Tag Archives: fear

Insecurity Is A Sin

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I have a friend who says that most men are afraid of their wives.  My joke has always been that I’m afraid of my wife and I’m not even married to her yet. Ha.

Men, even though we like to act tough and hide it, often get all wuss like when we are around someone we like.  We act differently.  We become too nice or desperate.  This is bad for many reasons but one thing for sure, as long as you are afraid of the girl, she will not be attracted to you.

Women are constantly subconsciously testing men.  Do they feel safe with you?  Can you take care of them?  Can you stand up to them and therefore stand up for them?  If you fail the test, you will not be attractive.

This is why we need to face the our insecurities with women.

Insecurity leads to all sorts of bad actions.  Defensiveness, nervous movements, bad jokes, talking too excitedly, being sarcastic, talking about ourselves all the time to prove ourselves, or acting tough just to name a few.  These things make us appear desperate – because we are.

Now obviously dealing with the opposite sex is not the only place that we face insecurity, far from it.  But it is one place that almost all of us at some point experience it.

Here’s a harsh truth.  More than making us unattractive or keeping us from a full dating life, insecurity is a sin. It’s not some type of humility.  Humility is having a right view of who I am in comparison to God and relation to others.  It means being not self focused.  That’s not insecurity.

Insecurity means that I am looking for my security and identity in someone other than Jesus.  If I’m insecure around a woman that means I need her approval.  I’ve given her the power to define me and how I feel about myself.  This is totally wrong, a form of idolatry, and it’s not attractive.

Insecurity is also a sin because it is fear based.  Fear of rejection, or fear of what others think of me.  Fear is never from God.  The truth is, every decision we make, we make either out of love or out of fear. There’s not much in between.

And this leads to perhaps the biggest reason insecurity is sin.  Insecurity gets in the way of loving others.  Think about it.  If I “like” this girl and am desperate for her to like me, then there is no way I can really love her.  You can’t love someone when you are more worried about what they think of you than what is best for them.  It’s impossible.  As long as you are focused on attaining or keeping their approval you aren’t free to love them.  As long as you are being insecure, the focus is on you not them.

This gets in the way of all sorts of ministry and it for sure gets in the way of loving those closest to us.  It also keeps us from allowing others to love us because we are constantly putting up different subconscious walls to “protect” ourselves.

You can’t have insecurity and intimacy.  Intimacy requires safety and safety requires security.

Jesus was never insecure.  In fact no one has ever been more secure in who he was than Jesus.  This is one of the reasons that so many people were drawn to Him and why so many people hated him.

He was comfortable and confident.  Therefore when you had a conversation with Him He could be fully engaged.  He was completely free to love each person He encountered precisely because He didn’t need them to like Him.  It’s not that He didn’t want people to like him – heck He invited people to follow Him for heaven’s sake, but His identity did not depend (and by the way doesn’t now) on whether you followed Him or not.  He is who He is, regardless of what anybody else does.

This is why the more I find my identity in Christ the less insecure I will be.  The more that I know how loved and secure I am in Him the less I have to fear. I can’t just know about Jesus and His truth –  I have to figure out how to actually live out of it.

Mostly what we do instead is try to cover up and hide our insecurities.  We pick only the challenges that we can win.  And in dating we only pursue people we know will like us, or we stumble around unsuccessfully chasing the women that we really want or we pursue no one.

Christian men should be the most confident attractive men that a woman can run into.  But are we?  Not from what I’ve seen.

We have to face our insecurities.  So, when are you insecure?  Where does that come from for you?  What in your story has made you that way?  Do you live more out of your fear or your identity in Christ?

Quit Being Nice

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When I was a younger single guy, one of the things I just could not understand was why women always chose against the nice guy.  I after all was a nice guy.  But no matter what women said about what they wanted, they always chose guys who didn’t fit that category. I’ve touched on this in a couple of places, but today I want to address the nice guy and why it doesn’t work.

First, the premise is wrong.  What we are really assuming (we being the nice guy) is that we are better (somehow less sinful) than someone else.  This throws us into allegiance with the oldest son in the story from Luke 15.  That is not the company we want to be in.

But even if we don’t judge the non-nice guys we are still fooling ourselves.  

