Locust Eaters: Godly Man Part 1

The podcast episode discusses the traits of a godly man and how they are often missing from conversations about masculinity. The hosts talk about the importance of submission to a higher power, mastering emotions, and loving well. They also mention the misconception of meekness, which they define as possessing power that is harnessed for the greater good. They emphasize the importance of recognizing and utilizing individual strengths within a team and how it contributes to the success of a mission. Just say it the way that you said it before. Right. Look, before we get started, I love you guys. Like, really. Me? Well, Stephen. Are we recording? We're on. Ah! Welcome to the Locust Eater podcast. My name is Levi. This is? John. And this is? Stephen. And we are on episode two, The Traits of a Godly Man. To be clear, this is not going to be an all-inclusive list. This is not going to be a check the box so that you can earn a merit badge and make your mommy proud. This is more of a let's talk. What are the things that we think are missing from the normal conversation of masculinity? What are the things that we see that the Bible tells us are maybe controversial aspects of being a man in today's world? But that the Bible says is absolutely part of it. And what are the things that we might be getting wrong, right? That we just pass over or maybe undervalue? So, I'm going to pass it off to you, Stephen. You can kind of take that ball and run with it. Sure. So, this list for me kind of comes from the last 20 years. Real men in life that were the men that stood out to me. That were both Christ-like and masculine. Along with scriptures that would back that up and paint that picture of the traits of Christ through the scriptures compared with real-life work. And I think what we've done is maybe in the church today, maybe what we've done is get so busy with tradition and what we've just experienced through our own eyes that we have forgotten to take a serious look at this. And so, some of those traits, just to sort of touch on them real quick, would be a man that's submitted. Submitted himself to a higher power that walks in obedience and he lays aside that personal will. He's not a people pleaser. A guy that can master his emotions. He builds his kingdom, but he puts it under the bigger kingdom of Christ and of God. He loves justice and righteousness. And the one that we don't like a whole lot is a man that's been tested and even suffers in that process. Yeah. And one that, I mean, I've looked at this list before and I forgot to bring it up earlier. Kind of part of mastering his emotions, but I think that a godly man is a man that loves well. Knows how to love well? Yeah. Yeah. A tough and tender. Yeah. Both areas. You know, not too far in the hardcore, but not too feminine and lovey, right? A middle ground. Yeah. Love well. Whatever that needs to mean, right? Yeah. People and God. That's the hard part. Right. All right. So, if we go to the top, submitted. Having, like, fealty. Yes. Like, having... One, I think, is interesting about this, to submit yourself. I mean, old text Hebrew, right? It means to align yourself under your commander, right? By the Hebrew intention of it. And that doesn't mean to be weak, nor to be passive, right? But in... I always take it to mean, like, meek, right? So, you have the ability for strength and power and, honestly, destruction and these things. But you harness it into a umbrella that you are loyal to use those things for. Which would be, like, fealty to a king or, in our sense, Lord, right? Yeah. And it takes a very strong man to submit himself to something. Yeah. Right? So, we think that being strong would be conquering anything you're up against. I got this. Everybody back up. Lone wolf. Yes. But that's... Everybody does that. Everybody can do that. It takes... It takes pride to do that. Yeah. That's about it. Yeah. But a man who can say, you know what, I'm going to stop what I think should happen right now and submit myself underneath to you and do what you're requiring of me, is a heck of a lot more strength, in my opinion, than somebody who just blazes out there and does their own thing. Levi, you used the word meek. And for somebody out there that maybe has a wrong connotation of that word, can we just unpack that a little bit as to what we're actually talking about when we say the word meek? Yeah. So, to possess power that is able to be harnessed and utilized appropriately and timely, but not for your own gain, necessarily. That's kind of how I would throw that. Yeah. As contrasted with weak, easily pushed over, easily pushed around, that idea that a lot of people have that a meek person would be a lamb, something that's defenseless. A weak person would be like, yeah, a lamb or sheep. I think that's a word that is very often misconstrued by people. Right. So, I just want to clarify that. Yeah. The terminology that probably resonates with guys in our audience would be, you know, you have the sheep and then you have maybe a shepherd, but then you have the sheepdog, right? A lot of these military, police, you know, first responder types consider themselves sheepdogs. That's where the meekness comes in. Right. Because they have the teeth just like the wolf, but they choose to not use it on the flock. They use it against the predators. Right. Right. That's good. That's good. A picture for me there is I love movies that have to deal with the age of kings and knights. And so, the king is only one man. And, of course, that doesn't apply with when we're looking at God. But in a kingdom aspect, the men that are submitted under him are carrying out the mission. And they submit