Resources for Men
Christian men, We welcome you to our community. We are also thankful that you are choosing to lead your family in faith while you wait for your wife to discover Jesus.
Our demographics relfect that about 10-11% of our readership is male. There are actually more men living unequally yoked than you might expect. Although there are many different challenges in an unequally yoked marriage that are gender specific, many difficulties that we face are identical, such as loneliness in marriage, the Church attendance barrier, and raising kids to faith.
Through this specific men's ministry we hope to connect men with other men. It is our prayer and hope that you encourage and support one another in your spiritually mismatched marriage.
Below are resources that have been recommended to us by our male readers who have been part of our online community for several years. These recommended resources have given them encouragement or support.
Online forum for men:
*We will add information and articles as the Lord leads. If you have resources you would like to recommend for this page, please email us through our contact page. As always we will cover you and your family in prayer. Please let us know.
- One of the best sites for helping men be husbands: The Generous Husband.
Books:
- Surviving the Spiritual Mismatch by Lee Strobel
- Forgotten God, and Crazy Love, both by Francis Chan
- Uprising by Erwin McManus
- The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
- For Men Only by Shaunti Feldhahn (If possible, ask your wife if she will read For Women Only)
- The Love Dare by Stephen Kendrick and Alan Kendrick
A link from Focus on the Family
A link from Family Talk with Dr. Dobson
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The following is a post from Robert Young. To join Robert and other men for support and discussion, join the Yahoo group, Sanctified Life. Request membership today. (click here)
If I remember correctly, I think my son Marc was around five years old when he started to understand the concept of Christmas – of course the concept at five is presents. And like most boys at that age, with the grasping of such great knowledge, independence is usually not far behind. "I do it!" he yelled said as I tried to help him open one of his gifts. "I do it!"
It was his gift and he was going to take care of it even if the task was going to take him an hour; he was determined to do it himself.
As Christian men, we can sometimes be like that: too proud and far too independent to ask for help. Somewhere along the way we've developed the idea that it's wrong to ask for help, that it's something no real man should ever do. I watched the movies where the tough guys, the heroes always made their own way. They didn't need anybody's help, and even if the likes of Bruce Willis did have to bring help, they were a bunch of hard, macho types. He never had to humiliate himself and ask for help.
But we can't live life that way. It's impossible. It's fiction. It's difficult going our own way alone sometimes. We all get knocked down by life's circumstances and it can be hard to get back up. If we don't ask God for help, you don't stand a chance.
Pride can be a funny thing. Psalm 10:4 tells us: "In his pride the wicked does not seek Him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God." The psalmist recognized this shortcoming in men thousands of years ago and I know it hasn't gotten any better.
Jesus was different from us. He constantly sought his Father's advice and direction. His character was flawless, free from the pride we display. Instead of trying to make it on his own, he depended heavily on the Father and the Holy Spirit.
If our pride isn't bad enough, some of us can be quite stubborn and also slow learners. We refuse God's help, mess things up, then a year or five years or ten years later we just repeat the same thing. It's hard for us to overcome our pride and the innate need for independence.
How do we break this cycle? How do we get into the habit of asking God for help, not just in big things but every single day?
We have to come to terms with who we are. Every Christian man has enough failures in his past to remind him that going it alone simply doesn't work. We shouldn't be embarrassed by our failures; we should be embarrassed because we were too arrogant to ask and accept God's help. But it's never too late to remedy that.
We need to learn from other Christian men who have humbled themselves and who rely on God for help and direction each day. We can see the victories in their lives. We can marvel at their maturity, their calmness and their faith in a trustworthy God. Those same admirable qualities can become ours., too.
There's hope for every one of us. We can live the life we've always dreamed of. Pride is a trait we can overcome, but first we need to start by asking God for help.