Navigating the Complexity of the Male Inner World | Formation Series

Sam.

Foreign hey.

Welcome to another episode of the Prodigal Journey.

We are continuing in our formation series for men.

And this second episode, I want to talk about.

I want to talk a little bit more about the inner world that we as men have ignored.

And this is kind of the question beneath the surface and just getting a little bit more into how we as men relate to our inner world.

And just to kind of recap the first episode, last episode, we talked about the reality that every one of us is being formed in one way or another.

And it's not a question about being formed.

It's who or what is forming us.

And we tried to make some connections there.

And whether we realize it or not, we're all being discipled by something.

Every voice that we repeatedly listen to is shaping the kind of person that we are becoming and whatever that voice looks like in our lives.

But that definitely raises another question, and it makes me ask what part of us is actually being formed?

One thing I've realized, especially as I was preparing this series and just some of the things that we talked about last episode, is I've started to realize that men can describe their responsibilities very well a lot of times, and that part comes very easy to us.

And this is something I've been thinking about lately.

And I think a lot of us as men could tell you exactly what's happening in our lives in regards to our work.

You know, maybe projects we're working on around the house or hobbies, bills that need paid, what's broken around the house, Just the next thing that needs to get done.

So many of us as men really know how to explain our respons responsibilities, but far fewer of us really know how to describe the content, or I guess I should say, the condition of our hearts.

A lot of times when people ask us how we're doing, the typical response is I'm fine.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Most of us would probably answer I'm good or I'm fine.

And sometimes that's true.

But I wonder how many times we may say those words simply because we don't really know what else to say as men.

So we just say I'm fine and hope that nobody asks any more deeper questions.

And that's not necessarily because we're trying to hide something.

And it's not really because we don't even care.

It's because somewhere along the way, many of us have learned to pay attention to everything happening around us, but slowly losing touch with what's happening inside of us.

And so that's why this is such a burden on my heart to talk about and just hopefully will be helpful to you as well, because this has also been true for me.

I don't say this again.

I. I stressed this in the first episode.

I don't say this as someone who's completely figured this out.

I've realized this in my own life more than once.

I've had loving people and mentors point this out to me in different areas in my life as well.

There's been times when I would come home, and this is an example of this.

But, you know, many times I would come home from work or wherever I was, and I would just start telling my wife about something that had happened that day during my workday or whatever I was doing.

And at the time, I thought I was simply sharing what was going on.

But over time, I started to realize something.

I was handing her weight that I hadn't taken the time to carry myself or carry before God.

And I would just, you know, unload that weight on my wife or my family.

And I've had that lovingly pointed out to me more than once.

You know, there's moments when I think I'm simply communicating what's going on, but I'm actually, again, handing someone else emotions that I haven't taken the time to even understand myself.

I'm not saying we shouldn't bring our struggles to the people we love.

We absolutely should.

But there's a difference between inviting someone into what we're carrying and handing them something we haven't even taken before God, ourselves.

And so I want to make sure we understand that distinction in the difference between those two things.

I myself may have felt lighter after the conversation, but the person I loved was now carrying something that I haven't even slowed down to.

Slowed down long enough to understand and process myself.

So hopefully that makes sense with that example and how we can sometimes not process what's going in.

What's going on in our inner world as men.

And maybe you're asking, like, why does our inner world even matter?

You know, that experience kind of forced me to ask a bigger question.

Why hadn't I recognized what was happening inside me before I brought it to someone else?

And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if this was something bigger than just one conversation.

You know, maybe I wasn't simply failing to process one difficult day.

Maybe I had spent years learning how to pay attention to everything outside of me while rarely stopping to ask what was happening inside of me, what was happening deep in my soul why I was responding in those ways.

I wasn't trying to hide.

I wasn't trying to avoid anything.

And really, the truth is, I just hadn't learned to pay attention.

And for those of you that know me well, that sounds like something weird to admit when I'm someone who pays close attention to a lot of things.

But again, a lot of those things I was paying attention to were things that were happening outside of me.

I could remember details, I could remember people, but I couldn't pay attention to the very things that were happening in my soul.

And I wonder if that's true for a lot of Christian men.

We've learned to work hard.

We've learned to provide, protect.

We've learned how to carry responsibilities.

And.

And again, as I said in the first episode, those are all good things.

And Scripture will honor those things.

But somewhere along the way, many of us were never taught to pay attention to the condition of our own hearts.

You know, what?

If one of the greatest areas of neglect in our discipleship is our inner world, it's not something we talk about much as men, because here's what I've come to believe.