themselves under that. The cool thing about that is he provides absolutely everything they need to do what it is that they do and give them the freedom to walk out and do the things that are necessary in that kingdom. And I think that's also why guys tend to love those movies with the guy that's the king's right hand that gets things done and makes things happen. Or, I mean, while you were talking, I'm looking at a stack of J.R.R. Tolkien books, right? Whose are those, John? Yours truly, baby. And to your point, like The Fellowship of the Ring was exactly what you just said. They said, I need somebody who can do this and you can do that and this person can do this and you're small and I'm going to use that to your advantage. And I will support this and send you out to go wield your strengths and you all banded together to support your king, right? Like, that's what we want so bad. You're so much different than me and so are you, but together, oh my gosh. The dream team. We have the dream team. Yeah, we can go do anything and the king supports us to do it. God, you can't stop it. I think that one of the problems, and I totally agree with that, but one of the disconnects with men, at least in my life, has been I begin to get jealous of your giftings. Ah, yeah. Or jealous of yours or why can't I accomplish the things Levi accomplishes? And I start judging myself based off of your character and strengths or your character's strengths and then it derails me and I take myself out of the game because I got wrapped up in my brother's giftings and leadership abilities and started putting the focus instead of giving what I can to the group, I'm starting to become jealous of the group and start to steal away from it. Yeah, man. I would honestly put that at like a 60-40 relationship, right? I would say 60% of that has to be you, not you, anybody, in their calling, knowing what their strengths are, knowing why they're in the relationships that they're in, but if you really want that relationship or that team to thrive, there needs to be a culture from that team that calls people's strengths out of individuals. 100%. Right? Where I can tell you I need this from you and I know you're good at it and you have a passion for it so that you get this confirmation in your mind of like, well, I am valued, right? That goes so far. Yeah. I think this is another episode completely and maybe we can talk about it at some point, but Levi, I'll turn this over to you because something that I know from that's in the military and in the business world, John, same thing, is that when there is a captain or someone over that group and all of those people know that they're specialized in a certain area and that if you don't walk in your skills, it leaves somebody else lacking to do what they need to be able to do, which affects the mission. And so if we have a clear picture of the mission and somebody has called out our skills and you know I have to do my thing to 100% for this mission to work right and for these other people to be able to do what they need to do, that changes that. That takes away that comparison that you're talking about and now we're not even dealing with that. And, again, I think we could unpack that in a much bigger way, but I'll let you two speak on that. It transcends everything, right? I mean, I can talk from the military perspective about how it puts people's lives on the line, but John can talk about if you have that one dude in your shop that is the transmission guy and they just choose to not show up and you need a transmission built, that's game over for the day, right? Or you can send it off to another shop, but it's going to screw everything up. But you can talk about the same, Stephen. If your worship leader doesn't show up on a Sunday morning and nobody else is prepped and nobody else knows how to play a guitar, now what? Well, exactly the same thing in every scenario, you adapt. You change your plan. You have contingencies. You have redundancies if you're lucky and you have a plan to head that well. But, yes, the individuals that are responsible for their area have to know their value and they have to know the implications of becoming delinquent on that submission of duty, right? So if I have a commo guy on our flight ops team that doesn't load the comm sec right and we're on medevac and we get called up on mission, then we have to launch and we're trying to launch without radios. Big problem. Big problem. Yeah. I mean, we're going into whatever we're flying into, whether it be weather or enemy fire situations, and you don't have the ability to talk back. And that's just because one dude got lazy or maybe just didn't check up on their job right. Well, you touched on something that said that you have to know your value. You have to know what you're here for. And in my experience, especially in the business world, trying to help guys figure that piece out. How do we do that? Because I think that's where the biggest disconnect in becoming a godly man and a godly leader of your home is what do I do? How do I do that? My father didn't teach me. His father didn't teach him. We got this whole generational thing of men who have had this disconnect on how to be a godly man. Now, okay, I'm standing up. I want to be a godly man. How? What do I do? I think one of the things that we have come to see so much, because we see the success of it, is that community where you're seeing it in other men, and then as we do life together, you begin to see this special thing, this spark that this one guy has, and you can speak into his life and you can call him up. You guys know that I sort of have a resistance to some of the things that we've done in the