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The Daily Blade: Joby Martin & Kyle Thompson
#129 - Matt Chandler // Toxic Masculinity: A Christian Perspective
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Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.
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Morning, men. This is Pastor Matt Chandler from the Village Church in the Dallas Fort Worth area. And I'll be walking with you. This week in the American Psychological association, it released its first guidelines for counseling boys and young men. The APA denounced what they called traditional masculine ideology as psychologically harmful. This is the birth of the phrase toxic masculinity. And it's been injected into the bloodstream, bloodstream of American, the American imagination. It's like a catch all phrase for any kind of male aggression. Now, I don't think anybody's claiming that there isn't something like toxic masculinity, but the problem is this is kind of blanketedly laid across anything that would be even biblically masculine. And so what ends up happening, brothers, is we can hear this message so often, especially young men, they can hear it so often that they start to believe there's something inherently defective in male character. And this is what the data is showing, brothers. All the sociological data is showing that men feel discouraged, devalued, demoralized. And, and I just want to kick off the week just asking, does any of that resonate with you? Like, do you feel lonely? Like few people know and, or understand the pressure you are feeling and walking in during this season of your life? Do you have a low level of frustration that's like always simmering beneath the surface? Do you find that sometimes it boils over and you don't even understand why? Then you're filled with regret and shame. Are you tired in your bones with the weight of the responsibility you shoulder and then the pressure that goes along with that. Like, you just feel like you, you just can't screw up this whole thing. Are you fighting with everything in you to not maybe be like your dad? But then if you're honest, you're kind of walking in the very same patterns. Well, what I want to do this week is I want to encourage your soul. I want to level set what it means to be a man. I'm not trying to answ the question, what does it mean to be male? I think that simple. A male has XY chromosome and a penis. But just because he's male doesn't make him a man. There are certain things that God puts on us. The scriptures put on us that helps us kind of measure am I playing the man or or am I just a boy who can shave? And so that that's my hope this week to just encourage you. In Genesis chapter two, starting in verse seven, it says this Lord God took the man or formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils and the man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden and in the east. There he placed the man he had formed. Now this is significant because God biologically made men unique and different than women because of testosterone. Men are typically larger and stronger and faster than women in general were more physical, more competitive, more risky taking. Now that's not always true like my wife is scarily competitive. But by and large women or men tend to be more physical and competitive, more risk taking. Men have thicker skin, about 25% thicker skin than women. They also have higher densities of the protein collagen like our thin our skin is literally thicker. The difference in density actually goes beyond skin. We also have stronger bones, stronger tendons and stronger ligaments than women. On average. Men tend typically have far more muscle mass than women and those skeletal muscles are faster and more powerful. Now it's interesting that women's muscles, they they actually resist fatigue and recover faster, but they're not as strong or as pliable as ours are. Then there are differences in the way our brains are structured, how we process information and interact with chemical signals. So let me give you a couple of examples there. Men have more information containing gray matter, but women have more white matter which connects to different parts of the brain. Like women also have bigger memory centers than men and maybe that helps make sense of some of the arguments you get in with your wife. And then lastly, men are less sensitive to cold temperatures. Now I'm starting this week out just by highlighting the unique strength that God put in you as a man in creation. This is not how he put women together. We'll get into that later. He he gave us a unique strength. And so the question we have answer is why did God give us this unique strength? Why is our skin thicker? Why do our brains process different? Why are we more aggressive? And so we'll we'll be back next week or tomorrow to answer that question. The the questions easily answered in the book of generous or in the book of Genesis. So we'll see you tomorrow morning.
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