Fathered by God: Learning What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

[B5150]

Moving on and passed the learning from and the leading of The Men's Fraternity - Quest For Authentic Manhood Study, I dive deeper and push ahead stronger in The Quest For Authentic Manhood and The Masculine Journey.

Although I will be taking the next study in the series; Men's Fraternity - Winning at Work & Home, this coming fall, during this recess for the next eight weeks I will be joining other men for this study.

I just thought I would share; consider the book if you will.


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[B5150]

Fathered by God: Discovering What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

1 - The Masculine Journey

Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
—Jeremiah 6:16 NIV

KEY POINTS OF THE CHAPTER

We would highlight these points/ideas as being key to this chapter (you may find yourself adding another point or two.)

• A boy has a lot to learn in his journey to become a man, and he becomes a man only through the active intervention of his father and the fellowship of men. It cannot happen any other way.

• This we must understand: Masculinity is bestowed. A boy learns who he is and what he’s made of from a man (or a company of men). This can’t be learned in any other place. It can’t be learned from other boys, and it can’t be learned from the world of women.

• Masculine initiation is a journey, a process, a quest really, a story that unfolds over time. It can be a very beautiful and powerful event to experience a blessing or a ritual, to hear words spoken to us in a ceremony of some sort. Those moments can be turning points in our lives. But they are only moments, and moments, as you well know, pass quickly and are swallowed in the river of time. We need more than a moment, an event. We need a process, a journey, an epic story of many experiences woven together, building upon one another in a progression. We need initiation. And, we need a Guide.

• We aren’t meant to figure life out on our own. God wants to father us.

• A man’s life is a process of initiation into true masculinity. It is a series of stages we soak in and progress through. And as for God, I believe that what he is primarily up to at any point in a boy’s or a man’s life is initiating him. So much of what we misinterpret as hassles or trials or screw-ups on our part is in fact God fathering us, taking us through something in order to strengthen us, or heal us, or dismantle some unholy thing in us.

• The result of having abandoned masculine initiation is a world of unfinished, uninitiated men. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We needn’t wander in a fog. We don’t have to live alone, striving, sulking, uncertain, angry. We don’t have to figure life out for ourselves. There is another way. Wherever we are in the journey, our initiation can begin in earnest.

 

[B5150]

Fathered by God: Discovering What Your Dad Could Never Teach You



2 - True Son of a True Father

I will be a Father to you,
and you will be my sons . . .
—2 Corinthians 6:18 NIV

KEY POINTS OF THE CHAPTER

• Most of us feel fundamentally fatherless.

• Our core assumptions about the world boil down to this: We are on our own to make life work. We are not watched over. We are not cared for.

• “The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart . . . the refusal to look up to God as our father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery.” (George MacDonald)

• You have a good Father. He is better than you thought. He cares. He really does. He’s kind and generous. He’s out for your best. You are the son of a kind, strong, and engaged Father, a Father wise enough to guide you in the Way, generous enough to provide for your journey.

• Coming home to our heavenly Father is the goal of human existence.

• We are Unfinished Men. And in truth, the Father has been fathering us for a long time now or, at least, trying to. What I’m suggesting is a new way of looking at your life as a man. To see your life as a process of initiation into masculine maturity, and your Father doing the initiating.

 

[NattyT]

Thanks b5150 this is good stuff I have had these type of talks with a lot of inner city youth.

 

[Zero V]

I am still going through the quest for authentic manhood :happysad:

Of course you can never get too much of a good thing:bling:

 

[B5150]

Fathered by God: Discovering What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

3 - Boyhood

Keep me as the apple of your eye.
—Psalm 17:8 NIV

KEY POINTS OF THE CHAPTER

• So much of the way we now approach life as men was set in motion in our youth—some of it for good, and some not so good. We want to recover what was good, and find healing for all that was not.

• Boyhood is a time of exploration and wonder, and to be a boy is to be an explorer. When God set Adam in the Garden of Eden, he set his son in a world that was, at the very same moment, safe and secure yet full of mystery and adventure. There was no reason whatsoever to be afraid, and every reason to dare. Evil is—for now—held at bay. Such is the world God intended for the boy. And that world is created under the sheltering strength of a father who makes you feel safe.

• This is the time in life when we were meant to come into the knowledge that we are the Beloved Son, the apple of our Father’s eye.

• A foundation in the heart of the boy is the lesson that life is not something you have to arrange for. There is someone who cares, someone who wants to give you good gifts.

• You are noticed. Your heart matters. Your Father adores you.

