How to Raise Weak Men

1 Kings 21:7 ESV

And Jezebel his wife said to him, “Do you now govern Israel? Arise and eat bread and let your heart be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.

“Devin, be quiet.” Are the words I bark to the back seat. We are forty-five minutes into our in-service day trip to Larned, KS with forty-five minutes to go, the disagreement erupted from the back rows of the van. “But Peter isn’t being nice.” Is the whiny plea I hear in response, but it grows quiet, so I am left once again to my pensive thoughts. “Be quiet” and “Be nice” seem to be the thing my children struggle with the most. Yet at this particular moment Voddie Bachuum is berating my mind with his typical condescending tone “the eleventh commandment, ‘thou shalt be nice’” and I am left wondering what I am raising my sons to be?

Devin has been told “be nice” enough to know that others should be nice, defined as do what he wants. Is “be nice” really the goal I have for the young men I work most often to train in their manhood? Is “be quiet” the twelfth commandment they need to survive God’s wrath? What I really desire is that these young men be self-controlled, because loud voices are needed when wrongs are done. Strong aggressive thoughtful responses are demanded when evil is afoot. If I succeed in raising my son’s to "be nice and quiet", I have raised geldings instead of stallions. They must be trained to be self-controlled and thoughtful, not “nice” or “quiet”. Theodore Roosevelt was a runt of a child, and given the times, he found himself beat up (back when bullying required more than just words). His father took matters in hand and trained his son to box, not avoid the fight. Our society has trained its sons to be nice and avoid conflict, instead of training them to fight and win conflicts.

As these thoughts reverberate through my brain, I am brought to the next two best practices to raising weak men. We see this in Ahab. Ahab is King of Israel. He wants a field that he can’t have and quickly withers into a cry baby fit to get what he wants. His wife comes along, she is a strong/willful woman, who desires her husband to be happy, so she takes command and gives him what he wants. Make sure there are plenty of strong women around him. Kathrine von Bora was a willful strong woman. So much so that no one would marry her. Except one old, confirmed bachelor, who liked the idea of making people mad. So Martin Luther married her, and their marriage was fruitful, and loud. Her care and resolve against his bachelor ways increased his ministry by ten years at the least. Such a person was best suited to accomplish what was needed. If she had been weak the marriage would have limped and both would have been unable to run the race as well as they did. Ahab, though was weak, and his wife was strong so her pagan sensibilities ran the country, and Ahab was okay with that he got what he wanted.

The last point necessary in the making of weak men, is giving them what they want. He has what he wants, nothing to strive or fight for. She has given it to me. Train him well to declare his wants to strong women in his life. Give those desires to him, so that he need not learn to strive for anything. He need not learn the lessons of discipline and work to achieve his goals. Whining and complaining work just as well.

How do we train weak men? 1) Train them to be quiet, that way when they need to yell, they don’t know how. 2) Train them to avoid conflict by being nice, that way they won’t know how to fight when something needs fighting for. 3) Surround them with Strong and willful women to care for them, so they don’t have a vacuum to fill. 4) Give them what they want, so they never learn to connect discipline and work with achievement.

How does a generation raised like this; train the Churchmen our churches need? No excuses. Men are what the church needs more than the culture around us. Men disciplined, self-controlled, willing and ABLE to fight. If you see a young man in church, how are you helping the cause?

Coram Deo