The most surprising men, whether alive today or throughout history, are men of persistent love. Men all over the world accomplish much for any number of reasons — for pride, for money, for fame and honor, for power. We expect men to work hard, take risks, and make sacrifices for self. A few strange men, however, do all that they do for love. They also work hard and take risks and make sacrifices, but they do it for the good of others, especially their eternal good.

When the apostle Paul wrote to a younger man, discipling him in manhood and ministry, he charged him, “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). While the qualities in this verse apply to young men and women alike, I find that they provide a simple yet challenging paradigm for becoming better men of God.

And could we have heard the apostle read this short list to his disciple, I think he may have slowed down over love, letting it land with special force.

Indispensable Ambition

Why would I think that? Because Paul begins the letter, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5). My whole reason for writing, Timothy, is that you might be a man of love — and that you might lead others further into that love. Love, as John Piper defines it, “is the overflow and expansion of joy in God, which gladly meets the needs of others” (The Dangerous Duty of Delight, 44). So, Timothy, set the believers an example in your growing, overflowing, need-meeting joy in God. Teach them, with your life, how to love.

“Love is an indispensable ambition for any man pursuing maturity in Christ.”

The apostle Peter charges followers of Jesus, “Above all” — above all — “keep loving one another earnestly” (1 Peter 4:8). And then Jesus himself says, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples . . .” — not by what we can do, or how much we know, or how hard we work, but by our love (John 13:35). Love proves that a man truly belongs to God — that God has chosen him, redeemed him, equipped him, transformed him, and lives in him. We should expect selfishness, sexual immorality, impurity, idolatry, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, and drunkenness from men (Galatians 5:19–21) — but genuine love confronts our (well-informed) assumptions about men.

If love, then, sets us apart as men of God, then love is an indispensable ambition for any man pursuing maturity in Christ.

What Real Love Does

Anyone who has genuinely loved knows just how hard love can be. Paul certainly saw and felt the hurdles himself, as well as how easily love can wither in relationships. His first letter to the church at Corinth addresses a host of serious issues, but perhaps none is weightier than their lack of love for one another. First Corinthians 13 — “the love chapter” — wasn’t written to newlyweds basking in the anticipation of marital intimacy; it was written to a church deeply infected with selfishness and divisiveness — to Christians who thought themselves mature while their love had grown cold.

So, what does real love look like? As men of God, how do we discern if our love is rooted in and empowered by God, or if it is just a self-flattering figment of our imagination? Paul gives us a series of reliable tests, culminating (and to some degree summarized) in 1 Corinthians 13:7:

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Men Who Bear

Men of love do not abdicate responsibility in relationships, or shift blame when things go wrong, or turn a blind eye to the needs of others; they bear, and do so with joy. Men of love are men who gladly bear the burdens of others, and who bear with others when they become a burden — when they disappoint, hurt, or offend us.

The man of God not only bears what might earn him praise or recognition, but he bears what other men will not — what might seem, from an earthly perspective, foolish. What is he getting out of that? And maybe even more surprisingly, he consistently bears the needs and offenses of others with patience, not irritability; with kindness, not harshness or rudeness (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). When a man loves in the strength of God, the burdens he bears are real and yet they are also strangely light (Matthew 11:30). He carries more than most, with more grace than most.

“When a man loves in the strength of God, the burdens he bears are real and yet they are also strangely light.”

So, what burdens might you bear? If you’re married, this begins at home. How sensitive are you to the everyday and ever-changing needs of your wife and children? How ready are you to go above and beyond in shouldering those needs? How well do you bear with the particular weaknesses and sins in your family? And then, having provided well at home, have you thought much about how the joy in you and your home might overflow to meet needs in your church family, your neighborhood, and wherever else God has placed you?

If you are not married, you may assume there are fewer burdens to bear, but remember: the apostle Paul was an unmarried man, and he did not lack burdens to carry. All of us are surrounded by need. Singleness often allows us to shoulder more with greater focus than those who are married (1 Corinthians 7:32–35).

Men Who Believe

Love also believes all things of other people. That sounds awfully naive, maybe even reckless and irresponsible, doesn’t it? Surely men of God know better than that. When the apostle says that love believes all things, he does not mean love believes everything it hears — Jesus certainly did not — but that love believes the best of others. To say it another way, when thoughts, desires, or motives are unclear, love does not assume the worst.

Cynicism, that sin we despise in others and yet often coddle in ourselves, is not the wisdom it pretends to be. It is a profound lack of love masquerading as “discernment.” Love, of course, is discerning. “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more,” Paul says, “with knowledge and all discernment” (Philippians 1:9). But love is not only discerning. As godly discernment grows and is refined, its love does not shrink and shrivel, but abounds more and more. And while this kind of discernment thinks carefully and deeply, while it feels the seriousness of sin and stands ready to confront it when necessary, it also refuses to assume evil of anyone. Love believes all things.