church, and so taking people through a spiritual gifting assessment is a thing that I absolutely hate because it tends to pigeonhole them and they think that's what I do. These are some questions on a piece of paper. Let's do life together, and let me see where your strengths and weaknesses are, and let's build on those things so that you can walk in that. And when other men are calling you up versus a quiz that you took on a desk, that shifts the value, the weight of what you contain inside of you and gives you a strength, a power to move forward in that thing. It's just like whenever we were on the grander group chat that we have with all the guys, and I posted that, hey, let's just see what this website says our spiritual gift is, and every single person, even the guy who had multiple in-person confirmations of people just walking up to him saying that he's prophetic without him prompting any of this throughout his life. We all got evangelists, and he was like, well, I guess I'm not a prophet. Well, first of all, prophet versus prophetic, right? But yeah, then there's immediate doubt, and it's because of computer algorithms. But I think that there's a lot of different perspectives when it comes to spiritual gifts. Of course, some people believe that we haven't even scratched the surface of what's in the Bible, right, because it's not a completely inclusive list. I have a tendency to believe that there are definitely ebbs and flows, right? You're not born with the one gift. Right, or the one calling. Or the one calling, absolutely. I had a calling until two and a half years ago, and it changed drastically. Yeah. And I had to struggle with that because I didn't understand it. I'll tell you when we get to that, though, I'm going to be referencing a lot of Jamie Winship work because that dude pumps me up. If y'all haven't heard of Jamie Winship, I'm going to post a link below. I want to go back to Stephen real quick, just what you said about community, because that's one thing the Holy Spirit said to me a while back ago, years ago in my life, is when I was in the middle of there's no men out here to do anything other than my dad. I don't have this band of brothers. I can do this by myself. And when I said that, I was talking to the Lord. I was praying, walking through the woods, talking to him about that. And when I said that to him, he said, oh, really, you can? I said, yes, I don't need men. I have you. And he rebuked me. Good. He said, oh, really? He said, well, when the Holy Spirit said, well, when I walked the earth, Jesus, when I walked the earth, I had 12 men around me, and I'm the son of God. So what makes you think you can do it by yourself if I needed 12 men around me? And boom, man, that changed my whole perspective about community and iron sharpening iron and men coming together. And it wasn't until I started seeking out godly men and community, you guys, that I was able to really start to see exponential growth in my walk with God and how I led my family and how my kids were growing. I mean, it was this trickle effect, even from the morning coffee meeting that we started doing. My kids started just getting on fire for Jesus. I wasn't even doing anything other than getting in communion with men. And then next thing you know, my son wants to come to the coffee, nine years old. My four- and three-year-old daughters are walking through Walmart and grabbing people and telling them Jesus loves them and how beautiful they are. And this whole trickle effect started going off. Once I started becoming the man in community with other men, the whole family got affected. So the picture there that I'm seeing is actually what we consider to be the mission of the church, which is to edify and to encourage, because that's what happens. You start getting built up inside, you start getting encouraged, and now your cup overflows and you're splashing on everybody. And this thing of I can do it myself, we can, but God said in the beginning that it's not good for man to be alone. So was he only talking about Eve? He does give him a wife, but then there are sons, and then there are families, and this grows and grows, and so we are better in community. You can't see yourself honestly. You can't. You need men to see you as you are, to call up the things that you have doubt about and to call out the things that you need to correct or work on. That's how we become better men. That's iron sharpening iron. And that also plays into the next theme that we have here of obedience. You heard the Lord tell you, you know, this is the answer. This is where I'm leading you. And had you still decided that that wasn't something that you wanted to be a part of, then guess what? We would not know each other. And you would not have the blessings that you just had. I mean, just knowing me is what I mean by blessings. But like laying down your personal will. Stephen, you annotated John 6, 38, right? Right. Oh, man. For I've come down from heaven not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me. So obedience and that submitting under a commander. Yeah, there's a mission. Yeah. And he's on mission his whole life. Right. How impactful would we be if we were knowingly on mission every day? Intentional life. Yeah. And realizing that we are talking about Jesus himself here, but do you see how cool it is that God prepares John the Baptist and these other men that are there? They're already waiting for the right time. And I think we've experienced that. We didn't have a connection until the right time. The season came and then, boom, there it was. And I would love to encourage guys that there's probably, if you feel like wherever you are you're alone and you don't