The truth is that being nice is just as much an angle as any other approach.  What it comes down to is no one is actually that nice.  In other words if I’m being nice to a woman because I want her to like me, well how is that any different than any other manipulative move?

Let’s take the giving flowers thing for example.  I started a new policy on flowers a few years ago.  I don’t give flowers to someone to get them to like me.  Never.  I don’t do it because we got in a fight, and I want the woman to like me again (classic nice guy move).  I only give flowers to care about the woman, without any other motive.  Do you see what I’m saying?  If I’m being “nice” to seek the woman’s approval, I’m screwed.  Either she will think I’m a wuss and bail, or maybe worse, she will dominate me.

In other words if I’m being nice to get the girl to like me, that’s not all that nice.

To make matters worse, women are typically not attracted to the nice guy.  The reason is because women don’t want a guy who follows them around.  They want someone who can be a man and lead.  They may not even consciously know this, but instinctively they know it.  Get this line right here – “If you can’t stand up to her, you will not be able to stand up for her”.  Seriously think about it.  Women are subconsciously testing this out all the time.  And to top it off, nice guys are boring because they always want to do what the woman wants.  Women don’t want to be bored – they want adventure.  They want a guy who is strong and not afraid of them.  Again if you are afraid of them, you can’t protect them and that is not attractive.

Now that’s not to say women don’t want a “good” guy.  There’s a difference.  It’s critical actually.  Think about Jesus.  No one, and I mean no one who met Jesus thought, “hey Jesus, he’s a pretty nice guy.”  No!  People thought Jesus was a good guy but anyone who hung around Him knew He was not a wuss, and not “nice”.  They’d seen His power, daring, leadership, and adventure.  Like the famous line in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia when the kids ask if the lion Aslan is safe and the beaver replies, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” Jesus was good and He was loved and hated.  He stood up for the right stuff.  He knew who He was.

Here’s the difference when it comes to dating.  Nice guys are worried about what the woman thinks.  Will she like me?  Will she be mad at me?  The good guy worries about what is right – and tries to do it, regardless of the what the woman wants.

Adam was nice in the garden – he should have been good.  He should have stood up to Eve. 

Women instinctively know the difference.

How do you know if you are a nice guy?  Here are some clues.  You are afraid of what women think of you.  You can’t approach a woman you want to talk to.  You are always in the “friend zone”.  You are told by women you want to date, “You’re a great guy but. . . ” You buy gifts for women that you are not in a relationship with.  You don’t understand what makes women attracted to a “bad” guy.

I’ll be writing more about how to kill the nice guy later – it can be done, I’ve done it, twice actually (he came back to life – pesky son of a gun), but the first step is recognizing it. By the way, this is important even if you are called to singleness or for that matter if you are already married.

So fellas, are you a “nice guy”? Ladies, am I wrong here?

Do You Want To Get Married? Really?!

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One of my favorite scriptures is the story in John 5 of the man at the pool.  So here’s the story in a nutshell.  There was a pool near the sheep gate in Jerusalem where many disabled people went.  They were there because they believed that when the water was stirred, that the first person in would be healed.  Now there was a man (an invalid) who had been there 38 years.  Then Jesus shows up and learned his story.  Jesus then asks the man, “Do you want to get well?”

Now this seems like a very odd question.  I mean here is a guy who has been sitting by this pool (where people come hoping to get well) for 38 years.  I mean obviously he wants to get well right?  But maybe Jesus is on to something here.  Jesus realizes that maybe this guy has become comfortable. Maybe, even though originally he wanted to walk, now he had lived this particular way for a long, long time.  Walking would change everything in this man’s life.  Everything.  Jesus wants to make sure, “Do you still want that?”

The man’s response is classic.  Here is Jesus with all the ability to help him and he says essentially, “Hey yeah – I need to get into the water – could you help me do that?”  In other words, “Hey Jesus, help me heal my way”  He had become focussed on getting in the water, even to the point of missing out on being healed.  The means had become the end.

This has so many implications there’s not possibly room here to discuss them all.  

We are all wounded and we are all seeking to get well.  Most of all we all have things that we think will heal us, and often we end up asking for those instead of healing in any form Jesus wants.