Whom do you struggle to believe the best of? Whom are you least gracious with — your spouse or roommate, your children or parents, your coworkers, classmates, or neighbors? Men of God rejoice at the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6), and when the truth is unclear, they believe all things. So, when suspicion begins to swell in your heart again, fight to assume the best (it will often be a fight!), and entrust your soul “to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19).

Men Who Hope

Men of God believe the best of others, and they hope the best for others, because love hopes all things. This hope is not “our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13), but a relentless horizontal hopefulness rooted in that great and happy hope. Good men don’t rejoice at the failures or misfortunes of others. They’re not consumed with selfish and competitive ambition. They’re not plagued by envy. They rejoice to see others succeed, bear fruit, and thrive — especially their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Paul doesn’t talk about this horizontal hope often, but he does in 2 Corinthians 1:7: “Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” Even while he was horribly afflicted, “so utterly burdened beyond [his] strength that [he] despaired of life itself” (2 Corinthians 1:8), Paul still hoped the best for the brothers in Corinth. He took courage and strength in knowing that their future would be better because his present had gotten worse. Men filled with the Spirit of God think and hope that way.

“When thoughts, desires, or motives are unclear, love does not assume the worst.”

So, in each of your relationships, hope for the best. Pray for the best. Ask God to use you to improve someone else’s life and future, even if it costs you along the way. Lay aside the selfishness and competitiveness that groans when others prosper while we struggle, and thank God when you see him using and elevating the gifts of someone else. Men who hope the best for others are unusually joyful men because they have so many more reasons to rejoice. Their joy isn’t limited to their own successes, achievements, and opportunities, but is catalyzed and strengthened by the joy of others.

Men Who Endure

The love of these men not only bears burdens, but keeps bearing burdens. Long after others would have walked away, feeling they had done all they could do, men of love stay and endure.

Fraudulent love always fades and fails, often quickly, like the seed that fell along the rocky ground (Mark 4:17). When real love meets resistance, the resistance doesn’t just reveal endurance, but actually produces endurance (Romans 5:3). These men will set boundaries when necessary in certain relationships, but will also endure more than most would. They love differently, they love durably, because they have been “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11).

Of this quality of love, Leon Morris writes,

It is the endurance of the soldier who, in the thick of the battle, is undismayed, but continues to lay about him vigorously. Love is not overwhelmed, but manfully plays its part whatever the difficulties. (1 Corinthians, 182)

Almost any man would like to think himself the soldier who would endure “whatever difficulties,” but like Peter as Jesus was betrayed, we often imagine ourselves dying for love (Matthew 26:35) only to cave before the servant girl in front of us (Matthew 26:69–70). We grumble and give way before the particular difficulties in our path, and make convenient excuses to get out of doing what love requires — we’re tired, we’re busy, we have our own needs, we’ve done so much already.

So, what tempts you to walk away? Anyone who is called to love sinners has plenty of reasons to give up. Love overcomes those reasons, and takes the next brave, costly step, as Jesus did when he bore the cross for us. When I lack the heart to endure, with patience and joy, in marriage, in friendship, in church life, in evangelism, I need to remember just how many reasons Jesus had to abandon me — and yet he has never left me or forsaken me (Hebrews 13:5, 8). So, forbid that, as I follow him, I be found to be a leaving or forsaking man.

Men Who Die

While death to self did not explicitly make the list in 1 Corinthians 13, we catch at least a whiff of this kind of sacrifice in verse 5: “[Love] does not insist on its own way.” Love often dies to its own way — to its own needs, its own desires, sometimes even to its own sense of what would be best or wisest.

“Loving men are always dying men — and happy men.”

And as we look up and widen our gaze beyond the love chapter, we see this thread of loving manhood again and again, most powerfully in the God-man of love: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). And so, he loved — and in doing so, he left us an example of surprising, masculine, sacrificial love.

For love to bear, it must die to comfort and convenience. For love to believe, it must die to cynicism. For love to hope, it must die to selfish ambition. For love to endure, it must die, again and again, to self. Loving men are always dying men — and happy men. As they die, they follow Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Like him, men of God love and die for joy.

Water baptisms are joyful occasions for believers of all stripes. We delight in the sound of the water, the ritual motion of the participants, the sight of the glistening smiles, the oddity of the entire scene. Sacraments make the intangible tangible, and memorable. Baptism makes the gospel splashable.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism explains that baptism is one of the “ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption” (question 88). Unfortunately for many of us, baptism has become quite ordinary — and not in a Westminster Catechism kind of way. (I write this as a baptist, who can be some of the worst offenders!) Though the sight of a baptism may give us joy, we can fail to see the many redemptive benefits God gives through this ordinance — and to grasp them for ourselves again. The memory of our baptism may be fresh or may have faded, but this punctiliar event in the life of the believer should grow sweeter with time.