have that group, man, just press into it and pray. I believe God's got brothers that feel exactly the same way in your area, hungry for the same things. Absolutely. And to that point, if we're going to talk John the Baptist, right, not a people pleaser at all. I mean, we talked about that last episode when we talked about why we're named the Locust Eaters. Right. But whenever you think about these influential characters in history and then the story of redemption for the world, that was the mission. They didn't sacrifice the mission for how people viewed them while accomplishing their mission. So John's like, nah, I don't need your everything. I don't need the establishment. I don't need the religion. I don't need your, you know, pharisaical approval. I'm going to go out here and do my thing because I know what the real mission is and I don't care what that makes me look like. Right. And that's the dude that baptized Jesus who nobody cared for. Like, man, why do we sit around and care what people think about us? Yeah, that's a great question. And it derails us so much, right, when we don't get the approval of men. You know, we do something or we don't do something because we think that, you know, what are they going to think? I love what you said, Steven. You know, if you feel that tug and if you feel that deal, then go. Seek out men. Because chances are there's probably at least two, three, or four guys in your circle that are feeling the same thing. But we as men, for whatever reason, have this thing that always reoccurs in us of if I step out, then they're going to think I'm weird. And the other guy's thinking if he steps out, they're going to think he's weird. But when one guy steps out and says, you know what, hey, let's start doing some intentional life together. You know, start learning about the Lord. Let's start being intentional. In my experience, almost every time, it ignites a fire in the guys around me. They're like, oh, I've been feeling the same thing. 100%. And when they don't respond that way, it's out of guilt and jealousy. So if you can withstand the storm long enough of their guilt and jealousy, they're going to come around. Or they're going to separate themselves so hard that you're going to recognize that they're not part of it, which is okay, too. It's great. It's great. Then you don't have to take care of a problem down the road. I would like to unpack this just a tiny bit more. I'd like to go back to Adam and the fact that he was silent. That's the great thing, right? Eve moves in a direction. It's never called people-pleasing, but Adam sits in silence. Yeah, he stands down. And so there is an act of people-pleasing there. And then we talk about in 1 Samuel, Saul was the king. He was God's anointed. And twice he feared the opinion of the people and went directly against what God had for him. He disobeyed or he just altered it and said, I've got a better way of doing that that will please the people. And so there's a massive danger in there. I've never done that in my life. So then back to John the Baptist. They said John had a demon. They actually accused him of having a demon because he stepped outside of the circle. So if you do want to get a group of men together, I will tell you the first thing that's going to happen is somebody is going to suggest a prayer breakfast. That's what we men do in the church. And it's not that there's anything wrong with that, but we've been assigned these little roles, these small little roles that we keep getting pushed into. And we think that's what being a Christian man is. Get out of the box. Get out of the building. I don't care if it's in the woods, if it's in the desert, if it's in a parking lot. Do something different. Do what men do but include this bigger mission that the Lord has in that. Yeah, I love that. If you're a fisherman, be a fisherman for Jesus. Yeah, dude. If you're an axe thrower, throw axes for Jesus. Jesus doesn't come to change who we are, our personalities. He changes what's inside of us. There's a death and a rebirth and we were born again. But the personalities and the characteristics that we have are God-given. So we don't have to go from being this hunter who loves to go out in the woods and kill things to somebody who knits scarves in a corner and prays all the time. Yeah, we were just having a conversation before we pushed for court. You said, Stephen, what does a new Christian feel when they walk into a conversation about masculinity or whatever in a church environment? And I wanted to be clear that a new Christian doesn't necessarily mean a young person. A new Christian could be a freaking force recon marine that spent 20-whatever years doing the work and found the Lord, thank God, through it. And they show up looking for this embrace and redemption because they have Jesus now and they are expecting the body to feel that way and the body is just like hands pushing them back. Oh, whoa, whoa, hey, why don't you... Coming along a little strong there, buddy. Yeah, whoa, whoa, let's calm down. Why don't you go do security things and if we decide to go have a man event, we'll let you know. Right. That destroys you. You will never come back. That's such a step down. And that's playing small, it's thinking small and it puts you in a place that you're extremely uncomfortable. So you can join a building project, you can mow the lawn, you can be part of the security detail or you can cook eggs and serve guys when we do a breakfast once a quarter or whatever and it's small thinking. And I think we have kept a lot of men out because that's all they see. Right. Rolling into the mastering of the emotions. Easiest one of all, right? I have a down pack when