Play the Man: Becoming the Man God Created You to Be

by Mark Batterson

The chiefs then made an offer of their own: If the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take care of their Education; instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.5

In the pages that follow, I’ll unveil seven virtues of manhood—tough love, childlike wonder, will power, raw passion, true grit, clear vision, and moral courage.

I wonder if churches do to people what zoos do to animals.

We try to remove the danger, remove the risk. We attempt to tame people in the name of Christ, forgetting that Jesus didn’t die to keep us safe. Jesus died to make us dangerous.

Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others.

In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men.

And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd.

A man discovers who he is in the wild. He also discovers who God is.

The answer is God’s original intent, God’s original design. We must examine the first Adam, Adam—he’s the prototype. And we must cross-examine the second Adam, Jesus—He’s the archetype.

When the compass needle of masculinity is spinning, Jesus is true north.

distinction between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues.

Résumé virtues are the skills you need to make a living, and those are often the most celebrated virtues in our culture. But when it comes to making a life, eulogy virtues win the day. These are the virtues that get talked about at your funeral.12

Much of what it means to be a man is determined by tradition. The expectations placed on men in first-century Israel and twenty-first-century America are very different. But I’ll do my best to decipher the difference between the hardwiring—the image of God in us—and the software—cultural expectations.

But once you receive the gift of salvation, you have to take it to the gym and work it out.

“I mean to make myself a man,” said Garfield, “and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.”13

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.

One of the great mistakes we make is thinking that God feels about us the same way we feel about ourselves. So we project our imperfections onto God.

In Rocky III, Rocky’s rematch with Clubber Lang is a classic fight scene. Rocky takes it on the chin over and over and over, but he does it intentionally, mockingly. “You ain’t so bad,” he says, taunting Lang. “C’mon. You ain’t so bad. You ain’t so bad.” His confused manager, Apollo Creed, calls it crazy: “He’s getting killed!” Rocky’s brother-in-law, Paulie, calls it strategy. “He’s not getting killed, he’s getting mad.”11

Because Jesus knew that conflict, not comfort, is the catalyst for growth.

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.14

My job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,

As I look back on my life, you know who I respect the most? It’s not those who “took it easy on me.” It’s those who pushed me to my potential, then pushed me past it. I didn’t always like it at the time, but their goading led to growth.

One of my annual rituals is choosing a verse of the year.

Craig Groeschel asked the question: “Does your heart break for the things that break the heart of God?” My honest answer was no. My heart had become calloused, not just my skin.

When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. —1 Corinthians 13:11

“The bullet is in me now,” Roosevelt informed the audience, “so that I cannot make a very long speech.”1

One of Roosevelt’s biographers, Edmund Morris, called it an “inhuman energy.” His description of Roosevelt’s nightly ritual is classic. The president would brush his teeth, jump into bed, put his revolver beside his pillow, and read a minimum of one book per night. “Then, there being nothing further to do,” says Morris, “Theodore Roosevelt will energetically fall asleep.”4

But his holy curiosity and childlike wonder may be best evidenced by his unrivaled reading habit—a habit that averaged five hundred books per year.

But the more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know! True knowledge results in profound humility, which fuels childlike wonder.

According to neurologists, our brains have a storage capacity of approximately 2.5 petabytes.6 That’s the equivalent of recording three hundred million hours of high-definition television! Simply put, we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for thousands of lifetimes! We won’t run out of hard drive space anytime soon. And the three-pound supercomputer inside our craniums runs on less power than a twenty-watt lightbulb.7 Amazing, isn’t it?

There is more information in one Sunday edition of the New York Times than the average person living in the Middle Ages would have consumed in an entire lifetime.

The most important law of ecology is this: L ≥ C. For an organism to survive, the rate of learning must be equal to or greater than the rate of change happening around them.

I subscribe to Albert Einstein’s school of thought: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”20

God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight. . . . He spoke three thousand proverbs and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He spoke about plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also spoke about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. From all nations people came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom.21

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,” said Solomon. “To search out a matter is the glory of kings.”22 Francis Bacon, a sixteenth-century English philosopher, had a fascinating take on this proverb: Solomon, although he excelled in the glory of treasure and magnificent buildings, of shipping and navigation, of fame and renown, yet he maketh no claim to any of those glories, but only to the glory of inquisition of truth; for so he saith, “The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out”; as if, according to the innocent play of children, the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, in the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s play-fellows in that game.23

Have you ever hidden something from your children with the hope of them finding it? So they can experience the joy of discovery? That’s what God does with us. To us, science seems like science. To God, it’s a game of hide-and-seek. God has hidden clues about His character in macroscopic galaxies and microscopic atoms. It’s our job—our joy—to discover them. And with each discovery, we gain a greater revelation and a greater appreciation of the Creator and His creation.

You Samaritans worship what you do not know.26 The Samaritans were worshiping God out of ignorance. And when we worship out of ignorance, our worship is empty. We don’t even know who or what or why we’re worshiping!

And many of us worship God the same way. We sing the words we see on a screen, but do we really know what they mean? If God interrupted our singing and asked us why we’re singing what we’re singing, we’d be speechless.

Be a man of your word, but more important, be a man of the Word. Paul exhorts his spiritual son Timothy: “Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed.”28

But what’s unique about the Bible is that you don’t just read it; it reads you. It’s a mirror that reveals who you are and who you can become in Christ. You can’t play the man without being a man of the Word.

In the tenth century, the grand vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, took his 117,000-volume library with him wherever he went. It was organized and carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order!32

Youth I want to see you game boys, I want to see you brave and manly and I also want to see you gentle and tender. Be practical as well as generous in your ideas. Keep your eyes on the stars but remember to keep your feet on the ground. Courageous hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to be successful in life. Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character.

Manhood A man’s usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all ironed endurance of misfortune make for a finer and nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.37

I think Paul is talking about childish self-centeredness.

Paul uses three verbs—talk, think, and reason.

This, surely, is the most valuable legacy we can pass on to the next generation: not money, not houses or heirlooms, but a capacity for wonder and gratitude, a sense of aliveness and joy.”40

Our lives are not just measured in minutes. They are measured in moments—those moments when wonder invades our ordinary reality. Carpe wonder!

“The chief proof of a man’s real greatness,” said Sherlock Holmes, “lies in the perception of his smallness.”42

A big man knows how small he is, and that sense of smallness makes him appreciate how big God is. The true measure of a man isn’t how much he knows; it’s how much he does with what he knows. A scholar knows how much he knows, and lets everybody know it. A gentleman and a scholar knows how much he doesn’t know. He cares less about being right than about being righteous. He loves asking questions more than giving answers.