The busyness of modern life needs no description. Society, culture, class, parents, employers, government, marriage, children, church, and self all have a different set of expectations that add weight to the burden of life. Men feel immense pressure to attempt to mimic the Greek titan Atlas whose job it was to shoulder…

Most people have a simplistic understanding of self-control. They reduce it to two basic motions. There is the brake pedal and the accelerator. To exercise self-control a person either presses down on the brakes to resist temptation (e.g. eating a second cookie) or steps on the accelerator to overcome fatigue (e.g. finish the last mile)…

Men, if you haven’t already, listen to this podcast by Rod Olps, ‘To Whom Much Is Given: Recognizing Your Talents and Setting Your Pace’. Rod will help you think about discerning God’s call on your life. Download it to your phone and listen in the car, in the gym, or when you have dead time between tasks.

The application for men is this: to be good stewards of our lives we need to set wise limits on our use of time, money, amusement, exercise, and so on. What should a man do if his income continues to increase through the duration of his career? Should he correspondingly raise his lifestyle unceasingly to match his salary? No, to do so would be to allow circumstances to dictate lifestyle rather than the call to follow Jesus. A better approach is for a man to sit down in prayer before God and to determine a threshold of how much he personally feels he can spend on his lifestyle as a good steward of the gifts of God. Any excess above this threshold should be used to invest in the kingdom of God. After all, the goal of life is not self-improvement, or to have a good time, but the glory of Christ.

God has called you to do something, to be something. This thought ought to quake the very foundation of your soul. Geologist warn us that one day San Francisco will lie in rubble due to straddling the San Andreas Fault. Christians should fare no better when they are told that God has purposefully created them. We are not accidents like a puddle of milk spilt from the cup of a careless child. We are instruments crafted in the forge of heaven for specific and non-negotiable tasks.

A man who ignores the future is like a person who walks around staring at his feet. He will miss a lot of useful paths in life because he never looked up to survey the landscape. The undeniable benefit of life planning is that the activity protects a person from ‘drift’, the mindless persistence along an unspecified course. Of course, for Christians, a deep attitude of humility must correspond to any attempt at life planning, since our lives are ultimately in God’s hands and because the future belongs to Him, not us. Nonetheless, most men will find spiritual relevance in Eisenhower’s quip, ‘Plans are worthless, but planning is everything’.

Our objective in drafting a Christian Life Plan is to cultivate self-control. In order to appreciate the importance of this exercise, we need to identify three spiritual dangers.

Men like to pretend that they are warhorses.  We tell ourselves that self-control is a natural muscle that can be flexed at will and that develops coordination and stamina over time. Our problem with self-control, so we think, is not that we don’t have it, but that we choose not to use it. Like a warhorse, we are capable of showing self-restraint in difficult circumstances. We are men, not boys. We are soldiers, not recruits. So we think…