I'm sleeping. I don't know, I'm a violent snorer, so I'm not even good at it. I would say even in my dreams I don't, so yeah. Yeah, that's a challenge across the board, especially because, I mean, in my life, the men that I know have a tendency to default towards anger when the women have a tendency to default towards sadness and you end up in an environment that maybe, like I said, a lot of times in the military, my brother, a lot of times in the fire service, mostly male-dominated, when you default towards angry, people understand what that means and that's actually a message sent and received. It's socially acceptable for a man to be angry. Yeah, because that's just the direction of your slant. If you go sad whenever something needs to be accomplished, it doesn't make any sense in that context, then you go to a church and they expect you to cry instead of be angry every time. Because you get angry, now you're toxic or you're scary or something, right? That's all in the appropriate context of sadness and anger, I feel like. Mastering the emotions outside of that where it's like rage, lust, violence, obviously. Manipulation. Manipulation, jealousy. All these things are definitely outside the character of God, therefore outside the character of a godly man. Right. This is one that I think we could probably double down on and do two episodes just on this alone, but we're not going to do that today. One of the things that we talked about is that this is a man that's not easily manipulated. He walks in a balance of his emotions. Because we mentioned anger, and there is righteous anger. Jesus displayed that. He had that righteous anger. God was angered multiple times in the Bible, so we're not going to call that sin. We're not going to say that's against the nature of God. There's a place for that. There is a place for the softness. There's a place for passion. Sometimes men feel like that's not the vein that they're supposed to walk in either. And so what we want to talk about is how these things are balanced out, how we walk through life with them. James talks about, and this has gone to so much, is that everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. For man's anger does not bring about the righteousness that God desires. So he doesn't say that you won't be angry, but are you taking that right path there instead of just this is my default mode. This is what I go to because the world is okay with an angry man. They are used to that. So I can just go right into that mode to get things accomplished. Right. And I do want to clarify that when I say like defaulting towards anger, what I mean is like the aggressive state, right? Not like, ah, I'm angry. Like you show up to the church, you start doing that. You're the one that's the problem, right? If you're just like raging on people. And rightly so. Yeah, exactly. But for me to be the person who steps up and says like, I'm advocating or I'm like, you know, my hands are up. If anything happens that you disagree with, oh, I'm sorry, okay, you know, it makes me sad, but I'm not going to show you that I'm passionate about it. I'm not going to stand on my own two feet like a man and like you want to hit me in the face, I'll take it on the chin. We can disagree, that's fine. That's just not a thing. I think there's a problem with dualistic thinking here. So to contrast the rage, we move into nice guy. And the nice guy is in this little box over here, and he never raises his voice, and he won't disagree strongly with you, and he won't take a stand because he's taking – we sometimes take some of the verses about giving preference to one over another, and we package this easily trained, kept guy who will not make waves about anything, and that's sort of presented as the church guy. Yeah. Being comfortable with who you are and showing the right kind of emotions is huge for a man. So we're talking about this, and the things that keep going on in my mind is in Christ, right, how it was Mark chapter 4 is talking about when Jesus was asleep in the boat, right, the thing going on, the waves, and all this stuff, and all this type of freaking out, and Jesus was asleep, and they wake him up, and he's like, calm down, be quiet. But then a few chapters later, he's making a whip, and he's running people out of the temple, right? So what does that do for your range of emotion on what a man looks like, One who can sleep in the boat during a thunderstorm, and he's completely peaceful amongst demons and lepers and all these things, and then he whips all the people out of the church. Right. I mean, that totally jacks me up. I don't know about you guys, but I'm like, golly, there's a lot to this godly emotional man. Yeah, but it all kind of comes back to that he doesn't care what people think about him, right? It is all on mission. So he doesn't care that his closest followers that are supposed to take this huge mantle when he passes, right? He doesn't care that they're completely not understanding his perspective of the situation. It's okay to him that they don't understand why he's sleeping, and it's okay to him that the Pharisees don't understand why he's building a whip and messing people up. It's just what he's supposed to do. Right. Okay, so here's what I think we're going to do. We're going to wrap this up. Definitely a Part 2 situation. So as we go, we're going to discuss this more. We'd love for you all to join us next time for What is a Godly Man Part 2. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Just push the button that goes to the next episode, and you'll just keep hearing. How do I do that? No, I mean like the user, like the listeners. You're good, John. Just stop the recording.