What God Wants Men to Be
A message from The Woodlands First Baptist Church — The Woodlands, TX
The world keeps handing men two scripts, and both of them are lies. The first says: be tough. Dominate. Never show weakness, never apologize, never need anyone. The second says: be soft. Step back. Your strength is a problem, your convictions are dangerous, and the safest version of you is a quiet one.
Tierce Green, speaking at The Woodlands First Baptist Church in The Woodlands, TX, opened this message by naming both ditches. Because that is what they are: two ditches on either side of a road that Scripture has been describing for three thousand years. Men who follow the first script wound the people around them. Men who follow the second abandon them. Furthermore, most men today were never shown a third option.
The Bible offers one. It is older than the current debates, sturdier than the cultural pendulum, and more demanding than either ditch. It comes into focus in two passages: a dying king’s final words to his son, and four rapid-fire commands from the Apostle Paul.
A Dying King’s Charge: Show Yourself a Man
First Kings 2:1–4 records David’s final words to his son Solomon. The old king is dying, and the kingdom is about to pass to a young man who will face pressures his father knows intimately. David does not give Solomon military advice or political strategy first. He gives him this: “I am about to go the way of all the earth. So be strong, and show yourself a man, and keep the charge of the Lord your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his rules, and his testimonies, as it is written in the Law of Moses, that you may prosper in all that you do.”
Notice the order, Tierce points out. “Show yourself a man” is immediately defined by what follows: keep the charge of the Lord your God. Walk in his ways. In David’s mind, manhood is not measured by conquest, wealth, or dominance. It is measured by covenant faithfulness. A man, in the biblical sense, is someone who knows what God requires and orders his life around it, especially when it costs him something.
The Honest Complication of David
Here is what makes this passage more powerful rather than less: David himself failed at much of it. His moral collapse with Bathsheba, his passivity as a father while his family disintegrated, his seasons of compromise, all of it is recorded in Scripture without flinching. The Bible does not airbrush its heroes.
Yet David is still called a man after God’s own heart. Tierce is careful with this, because it matters. The title was never about David’s perfection. It was about his direction. When David sinned, he repented fully, took responsibility without excuse, and returned to God. Psalm 51 exists because a broken man refused to hide from the God he had failed. That, Tierce argues, is itself one of the most important lessons about biblical manhood: godly men are not men who never fall. They are men who refuse to stay down, refuse to blame, and refuse to quit walking toward God.
For every man who has disqualified himself in his own mind because of past failure, David’s story is not a warning. It is an open door.
Four Commands That Define a Man
Tierce Green challenges the men of The Woodlands First to reject the two scripts culture offers and pursue the four marks of manhood Paul lays out in 1 Corinthians 16: be watchful, stand firm, be strong, and do everything in love.
The second anchor text is 1 Corinthians 16:13–14. Paul closes his letter to a fractured, struggling church with five commands delivered in quick succession: “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.”
The phrase “act like men” translates a single Greek word, andrizomai. It appears only here in the entire New Testament, and it carries the sense of courageous, mature manhood, the opposite of childishness and the opposite of cowardice. Paul is not telling the Corinthians to be male; they already are. He is telling them to grow up into something. From these verses, Tierce draws four marks of the man God is after.
Mark One: Be Watchful
A watchful man pays attention. He knows the condition of his own soul, his marriage, his children, his thought life, and his weaknesses. He does not drift through his own life as a passenger. Watchfulness is the opposite of the passivity that has quietly become the most common male failure mode: present in the house but absent from the family, employed at the job but disengaged from the mission, attending church but asleep at the wheel spiritually. The watchful man sees what is coming before it arrives, because he is actually looking.
Mark Two: Stand Firm in the Faith
Standing firm requires having something to stand on. A man cannot hold a line he has never drawn. This mark, Tierce explains, is about conviction: knowing what Scripture says, believing it, and refusing to be moved by pressure, mockery, or fatigue. Culture rewards the man who bends. Paul commends the man who holds. Importantly, standing firm is defensive language, the posture of a soldier holding ground that has already been won. The victory belongs to Christ. The man’s job is to not surrender territory that was purchased at the cross.
Mark Three: Be Strong
Strength in Scripture is never strength for its own sake. It is strength deployed on behalf of others: the strength to work when tired, to provide when it is hard, to protect the vulnerable, to say no to himself, and to carry burdens that belong to the people he loves. Biblical strength is also honest about its source. “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might,” Paul writes in Ephesians 6:10. The man who runs on his own strength eventually runs out. The man connected to Christ has access to something deeper than willpower.
Mark Four: Do Everything in Love
Then comes verse 14, and it changes the entire complexion of the passage: “Let all that you do be done in love.” Watchfulness without love becomes suspicion. Conviction without love becomes harshness. Strength without love becomes domination. Paul places love over all four commands like a governor on an engine, because he knows exactly what male strength looks like when it is severed from love. The world knows too; that is where the caricatures come from.
This is what neither cultural script can produce. The tough script has strength without love. The soft script has love without strength. The biblical man carries both at full measure simultaneously, exactly as Jesus did: the same man who flipped tables in the temple wept at a friend’s grave and welcomed children onto his lap. Grace and truth, strength and tenderness, fully intact in one person.
The Man in the Arena
Tierce closed with the famous passage from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech at the Sorbonne: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
The application is direct. Manhood is not performed from the stands, where critique is free and risk is zero. It happens in the arena: in the marriage that takes work, the kids who need a present father, the workplace that tests integrity, the church that needs men who will serve, and the private battles nobody sees. Scripture never promises the man in the arena that he will not fall. It promises that when he walks with God, his falling will not be the end of his story. David is proof.
Where This Goes Next
A single sermon can name the target. It takes something more sustained to actually move men toward it. Because of that, The Woodlands First is launching a six-week men’s study this September on Wednesday nights, led by Tierce Green, built to take everything in this message deeper: the four marks, the honest look at failure and recovery, and the practical work of becoming the man God is after. If this message put its finger on something in you, that study is the next step, and you do not need to have anything figured out to show up.
The charge David gave Solomon still stands, and it has not gotten easier: be strong, show yourself a man, and keep the charge of the Lord your God. However, no man was ever meant to attempt it alone. Men grow best shoulder to shoulder with other men who are walking the same road.
If you are searching for a church near me in The Woodlands, TX where men are challenged, equipped, and genuinely known, we would love for you to join us at The Woodlands First Baptist Church.
Learn More about The Woodlands First
► Watch the full sermon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQKZuZw5Nfg
► Plan your visit this Sunday: https://thewoodlandsfirst.org/new/
► Learn about our church: https://thewoodlandsfirst.org/beliefs/
► First Kids (Children’s Ministry): https://thewoodlandsfirst.org/ministries/first-kids/
Visit The Woodlands First Baptist Church
We offer worship services in traditional, modern, and Spanish-language styles across two campuses in The Woodlands, TX, along with Bible study classes and small groups for all ages.
South Campus — 11801 Grogan’s Mill Rd, The Woodlands, TX 77380
North Campus — 5148 FM 1488, The Woodlands, TX 77354
Phone: (281) 367-4317
Website: thewoodlandsfirst.org
Looking for churches near me in The Woodlands, TX? The Woodlands First Baptist Church has served this community since 1979. Come discover a community that takes Scripture seriously and welcomes everyone who is searching.
