(This blog is a repost of a blog I wrote several years ago.)
The potential of a man is not determined merely by his strength, intelligence or even character. All these things matter, but they do not make someone into a man.
Before someone ever becomes a man, he first is a son. Before someone ever attains manhood, he spends decades of his life through the eyes of a son struggling intensely to understand what the world is about. If someone fails to understand his privilege as a son – he will always fail to understand his privilege as a man.
If Daniel does not know himself to be accepted and adored as his father’s son, then he will spend all his life as a man wasting energy attempting to prove himself to others, hoping to gain their respect. He desperately tries to earn the approval and respect that his father should have already given him as his prized son.
You see a man does not become a man until his father tells him that he has become a man. A man does not know his true purpose until he knows the life story of his father and the business of his father. If the son is a runaway or if the son has an estranged relationship with his father, then he has to find his own identity and his own inheritance in his own power. And a lifetime is not long enough for him to accomplish this.
If a man lives his life functionally disconnected from his father, he lives his life functionally as an orphan. He has no one to consult, no history to remind him and no story as his framework. He starts life from scratch, but even worse, now he has to find the answers to these questions: Who am I? Where am I going? And how do I get there?
He is lost.
That is a scary and difficult place to be. How can an orphan be rescued and adopted?
If his desires are pure, if he is desperate enough and if he begins to hope again, the runaway orphan will always have the desire to be restored to a right relationship with his father.
You see, how much someone understands the greatness of being God’s son is the measure of how much someone understands his own manhood.