One of the big traps we as singles can fall into is the idea that if I get married it will heal me (make life ok, fix my sexual problems, solve my loneliness, bring me happiness, fill my heart, etc).  I know for me there have been plenty of times where I feel like if Jesus would have asked me, “Do you want to get well?” I might as well have answered, “Yes, I want to get married.”  But marriage is not the answer to any of those type of questions. The questions that marriage answers are “Who will I marry?” or “Will I get married?” It doesn’t answer the big questions.  Only God can really do that.  And if I’m looking for marriage to do that I will screw up my search for someone to marry and/or I will have a really hard marriage.

However, as you stay single longer, there is another very real question here.  “Do you want to get married?”  You might say, “Jesus, seriously, I’ve been trying to do that for 20 years.  I mean I’ve been on good dates, bad dates, blind dates.  I’ve been on every dating site and been set up by everyone in my life.”  To which I think Jesus would still be smart to ask, “Yeah but do you want to get married?”

It’s a fair question.  After all if you are in your 30s or older, you’ve lived a certain way a long time, and marriage, changes everything.  The question is “Do you still want that?”  or maybe a better way of asking it, “Do you want that change now?”

I think it is extremely important that we ask this question because the answer changes things.

If your answer is no, you need to ask why.  There are some bad reasons.  For example, are you just being selfish or are you just really scared that after living a certain way that you won’t be able to do it.  It is legitimately scary, but that’s not a reason to say no.  But if the answer is no and you feel like Jesus agrees with that answer (it might be good to ask Jesus, “Do you want me to get married?”) then you’re going to need a new approach.  For one, quit dating.

But if the answer is yes, then you might need to change your approach as well.  You are going to need to be prepared for the fact that Jesus might actually give you what you want, in a way that you didn’t think of.  You need to be able to say, “Jesus I do and I will do it however, and with whoever you want me too.”

So, first, do you want to get well?  What is the “pool” you are counting on?  Is it marriage? Second question, “Do you want to get married?” And are you willing to do that any way Jesus wants?

Are You Afraid Of Choosing Wrong

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When I was a little kid I loved when my parents would take me to the toy store.  The huge toy store that I remember was called Children’s Palace.  It was AWESOME!  I mean it had every toy.  I could spend all day in the Star Wars and G.I. Joe aisles.  There were endless action figures and vehicles.  Now the vehicles were usually for the birthday or Christmas lists but most times we went, I got to pick out one, and only one, action figure.

When I got just a little older the stakes were as I was there to pick one to spend my own allowance money on.  While on the one hand this was cool, it was also kind of stressful. There were a lot of figures and I had to choose one, just one.  Usually I would narrow it down to two or three and I would spend a lot of time (or at least what seemed to be a lot of time) trying to decide.  I’d look at them both, considering all sorts of things about them. And finally I’d pick one.  Sometimes it was the best.  Other times I had little kid buyer’s remorse and thought, “I should have gotten the other guy”.  There is a lot great about this – it’s great parenting actually – you can’t have it all, you have to pick, but you get to.

As intense as it was, that was a toy.  Now choose someone to marry.  Yikes.  

And here in lies two of the things in our culture that has created more singles than ever before. The first is that we have more choices than ever before.  We get to choose if we marry, who we marry, and when we marry.  What’s crazy of course, is that until about 150 years ago, almost no one ever had one, let alone all three, of those choices.

I was talking to my dad about the breakdown of the family in America.  I asked him why he thought that happened?  He said, “I have a theory on that” (not surprising knowing my dad).  He went on,  “100 years ago you lived in rural America and you were 18 and you met a decent girl – You married that girl because you might not meet another one.”  As funny as it is, he’s exactly right.  But then there were big cities, cars, planes, and now the internet.  The choices are endless.

And then you add to that an extreme fear of buyers remorse.  My generation and younger are scared crapless of getting it wrong.  Half of our parents are divorced, some more than once.  In the Church we’ve been told how hard marriage is and how it has all these standards.  We don’t want to choose wrong.  We have friends who marriages are brutal or who are divorced already. People are scared.

We know intellectually that there is no perfect scenario but the fear can drive us to not marry.  It leads to all sorts of things I want to touch on more later.  Things like: serial dating, fear of commitment, looking for the perfect person, consumer dating (what can they do for me), cohabitation (I’ll live with you but I’m scared to marry you), looking for faults with everyone and much more.  All of these things get in the way of marriage and can lead us to stay single even when God has not called us there.