We cannot surrender to God what we've refused to acknowledge.

Let me say that again.

We cannot surrender to God what we refuse to acknowledge.

If I don't recognize what's happening in my own heart, how can I even surrender it to God?

I can't just expect him to always point something out and say, this is what I need you to surrender.

We have to do the hard work of transformation in the sense of sanctification and working it out in our own hearts.

And we're commanding to do that in scripture.

And then, you know, I think, I feel like a lot of times we just lazily, you know, confess, please forgive me for being angry at my family or my kids that day or my wife, without really acknowledging that the fact that the anger was an outward expression of something deeper happening inside of us.

And so we rarely take the time to.

To dig into that inner world.

I think what men often do instead, and the reality is most of us don't ignore our inner world on purpose.

We just know how to keep moving.

It's something we've been taught to do.

Pick yourself up by our bootstraps.

Don't cry.

Don't show emotion.

Just keep moving.

Don't be weak.

When something hurts, we work.

When life feels overwhelming, we stay busy.

When we're anxious, we just tend to solve another problem.

When we're discouraged, we pick up our phones or Find a way to distract ourselves.

When we're carrying disappointment, sometimes it comes out as frustration instead.

And it's not necessarily because we're angry, but because anger is easier to recognize than grief or something deeper.

Sometimes productivity becomes a coping mechanism and becomes an idol.

Responsibility can become a hiding place for us.

And eventually we become really good at functioning without actually knowing what's happening inside of us.

And this is such a struggle for so many men, myself included.

We have been discipled in responsibility, but not in self examination before God.

You know, I often wonder, could it be that the strongest man in the room isn't the one caring the most, but the one who has learned to honestly bring his heart before God?

And that brings us to a scriptural invitation.

You know, this, this is what amazes me about Scripture.

The examples of men we often see in scripture and the men we see God working through, they weren't emotionally disconnected.

You know, when you look at the life of David, for example, David, throughout all the Psalms, he wrote about fear, confession, joy.

He wrote about shame, anger, hope, grief.

He wrote about all the spectrum of emotions we experience as humans.

I mean, you can't get very far in the Psalms without reading those things.

And as you read those things, you'll find a man who continually brought his heart, his entire heart, before God.

And we know that David wasn't perfect.

We see the examples of the ways he failed in Scripture, but we also see a man who was considered to be a man after God's own heart.

And he brought his entire heart to God.

You know, it wasn't because every emotion was right, but because every part of his life belonged before God.

And he understood that God didn't turn those people away for asking questions.

He didn't turn them away for experiencing or communicating those emotions to God.

But he welcomed those things as part of a bigger picture.

And even when we look at Jesus, Jesus wept, he grieved, he felt compassion, he experienced deep anguish in Gethsemane.

He experienced, you know, disappointments.

And none of that made him weak.

It revealed what true strength looks like.

And I think biblical maturity isn't pretending nothing is happening inside of us.

It's learning to bring everything that's happening inside of us before God.

And again, we miss that so often as men.

And we don't know how to process those things because we've been taught to just keep, keep going, keep doing the next responsibility, you know, awareness.

One thing I'm learning is that awareness is really where the surrender begins for us.

And I want to clarify that by saying, I don't think.

I don't necessarily think that God is asking us to become more introspective.

I don't think he's inviting us to become self absorbed.

Because the ultimate goal, even in itself, is not awareness.

The goal is surrender.

Awareness is kind of the doorway that brings us to surrender that we have to walk through.

And surrender has to begin somewhere.

So it begins by slowing down long enough just to notice what's actually happening inside of us.

Asking questions like, what am I carrying today?

What am I afraid of?

What disappointments have I not admitted to someone in my life?

What am I still trying to outwork and avoid?

And even those questions in themselves, they aren't the finish line again.

They're simply the doorway into bringing our entire souls to Jesus and processing those things before God.

As we think about going into the next episode, we're going to just look more specifically at the perfect example, the life of Jesus.

Not simply as someone we're called to imitate, but as the clearest picture of what a fully formed human life actually looks like.

We have so many examples in Scripture of the ways that he has modeled this to us.

And so we're just going to take a deeper look into the life of Jesus, walk through some of the examples and just see how he handled those situations, emotions.

That way we can, you know, begin to bring those things before Jesus as the ultimate goal is surrender.

I appreciate you listening.

This was a shorter one this time, but I really think that sets the stage.

These first two episodes.

And now we're going to look more at the life of Jesus as the clearest picture and example of what a fully human, fully formed human life actually looks like.

Someone who represented this clearly to us.

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All right, thanks for listening.

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