Where Are The Faithful Men?

Recently, I was bemoaning the state of male spirituality. I was genuinely grieved that I could not find a single male candidate to hire for job openings at the school.

I asked myself and God: “Where are the men with clear doctrine, who can depart from evil, stand before their peers with leadership vision, who possess some intellectual rigor, live by a decisive global vision, move with a clear missions understanding, conduct themselves with human sensitivity, justice, discipline, and the clear ethic of putting others before themselves?”

Why are men so spiritually wimpy? They cannot answer basic Bible questions. They cannot defend the faith. They are not warriors.   Their homes and children are essentially doomed to a life of compromise. Their children are sitting ducks for cults and societal evils.

The average Christian male is doomed in the face of the polemic of secularization. His children have almost no hope of even being remotely equipped to wage war on evil.

What is even more unfortunate is the reality that most men don’t even see the problem. They are clueless to just how preoccupied they are with secularization and secondary agendas. This blindness is at the heart of my grief.

The cost of becoming a man capable of doing battle in our culture is great. It is a multi-year commitment to becoming biblically educated and seeking out quality mentors. As a young man, I determined to encompass land and sea to find even just a few models from whom I could gain an image of a biblical warrior.

Last night I was discussing with my wife the marriage outlook for young women. The plight of unmarried women is bleak; that is, there is a dearth of quality young, marital men who will raise godly children with some form of deliberateness. Most single women will have to compromise in their choice of a spouse.

David follows his summary statement in Psalm 12 by a few qualities of those who he saw around him, that is, the characteristics of prevailing social norms. He saw flattery, pride, and social injustice as indicators of the decline in the covenant community.

David begins this Psalm with the word ‘help,’ really the word ‘save’ in Hebrew. It’s the same root for the name ‘Jesus.’ God needs to save us from this plight.

The remedy is in the Lord. There is not much help around us. For a young man, and I do mean ‘man,’ to stop the downward slide of secularized mediocrity requires years of commitment to biblical attentiveness and costly personal sacrifice. To think that we can produce thinking warriors in the short term is ridiculous. A young man will have to commit to years of spiritual cultivation in the scriptures.

Does the church have a plan? Do we know how to raise battle-hardened youth who are able to face the demands of the 21^st century? It’s a scary thought. “Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases.”

We need to throw ourselves on the Lord Jesus. He can call out young men who are able to remain pure, stand strong in the face of social injustices, limit dependency on electronics, and confront their peers in the face of collective compromise.

God, give us these men, even just a few who are able to model for the rest of us what it means to have words like silver, purified seven times in the furnace of divine righteousness, so our generation can be preserved (Ps. 12:6-7).