Stephen Mansfield Quotes

Being a man is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is a surrender of our priority. It is a laying down of our lives, not physically but inwardly - our preferences, our pleasures, sometimes even our dreams. Our version of Witold Pilecki's medals comes in the lives we offer to God, lives we have bled and sweated and prayed and given ourselves for. This is what it means to be a man.

In our love for our church and our holy regard for those who lead us in the things of God, we forget the nature of humanity. We are not surprised by the evil pressing in from without, but we are blind to the potential for wickedness that slumbers in our own souls. We forget that humans are a combination of greatness and grief, of righteous might and disgusting sin. In our sentimentality about our church and those we love in it, we forget to stand guard against the natural failings of humanity. We turn off our deflector shields and cast aside our filters and begin to ignore the signals our inner radar may be sending.

By doing rather than merely studying, we create a culture. Newcomers and the young feed on that culture. They watch. They do. They, too, are changed. Our culture expands. You Americans create a system of thought. The most you ask is that people contemplate new ideas. You might ask them to give or to sometimes attend meetings, but no contagious culture is created. Nothing is offered to newcomers and the young but thoughts. So they think. They don't do." We are changed. We craft

Honorable men refuse to wallow in the small and the bitter. Honorable men refuse to hate life because something once went wrong. Honorable men don't build monuments to their disappointments, nor do they let others brand them and curse them to their destruction. Honorable

David knew what it was to be a man. As he lay dying, he called his son Solomon to his bedside and gave him final instructions: "I am about to go the way of all the earth. So be strong and show yourself a man." These are the last recorded words of one of the greatest kings to ever live. Of all he might have said to his son with his final breath, he chose to instruct him to be a man. They are words we should never forget.

But the truth is, when it comes to emotional pain - the pain that registers inside - the greatest damage is often the thing that continues to resonate when the feeling of the pain subsides. It is that message that the pain tells us about ourselves and about the meaning of our lives.

The confirmation of history is that we are not called despite our wounding and betrayal; we are wounded and betrayed because we are called. And God yearns to make your pain redemptive in your life.

Here is where it leads us. And let me make this clear: there is nothing that happened in that wounding experience with that church that is worth what is happening to you now.

Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, "a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns." This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life.

If a man lives for the glory of God, he stops looking for affirmation from other human beings after every good deed, a pat on the head every time he does his duty. Instead, he throws himself into his role unselfishly. He contents himself with knowing he is fulfilling his purpose in this world and pleasing the God who made him.

Every Christian has a capacity for the most magnificent Christlikeness. Yet, every Christian also has the potential to commit the most disgusting and horrible acts of the flesh.

declare war on those parts of themselves that keep them from exceptional lives.

I want to identify what a genuine man does - the virtues, the habits, the disciplines, the duties, the actions of true manhood - and then call men to do it.

Every human soul is different. We are all shaped by both experience and design, by callings and the way our gifts mold our inner lives. Every soul has a bent, a drift, a way it wants to go. And when hard times come and the inner person writhes in torment, the soul reaches for what it thinks is anesthesia, for something to medicate the pain.

Beer, well respected and rightly consumed, can be a gift of God. It is one of his mysteries, which it was his delight to conceal and the glory of kings to search out. And men enjoy it to mark their days and celebrate their moments and stand with their brothers in the face of what life brings.

There is a schizophrenic nature in modern politics. A leader is expected to have a religious faith but he is not supposed to let it influence him in his duties. Somehow, the truths that determine everything else about his existence are not allowed to influence how he conducts himself in public life. Not only that, his principles are usually considered so personal that the public is not even allowed to know for certain what they are. This passes for noble statecraft in our time. It was once thought cowardice.

All it takes for a contagious manly culture to form is for one genuine man to live out genuine manhood. It creates a model, something for other men to feed upon and pattern themselves after. It also gives other genuine men a vital connection that sustains and extends who they are.

God is God, and I'm not.