But guess what, we probably aren’t going back to arranged marriages, although I know some people who will do it for you, so that means you are going to have to choose.  And there’s a lot good about that.  It gives us some ownership in the process and it makes us responsible.  And at the end of the day when we are married we are responsible for that.

We are going to have to choose.  How will you do that?  

Look for a blog about that soon, but here are some things to consider.  Maybe we could use some help.  Number one we need to walk with God and ask Him a lot of questions. And, we need community.  I don’t think I could write enough blogs about that.  We need people in our life who know us and who can be in this stuff with us, people who would say, “I’m worried about this one and here’s why,” or, “quit being an idiot and marry this person already.”

Finally we need to face this fear and ask if it is one of the things keeping us single when we don’t feel called to be.  We need to ask what we are really afraid of and ask God to help us fight through.  Choosing wisely makes total sense – that is from God.  Being paralyzed by fear – that is not from God.

Passivity Is Killing Us

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So yesterday was father’s day and that made me think of men and the struggles we often face.  One of the areas we really struggle in is our passivity.  It’s pretty much an epidemic really.  We so often fail to engage where we should.  Sometimes that comes from laziness but often times it comes from fear, and our number one fear is failure.

We are all passive in different places, mainly the places we don’t feel confident (which is a lot of places for most of us).  We of course try to only operate in the places we feel confident but that usually fails at some point.  When we don’t know what to do or are afraid to fail, we go passive.

One place that most men are passive though is in relationships with women. This goes all the way back to the garden.  In Genesis, Adam and Eve are in the garden when Satan tempts Eve to eat the fruit.  I’m not going to go into the female part of this here but I want to touch on Adam’s part.  Adam was literally right next to Eve as this is going on.  It’s not like she calls him over and says, “Hey come check out this fruit”.  No, Adam is “with her” and in the Hebrew it says he was literally with her, right at her side.

Adam is there and he does nothing.  He doesn’t lead, doesn’t confront, doesn’t rescue Eve, doesn’t stand up and say, “Hey go back to Hell.  We are following God”.  He goes passive.  Ever thought about why? I’ll tell you why.  He was more afraid of Eve than God.  I have a mentor that says most men are afraid of their wives.  I like to joke that I’m afraid of my wife and I’m not even married yet.

This leads to all sorts of trouble in marriage.  Husbands can become passive and then aggressive to make up for it.  They hide in work.  They can fail to lead their family.  Mainly there are just whole areas where they check out. But this is also extremely important as a single.

As a single person I think it is much easier to keep ourselves in situations that we feel confident without facing our fears.  There is often no reason bigger than ourselves to face them so we just don’t.  This is why having people that know your story, including where you are passive, is so huge.

And when it comes to how we approach women, it just creates one mess after another.  It can keep us from pursuing women that we really want to.  If we do pursue, it can lead to doing it in a nice guy, aw shucks kind of way at best, or make us creepy at worst.  We end up chasing instead of pursuing and that is not where you want to be – trust me I’ve spent way to much time there.

If we don’t deal with passivity as a single guy, one of two things is going to happen.  Either we are not going to get married or probably worse, we are going to marry someone we don’t really want to or someone who is controlling us.  In both cases we end up with a situation where they are leading us.  We end up in a marriage that is all backwards where we are emasculated or where eventually we grow a pair and it all blows up in our face.  All of this is bad, really bad.

Passivity kills masculinity because it steals our confidence and leads to sin. So we need to face it head on. Here are a couple of things that have been helping me.  First of all when you are passive in a situation, don’t spend time beating yourself up over it.  This accomplishes nothing good and in fact will probably drive you to more passivity.  Instead, ask yourself where are you passive?  What situations do you shrink back from?  A way I like to ask it to myself is where do I feel like a 5 year old?  Then ask God, where does that come from?  In other words what are you afraid of and where does that fear originate?  It will probably not be the first thing that comes to mind so engage your heart, and God.

So how about it guys?  Does this resonate?  Where are you passive?  What has it cost you?  How have you responded to your passivity?  Ladies feel free to chime in as well.