As men who are called to lead, we must remember that every facet of our life, and every milisecond of our leadership, must be done in submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our King and soverign. We are simply the stewards of His treasures and will be held accountable for how we care for His possession. At the heart of it, that is the essence of male leadership. It is not pomposity, abdication, nor machismo. True godly and masculine leadership is found in submission to Jesus. It comes in orienting our lives around loving, serving, obeying, and worshipping Him.

When we began this masculinity series a couple of months ago, I was convinced that the recovery of Biblical manhood was one of, if not the most, important issues that we face today. There is an all-out war being waged against men and the culture around us is suffering because of it. In the same way that a house will not stand if you knock down it’s load bearing walls, a culture cannot stand when you knock down its men. They are the ones who were designed by God to bear the load of the nation, they are the ones who were made to protect our most valuable and precious citizens, our women, who in turn care for and protect our children. So, when you cut down the men, pervert them, and cripple them, you leave everyone else exposed… Which kind of seems like the point.
Today, we draw our masculinity series to a close by talking about what it means for men to bear the load of leadership. In this episode, we will talk about where true leadership begins and we will give a Biblical case for what male leadership looks like, in this generation, and beyond. So, let us first begin with where leadership begins, and that is at submission.
Submit Like a Man
In order to lead like a man, you must first know the limits of your leadership. You are not sovereign, Christ is. You are not unlimited, He is.
We know this from many passages, but perhaps the most clear passage for us to consider is Matthew 28:18, where Jesus says
 “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
Jesus’ perfect unbroken submission to His Father, along with His lifelong unblemished active submission to the law of God, as well as His lifelong unflinching passive submission to the covenantal plan of redemption – that would culminate in Him being crucified on a Roman cross, dying like a criminal, and buried in a borrowed tomb – is what earned Him supreme, unlimited, and unrivaled authority. When He rose form the dead, He did not claim a kind of amprophous or undefined victory… He triumphed over all powers, authority, and dominion. He earned maximal authority on earth, in heaven, over life, and over deah.
Knowing this, we may rightly conclude that there is no actual (or even perceieved) authority structure outside of Jesus Christ. Every king, every dictator, every potentate, and every single person exercises authority that is borrowed on credit from the Lord of glory. We will either bow our knee to Him, in this life, as humble slaves that have done our master’s bidding (Mt. 25:23) or we will bow in terror in the life to come, when He showcases His magnified and exalted position to all creation (Philippians 2:9-11).
As men who are called to lead, we must remember that every facet of our life, and every milisecond of our leadership, must be done in submission to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our King and soverign. We are simply the stewards of His treasures and will be held accountable for how we care for His possession. At the heart of it, that is the essence of male leadership. It is not pomposity, abdication, nor machismo. True godly and masculine leadership is found in submission to Jesus.
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The truly free and faithful person cannot live by lies. Everyone who chooses to do so, for whatever reason, is not truly free…nor morally strong. As Solzhenitsyn said many decades ago, such a person must admit, “I am part of the herd and a coward.”

At the precise moment of his arrest and exile from Soviet Russia in 1974, the celebrated literary dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn released a document that was as powerful as it was brief: Live Not By Lies.
At the precise moment when so many are speaking plain truth today—saying 2+2=4—and getting kicked off popular social media platforms for doing so, Solzhenitsyn’s words are deeply relevant and essential.
It was the great novelist’s simple and profound answer for how his people could resist the soul-crushing tyranny under which they lived. It is our answer today as well.
Communist ideology re-fashioned basic reality in a way the masses knew to be false; giving established words new meaning for political and ideological purposes. Dissent from the new order was not tolerated. Citizens were required, through excruciating political, economic, and ideological pressure, to speak and give assent to a carefully constructed, but wholly false reality. The people wrongly believed they controlled no real levers of power.
Does this sound like anything you recognize in culture today?
But Solzhenitsyn told his fellow citizens, and us today, they possessed the greatest power of all: the individual choice to refuse to live by lies. This is what this short, regime-toppling document explains, and it is worth us reading again today and taking to heart.
Solzhenitsyn explained the simple fact that the ideological system they were suffering under “demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” Thus, he told his countrymen,
The simple and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation is this: personal non-participation in lies.
Read that statement again for emphasis and reflect upon it. This truth is equally simple and profound. Resolving to refuse to speak or assent to what you know to be false is one of the greatest revolutionary acts a human can perform. Solzhenitsyn explained,
It is the easiest thing for us to do and the most destructive for the lies.
Why?
Because when people renounce lies, it cuts short their existence. Like parasites, they can only survive when carried by a person…Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies…and we will be amazed how swiftly the lies fall away, for that which should be naked will be exposed as such to the whole world.
Lies have no life if we all refuse to let them live in our own words. Simply stop serving as their host. This remarkable insight served to give a humble and seemingly powerless people the moral courage necessary to bring down one of the most dehumanizing systems in modern times. Their example is instructive to us in our age.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
 If you follow Jesus you will have your sins forgiven. Your shame will be wiped away to be replaced by the Father’s smile on his beloved daughter, his beloved son. Your fears and afflictions from evil spiritual forces will be defeated by the victory of Jesus on the cross. But they are not the good news.

I’m a charismatic, and plenty of others who would claim that label believe some fairly kooky things. It thus occasionally falls to us to carefully disassociate ourselves from what others might believe.
It’s pretty normal that we would occasionally denounce what is commonly called the ‘Prosperity Gospel’—essentially that if you follow the way of Jesus God will bless you financially. You will become rich, or sometimes healthy and rich.
This is a pernicious lie from the pit of hell, but I don’t have a lot of desire to spend time writing about why it is. Here’s the challenge I’d like to offer instead: I think most Christians I know believe something pretty similar.
I think that because I think I do.
Let’s back up a bit. We’re very careful to exclude financial blessing from the blessings that God will give you if you follow the way of Jesus. This is not to suggest that God could not bless us financially—as though Adam Smith’s invisible hand was a spiritual force not under Yahweh’s ultimate command—nor to say that if we receive wealth we shouldn’t thank God.
The problem comes when we imply that finances come as a reward for obedience.
Yet, there are plenty of passages in the Bible that suggest that God does bless the obedient. I think it’s a very reasonable thing to say. Normally we would want to qualify blessing to exclude health and wealth as a rule. Which I would happily agree with.
Here’s the rub. I believe that if I am obedient that God will bless me with comfort. I think it’s likely you do too. This is a lie. I believe that he will secure me gainful employment, a nice house, and a middle-classed lifestyle. God had given me much of the window dressing of middle-classed life, and some of it has come in ways that were frankly miraculous. I am deeply thankful, when I remember to be.
The problem is that if I think it’s a reward—even though I would deny I do if asked—and I experience pain, or even simple discomfort, I’m thrown for a loop. The problem is that I have, and I think we have, a doctrine of blessing that only works for middle-classed knowledge workers like me. The problem is that it’s a doctrine of blessing that would make no sense in South Sudan, or India, or North Korea. The problem is that it’s a false gospel.
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