• The crucial thing about the stage of the Beloved Son—any of the stages, for that matter—is that it not be cut short, assaulted, unfinished, stolen in any way. We were designed to experience belovedness and boyhood, soak in it for years, learn its lessons, have them written indelibly upon our hearts, and then pass through this stage to the next, carrying all its treasures with us.

 

[B5150]

Fathered by God: Discovering What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

4 - Cowboy

And the boy grew in wisdom and stature,
and in favor with God and man.
—Luke 2:52 NIV

KEY POINTS OF THE CHAPTER

• I would set the beginning of the Cowboy (or Ranger) stage in early adolescence—around age twelve or thirteen—and suggest it carries into the mid-twenties. A notable shift begins to take place in the boy’s soul as he approaches his teens, a yearning for real adventure. Something inside tells him that he needs to prove himself, needs to be tested. And now the Question of a man’s soul begins to present itself in nearly everything the boy-becoming-a-young-man does: Do I have what it takes? In the Cowboy stage the answer comes partly through adventure, and partly through hard work.

• Men, and boys, learn by doing; we learn through experience. The experience is both a revelation and a kind of authoring, in that it reveals to you what you are made of and writes the lesson on your heart.

• Life is hard. While he is the Beloved Son, a boy is largely shielded from this reality. But a young man needs to know that life is hard. Until a man learns to deal with the fact that life is hard, he will spend his days chasing the wrong thing, using all his energies trying to make life comfortable, soft, nice, and that is no way for any man to spend his life.

• The Cowboy heart is wounded in a young man if he is never allowed to have adventure, and it is wounded if he has no one to take him there. It is wounded if he has no confidence-building experiences with work. And on both counts, it is wounded if the adventure or the work is overwhelming, unfit to the heart of the boy, and if he repeatedly fails there

 

[B5150]

Fathered by God: Discovering What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

5 - Warrior

Gird your sword upon your side, O mighty one.
—Psalm 45:3 NIV

KEY POINTS OF THE CHAPTER

• Our God is a warrior, mighty and terrible in battle, and he leads armies. It is this God that man is made in the image of.

• Our God is a Warrior because there are certain things in life worth fighting for, must be fought for. He makes man a Warrior in his own image, because he intends for man to join him in that battle.

• We live in a world at war. We are supposed to fight back.

• The heart of the Warrior says, “I will not let evil have its way. There are some things that can not be endured. I’ve got to do something. There is freedom to be had.” The heart of the Warrior says, “I will put myself on the line for you.”

• Above all, the Warrior learns to yield his heart to nothing. Not to kill his heart for fear of falling into temptation, but to protect his heart for more noble things, to keep the integrity of his heart as a great reservoir of passionate strength and holy desire.

• The Warrior heart has been wounded.

• We have a Father who is a great Warrior, and he will raise us as Warriors, if we’ll let him, if we will embrace the initiation that comes with this stage. There is a Warrior in you, by the way. However it has been handled up to this point in your life, it can be restored, recovered, and made strong. The promise of Scripture is that the Father is raising us to be sons just like Jesus, meaning, you shall be as valiant as he was.

 

[andrew732]

Good stuff.

 

[B5150]

Fathered by God: Discovering What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

6 - Lover

I found the one my heart loves . . .
—Song of Songs 3:4 NIV

KEY POINTS OF THE CHAPTER

• The great danger for the Warrior is not defeat, but success, for, as I said before, what the evil one then does to a good Warrior—if he cannot take him out, cannot keep him from entering the battle at all, as he has intimidated so many men—is to bury him.

• Down through its history the church has held up the good, the true, and the beautiful as a sort of trinity of virtues. As we think over the stages of the masculine journey, we find that the boy begins to understand Good as he learns right from wrong, and the Warrior fights for what is true, but when a man comes to see that the beautiful is the best of the three, then is the Lover awakened.

• It is very good for the Warrior to be arrested by Beauty. It provides a great balance to his soul, lest he simply be a fighter. The Celts had a phrase, “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance,” by which they meant if he is not also becoming a poet, be careful how much Warrior you allow a man to be.

• That which draws us to the heart of God is that which often first lifts our own hearts above the mundane awakens longing and desire. And it is that life, my brothers, the life of your heart that God is most keenly after.

• While in other realms God will remain Father, and Initiator, when the Lover begins to emerge God invites the man to become his “intimate one.” This is the crucial stage. The danger for the Warrior is that life becomes defined by battle, and that is not good for the soul nor is it true to our story, for there is something deeper than battle and that, my friends, is Romance.

• The awakening of his heart is essential if a man would truly love a woman.

• The heart of the Lover never gets to awaken or develop in a man so long as he rejects the heart, chooses to remain in the world of analysis, dissection, and “reason is everything.”

 

[B5150]

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