A CULTURE OF AVOIDANCE

I felt it was necessary to explain a little bit about our men's group at Real Ministries, in order to make our newest study make sense to an outsider. Real Men, as we call ourselves, isn't meant to be a puffed up remark or a comparison to other groups. It's what we desire to be. We desire to be real in the sense of being genuine, sincere, and faithful to our calling as men of God. We don't have gimmicks or hooks. We are men of faith on an epic journey to becoming godly. To do that, we have all made a pledge to one another, our families, and most importantly to our God, that we will do all we can to furnish our lives with the tools necessary to be real. Those tools were given to us by Jesus Christ through the infilling of the Holy Spirit on the day of our 2^nd birth. We have everything we need for life and godliness, through faith in Jesus Christ. Our pledge is to yield to the grace of God and allow the Holy Spirit to take us back to our original relationship with the creator.

We are a Kingdom family of men and young men seeking to bring God's Kingdom to earth just as it is in heaven. When you come to one of our meetings, you may be surprised to see young men ages 12 and up, mixed in with men well into their late sixties. You will see father's baring their souls and their hearts before their sons. You will see young men sharing their fears and desires with men who've lived longer than they've been around. I believe it is what makes our 'fellowship' unique.

Our studies aren't about playing 'stump the dummy.' The teacher doesn't believe for one instant that he knows it all. He knows the one who does. Our men don't talk down to, or belittle the 'younglings' in our midst. In fact, we eagerly hang on every word they say. They- our young men- are why we gather every Sunday morning at eight. We believe that relationship with the Father, demands relationship with our fathers. So, if you should somehow lay hold of this blog and are in Harrison, Arkansas on a Sunday morning, feel free to join us.

Today, we began our study into the book- Bond of Brothers, by Wes Yoder. You'll see a link to the book on this page. I highly recommend it to any man of any age. In preparation for our study, I asked the men to read up to page 22 of the book before coming to today's meeting. I asked them to highlight a part of the reading that had an impact on them. To show you how much I know, I thought it would be a hard thing to get the men to talk about. WRONG! What an awesome time of sharing and love. It started with one of the young men in our group who immediately opened up the discussion with talking about how fathers will hide their true feelings from their sons and how destructive it can be when they reach adulthood. Another young man also liked the portion on page 19 about how our silence about our fears, eventually becomes a solitary confinement. He felt it had application to himself. One of the fathers in our group was extremely moved by the passage where Wes Yoder says that he couldn't remember his father telling him he loved him. The tears began to flow as he thought of his own father and how difficult it was for his own father to say he loved him. The absence of reassurance, made him desire to make sure his own sons knew he loved them. It also made him desire to live a transparent life before them. That sparked another question about what transparency is. What do we mean, when we say we must be transparent? We spent over fifteen minutes defining transparency. We heard story after story about what transparency should look like. We finally determined that transparency wasn't about what we did, as much as it is about how we felt about what we did. It's about our fears, our desires, our hopes, and our dreams.

It was not a discussion for the faint of heart or shallow of mind.

CONTINUE TO READ IF YOU'RE NOT SLEEPY OR IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE LESSON SHEET WAS ABOUT. I ABRIDGED IT TO MAKE IT MORE BLOG FRIENDLY.

THE CULTURE OF AVOIDANCE

Not long ago, I was listening to a series of sermons by a well known Pastor/Televangelist about living the Spirit Led Life. I enjoy this man a lot, but found myself doing double takes as he tried to explain how we could escape injury, pain, and costly mistakes if we allowed the Holy Spirit to guide us. This is part of the modern day culture of avoidance. We'll go to any cost to avoid pain, conflict, and even one another. Don't get me wrong, I believe the Holy Spirit guides us, and I believe we can avoid unnecessary pain by allowing him to guide us through even the most mundane of life's moments. However, I also believe that there are times the Holy Spirit leads us directly into the fray of the battle in order to develop deeper faith in Christ Jesus. There are times the conflict and struggle are given to us in order to bring us glory and reveal the presence of God within us.

WHAT?

