Getting in Touch With Your Feelings? You Need to Get in Touch with Your Testicles! Sprout a Pair!

There's a local leader in the psychobabble world that unwittingly is contributing to the crybaby syndrome so prevalent in our culture...particularly among men.

His advice to men (using the term loosely) is consistent with the postmodern culture at large: "Get in touch with your feelings." Here's some of the reasons he offers for this "guide" to mental health.

* It is healthy to feel your feelings.
* There is no such thing as a right or wrong feeling.
* All feelings are OK.
* It is OK to feel what I am feeling now.
* No one can take what I am currently feeling away from me.
* I have a right to feel my feelings.
* No one can judge me wrong for feeling the feelings I experience in my life.
* It is OK to have negative feelings and to identify and express them freely.
* Identifying and expressing my feelings makes me a real and authentic human being.
* No one can deny me my feelings.
* No one can tell me how I should be feeling.
* No one has the right to make me feel bad or guilty for the feelings I am feeling.
* I am more alive and vigorous when I am in touch with my feelings.
* I have a right to have my feelings be visible, seen and heard by others.
* I will no longer hide my feelings and emotions from myself and the others in my life.
* I deserve to have my feelings listened to by others.

If your worldview is driven by the asinine theory that human beings...men for the sake of this blog, are the result of a random process, a mass of cells developed by accident over billions of years...blind chance...with no purpose, no manly responsibility, no inherent values, no rhyme or reason as to why you were born with a pair...than by all means, get on board and offer your masculinity up for the surgeon's knife. But think it through. Feelings are not experienced in a vacuum. They are the product of emasculated, infantile thinking.

Here's what raw emotionalism driven by this prevailing worldview has brought to the lives of men:

There is a battery of questions that all worldviews use as a building block that offers a validation for how we feel, and ultimately how we live...in other words, there is a correspondence between how we think and how we feel... And everyone has a worldview, even in a culture that would rather light candles and bump weenies than think, the simple fact is everyone has a worldview.

If your thinking is that you are mass in motion with no moral culpability, no direction, that livng a life centered on yourself, then validating your self defeating emotions will become a way of life. Taking responsibility for failures to love, to protect, to lead as a man in appropriate ways in all your varied relationships will make no sense.

If your thinking is that you have no other purpose than to consume and enjoy...without regard to any higher ideal or value, than you will inevitably cry like a baby every time your context suggests, or in some cases demands otherwise. When your children interfere with your schedule, you'll "feel" that its unfair and you will cry about it. When your wife needs you to man up and provide for her needs...to sacrifice your desires for her greatest good, you will "feel" put upon and you will whine. When your boss demands that you give an honest days work for an honest days wage, you will "feel" mistreated.

If your thinking is that the way to fix your problems is to focus on your own needs, your own emotions, your own sexual desire, your own hunger, you will "feel" empty and all that will be left is to whine. You will be consumed with how others treat you rather than how you might serve others. You will abandon your responsibilities and take no responsibility for your life. You'll blame your mom, your dad, the nurse who dropped you on your head, the neighbor, the boss, the wife, the kids, the lack there of, the bottle, the government, the church, the pastor, the deacon, any and everyone but yourself. In the end, this will lead to self-destruction.

The good doctor's advice that we started with is not recommended.

“Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
(Philippians 3:19 ESV)

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the only way to redeem our sagging masculinity. We don't need to get in touch with our feelings. We need to get in touch with our God given maleness as it is redeemed through our King!

Paul writes to the Church in Colossians:

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
(Colossians 1:16-20 ESV)

Here's the worldview that counts! Why? Because it’s true. The truth will liberate crybabies and emasculated men. The truth will set us free.

Masculinity redeemed in a nutshell.

1. Jesus is the Creator and Lord of all. That means that you are His subject. Again, slowly...you are the slave, the peasant, the creature, the worm (Psalm 8, Job 25:6). Jesus is the sovereign, divine, rightful King, the boss, the One in charge, of all creation.
2. The only proper response is to fall on our faces and worship Him! “For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. Today, if you hear his voice,”(Psalms 95:3-7 ESV). The creative acts of Jesus offer the grounds for His universal right to rule.
3. Men are inherently sinful from the fall forward, born into sin with no way to extrapolate themselves from their fallen, sinful condition or the slavery to their sinful desires. This includes our feelings and our manufactured false worldviews. The solution is not an apologetic of accommodation. God has said so and history confirms our condemnation. Our sinful nature means that we have cast of restraint and rejected, both as a race and individually, the rightful Kingship of Jesus. Creating kings and gods of our own choosing is the root of the problem and the precipitous cause of all that is wrong with the world (Genesis 6:5; Ps 14:1-3; Ps 51:5; Is 64:6; John 8:7; Romans 3:23; Romans 5:12-19).
4. The Kingdom and the eternal enjoyment of God is within our grasp only through the penal substitution of Christ on the cross. That’s the point of the Colossians text: "making peace by the blood of his cross.” The very real and bloody sacrifice of Jesus on the cross fulfilled what the sacrifices of the Old Testament looked forward to. Namely, the satisfaction of God's wrath against sinful humanity. The penalty of our sin was placed on our King...and "He who knew no sin (Jesus) was made sin (became our substitute) so that in Him, we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor 5:21) The "blood of the cross" is the divine solution to our total depravity.
5. Hell is a real place of eternal torment and the expression of justice of sinful humanity for those who reject Jesus, the sovereign King and Savior.
6. God created men to be men under the sovereign control and demands of their sovereign King. That means that the transforming power of the gospel will bring our money, time, affections, motives, thoughts, deeds, purpose, direction, and hope under His rule and liberate us to stop whining and to live as free men, enjoying all that He has decreed!

Stop crying...and worship Jesus. Be a man. Place your emotions where they need to be: a response to a Biblical worldview...a gospel and Christ centered life. The women in your life will thank you.