and make disciples more faithfully today? I really wish our church today, just, especially in our country, we need to get wiser in how we talk about the things of God. We, we need to make wiser disciples and we need to make sharper disciples. We need to push away from a, a soft, feel good message in our platforms today. And we need to engage our dialogue around difficult topics. We're entering a time where I think in the coming decade or two that people are going to be hungry more and more for information like you're sharing today, where they want to dive in to really understanding the things of God. And we can't just touch on the peripheral anymore. Also, we're going to have to do it more like this, one-on-one, where we can contemplate, we can ask questions, we can think through things, we can reference scripture. We can experience discipleship in a way that it transforms our life. I wish that's where we would move in the coming couple of decades, is that we would understand the value of, of being wise as Christian leaders, helping our people to understand how to think. And I don't exactly understand all the cultural shift over the last 30 years, but there's some places in my heart that miss Sunday school. I miss church on Wednesday nights. I miss the robust conversation in small groups around just God's word. I miss a little debate. I miss wise thinking. And I think we see people in our culture craving it because there are, there's so many lies and so much propaganda before us. It's hard to navigate it unless we sharpen our senses as Christians. You know, InterVarsity used to call it the discipleship of the mind. I think we're entering days when we've got to be a little bit sharper on how we handle those conversations. And I truly believe in my heart that it begins with the leaders of homes that, that men need to be discipling their children and their families. We can't hand this off to the government. We can't hand it off to education. We can't hand it off to corporate America or to YouTube. We've got to take responsibility for that and lead our families so that they know the truth of God's word. And that's my hope and vision for men, even with this study that I've created here, that will guide men into conversations with other men around the gospel in the hopes that their lives will know the truth about Jesus Christ. Well, Vince, this has been a great conversation. I will admit, I've had folks who come on and talk about manhood previously. And I am refreshingly surprised by your approach. I love it. I think it's very, very good and very, very biblical. And so, folks, I would just recommend check out Vince's new book, Essential Elements, Forging Godly Men. You can also find a lot more information on his website, beresolute.org. And we'll have those links in the show notes. And so you'll be able to find them pretty easily. And Vince, anything else that you direct folks to or is that plenty? That's it. I have a daily devotional that you can get on video, audio, or written format every day, just like you. I'm going through the book of 1 Samuel right now. And then I have a weekly show. We spent a lot of marketing money on trying to figure out a title for it. We came to The Vince Miller Show. That's it. And so, yeah, exactly. And you can find that weekly also on YouTube and just our means of trying to disciple others so that they might hear the truth of the gospel as well.

So that's it, man. VinceMiller.com or BeResolute.org. Either link will take you directly there. And thank you so much for what you're doing here as well. I just I love I've listened to a lot of your stuff at this point. It is fantastic. And I love that you're helping us to think well about the things of Christ. So thank you so much. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. And we'll get all those links into the show notes. Please go check out Vince. Like I said, this was a great conversation. And for everybody who listened, I hope that was a blessing to you. And we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. There's no better way to start your day than spending time in God's word and in prayer. Don't know where to start? We have a free daily prayer podcast created to help you do just that. The Your Daily Prayer podcast delivers a thoughtful devotional and timely prayer to you seven days a week. Gain inspiration, faith, and encouragement with daily messages in 10 minutes or less. To start listening now, search Your Daily Prayer on your favorite podcast app or visit lifeaudio.com.