God’s past, present, and future grace awaits us at Jordan’s stormy banks, if we are willing to take the plunge (2 Kings 5:10–14).

Plunged into the Past

A teary sentimentality often accompanies a baptismal ceremony. Each one we witness reminds us of our own. Moreover, each one we witness reminds us of Christ’s. Baptism is backward-looking by nature — a proclamation of faith in God’s grace demonstrated to us in the past.

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us of an obvious but profound fact about the cross: Jesus has not died and been raised in the modern era. To find saving grace, we must look to the past: “I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ” (54). Baptism makes us a participant in that history. Baptism puts us into the Jordan with the repentant sinners, where we watch a sinless man come down and join us in the water (Matthew 3:6, 13–17).

“As we are united with the Son, we hear the Father’s divine favor spoken over us.”

In God’s gracious providence, baptism is the place where our lives intersect the narrative of Scripture. Plunging beneath the water, we pass through the pages and become characters in its plot. At baptism, our lives are eclipsed by the life of Christ — his death and resurrection: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. . . . We have been united with him” (Romans 6:4–5).

As we are united with the Son, we hear the Father’s divine favor spoken over us: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). His pleasure in us is a past proclamation, resting on our identity in Christ — not on our present performance. Whether we waver, doubt, sin, succeed, overcome, do good, the Father’s grace echoes over the waters of time from the moment our lives were “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

Surrounded in the Present

Baptism is not always a lighthearted affair, especially in non-Western contexts. During Amy Carmichael’s ministry (1867–1951), Indians realized — rightly — that baptism was the end of supreme loyalty to caste or family. When she spoke with the brothers of a young lady who wished to be baptized, they responded, “Baptized! She shall burn in ashes first. She may go out dead if she likes. She shall go out living — never!”

While most of us may not face imminent death, following Christ does mean losing one’s former life (Mark 8:35). “But he gives more grace” (James 4:6); we are baptized into a people. This is part of God’s present grace: instant family! We receive mothers and fathers to carry us along in our discipleship and brothers and sisters to feast with along life’s pilgrim way (1 Timothy 5:1–3).

Paul reminds us that baptism also places us in the stream of orthodoxy: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5). The cloud of witnesses encourages us to run today’s leg of the race with endurance (Hebrews 12:1–2). The writings of Athanasius, Augustine, and Cranmer; the hymns of Steele, Watts, and Crosby; and the orthodox creeds of Nicaea, Chalcedon, and the Apostles help us to faithfully “guard the good deposit” entrusted to us in the present (2 Timothy 1:14).

In the new covenant, we join a company of priests who have been baptized with the Spirit (Mark 1:8). And to borrow a line from Kendrick Lamar, the Spirit makes sure “the holy water don’t go dry.” In other words, baptism reminds us of the continual work of the Spirit today. James B. Torrance puts it this way in Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace: “The water exhibits not an absent Christ, but a Christ present according to his promise. The Christ who was baptized at Calvary in our place, as our substitute, is present today to baptize us by the Holy Spirit, in faithfulness to his promise: ‘Lo I am with you . . .’” (80).

Assured of the Future

For all baptism’s past and present grace, a not-yet element remains. Baptism is a public declaration of hope that grace awaits us on the final day.

“Baptism is a public declaration of hope that grace awaits us on the final day.”

Although God’s focus in the new covenant is more internal (compared to the external focus of the old), Christians do not abandon hope for the renewal of the outside. The author of Hebrews insists that baptism — the washing of our bodies with pure water — gives us great confidence as we see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:19–25). Why? Our salvation is not yet complete. Our union with Christ holds one final, eternal grace: “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).

Christ’s baptism was a Trinitarian prophecy of his death and resurrection. Our baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is too. The Christian life begins with a bold proclamation about the end; baptism is a statement of faith in the future grace of resurrection, when all of God’s people will rise to receive a body like Christ’s (Philippians 3:20–21).

Our Passive Amen

Through baptism, God brings past grace near to contemporary believers, secures us in a state of abiding present grace, and excites in us hope for future grace at the resurrection from the dead. In baptism, we do nothing to add to God’s full acceptance of us in Christ. As Torrance reminds us, “There is nothing more passive than dying, being buried, being baptized” (77). As we wash in the water, we proclaim our passive amen of faith to God’s past, present, and future grace: Let it be so — I believe!

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14695697/what-is-biblical-meekness