Perhaps you had a struggle with that last statement. It is both an Old Testament promise and a New Testament promise. We've all heard that God doesn't want to share his glory with anyone, but that isn't entirely true. He is more than happy to give us glory and even allow others to glorify us. When we are successful in our endeavors, we bring him glory. Actually, he doesn't want us to love the glory of men more than him, but he does give honor where honor is due. He will cause men to take note of our achievements and our successes. As long as we are pointing to God as the source of our success, we give glory to him. It's only when we take possession of the glory that we run into trouble, but the culture of avoidance won't even allow us to accept that God has done something in us. We won't allow anyone to call us mighty men of valor, even though God does it all the time. If you don't believe me, look at the story of Gideon. What did the Angel call him? I believe it's time to stop the culture of avoidance. It's time to move from self deprecation to real humility

The beginning of humility, is to acknowledge who you are. The Psalmist David did it when he said; 'What is man?' Here we have another point of avoidance. The media and humanist thinkers of this world would like you to believe that being a human is a terrible thing. We are painted as destroyers, and blights upon this earthly vale. Let's stop denying and avoiding the fact that we are men. The truth is; we are created in the image of God. We are men. When we stop avoiding that truth and allow God to glorify himself in us, we will begin the path to relationship. The unspoken answer to the question; 'what is man, that he is mindful of us' is that HE IS MINDFUL OF US! He is glorified in us and we will bring him glory. WOW!

What keeps the culture of avoidance alive is, we have other things at work within us. We have. . . issues. Those issues aren't easy to define and are as varied as the number of men in this world. We live in shame and try to avoid any hint of the issues at work within us. Sure, they can be distilled down to sexual issues, anger issues, trust issues, issue issues and on and on and on. We want to avoid the issues because we've believed the lie that we are the only one with issues. Every man and woman in this world has issues. No man likes to admit that they battle daily with the enemy of their soul and sometimes lose. No man likes to admit they've wrestled with fear and doubt and been pinned. No man likes to admit that they worry about failing the Lord. Worst of all we don't like to let others see when we fail. If we are in a wrestling match, there are more points awarded for a reversal than for the actual pin. The ability to escape or reverse a pin is what makes a good wrestler a great wrestler. The problem is, as men, we don't teach one another how to handle the failures or explain to each other how we escaped or reversed the pin. To do so, means we have to admit we were in the pin. God knows when we fail and how we fail, yet he showed us how to overcome it. There was a day when men taught one another how to overcome. There was a time when nobility wasn't measured by the absence of failure, but in how we handled the failure. The proof of that is in mankind's first recorded failure, we have to learn a lesson from that fateful time.

First, let's start with a basic truth.

God is omniscient. As he walked in the Garden that fateful day when Adam fell, he already knew the condition of his creation. At that moment, he even knew me. The problem was, Adam was no different than me, or should I say, I'm no different than Adam. He knew where Adam was. Adam was avoiding him. This is the problem with men to this day. Our first reaction to failure is to hide. We hide from our parents, we hide from our friends, we hide from our wives, our children, and we think we're hiding from God. Nothing scares us more than being naked. So we avoid anyone that might look upon our nakedness. Our fathers hide from us, we hide from our fathers, and we hide from one another. Ironically, all men know the truth. . . WE ARE NAKED. We know exactly who we are, what we are, and what we're about. We know that about all men. Yet, we dress ourselves up in whatever fig leaf we're comfortable in and act as if we aren't naked. That fig leaf can be work, sports, weather, anything but the real issue. We can even hide our shame in the fig leaf of religion. Worse yet, we pretend that we don't see each others nakedness. We convince ourselves that our fig leaf is better at covering our shame than anyone else's. We don't point out the inadequacy of the fig leaf on others because we don't want them pointing at our own. It's time for us to get beyond the fig leafs. Let's stop the culture of avoidance and break the silence. When God calls us in the cool of the day, let us cry out- 'I'm here.'

(SPECIAL NOTE: It is understood in our men's group that nakedness is the equivalent to 'shame.' To see a man naked was to see his shame. Nudity on the other hand is a totally different word. The word for without clothes is used first when describing Adam. Then once he'd eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he became naked. This is symbolic of the shame that all men feel when they are revealed for who they are. The only way to destroy the shame, is to own up to what and who you are. It is Christ who clothes us in robes of righteousness, so that we are no longer naked.)