168: Young Men Need Older Men

Christ the King and the Local Church

To the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

65 days till Christmas. Well, actually, by the time you listen to this, it'll be 58, because I'm recording this on Wednesday, October 21st, usually, well, really, with my podcast. I like to be a couple weeks ahead, but that hasn't happened lately.

In fact, I've kind of contemplated the feasibility of continuing the Rural Church Podcast, but I want to, I want to. I'm not quitting or anything like that, but, man, I'm just busy juggling several jobs, and it's hard sometimes to find the time.

But, so I'd be a good way. I'm not pleading for, you know, encouragements, but if you enjoy the Rural Church Podcast, feel free to holler at me, let me know. I want to keep going, so that's the game plan as of right now.

But my office just got clean. My lovely daughters helped, and that has really, you know, there's something about decluttering the pastor's study that really gives some clarity of thought. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast.

I am your host, Alan Nelson. I'm one of the pastors here at Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas. Do you ever get discouraged, pastor? I know that there's a few people not gonna be at church tonight, and it's all for, you know, well, some of it's good reasons, and then other, it's tough reasons, because there's like one family's got several sick kids.

There's another family, and a young man just had a tonsillectomy, so it's, yeah, it's sad when you know that there's gonna be some families that can't make it because of that. Another family going out of town, which is great, but still, you know, sometimes we let little things like that discourage us.

We shouldn't, but it's just the life of a pastor. I am grateful for this body. I've been more encouraged in the last, I don't know, three, four, five months than I have been in a long time. Most of you listening, you know our story.

You know that we've gone on quite a journey as a church. Praise God, we celebrated 30 years as a church this summer, and I've been here for a third of that, so just over 10 years. Actually, I guess, technically, just over a third.

God's been good to us, and so I'm grateful, grateful for the brothers and sisters at Providence, grateful for the opportunities that God has before us, grateful for some families that have been visiting lately and that wanna join, and even some baptisms, and I'm grateful for my oldest son, gonna get married.

By the time this comes out, it'll be the next week, so if you're listening to this on Wednesday the 28th, then next Friday, the 6th, Braden gets married, and that's crazy to think that I'm old enough for my son to get married.

In fact, I worked part-time in admissions at Grace Bible Theological Seminary, and recently, I interviewed a young man who was actually younger than my son, and that was mind-blowing. That was surreal for me.

The Need for Older Men to Guide Younger Men

I was like, what? I'm old enough to be interviewing someone who is younger than my oldest son, so anyway, feeling my age. Speaking of age, that's what I wanna talk about today on the podcast. I wanna talk about sort of the angst of young men in our nation and sort of what I see, and I've posted about this, kinda got slammed for it from certain realms, but just wanna talk about the relationship with young men, older men, look at some passages in just a moment, but I wanna start with a story, and a lot of times, just because of time's sake, you didn't have to worry about, or you didn't probably, you probably already knew that I don't put a lot of prep work into the podcast.

I just don't have time, so unless I'm doing something I'm already studying, I'm just kind of thinking out loud, but there's a story, so you have to research. You can look this up. It's a true story, and I believe the date is like the early 90s, like early to mid 90s, and I believe the location, hmm, somewhere in southern Africa, I believe, not South Africa, not the country of South Africa, but somewhere kind of in the southern region of the continent of Africa, I believe, there is like a nature preserve, like a wildlife preserve, and what they did is they went from some other countries and took, that were overpopulated with elephants, and they took, they were actually killing some of these elephants because of overpopulation, so they got the great idea is we're gonna take the younger elephants, and we're gonna put them in this wildlife preserve.

Well, what they did, so what they did that, I think it was like six, they took like six bull elephants, young bull elephants, and they put them in this wildlife preserve. What happened was, what they didn't anticipate is that elephants are a very familiar, familial type animal, and they require some learning and some oversight from older elephants, and so there are some things that didn't quite mature rightly with these bull elephants because they didn't have the proper oversight.

What happened was they noticed first is when some rhinoceroses, is that how you say that? Is it rhinoceri? When some multiple rhinoceroses ended up dead on the preserve, and at first, they didn't know, like is it poachers?

No, it's not poachers because they left the horns and all that, and these things are just dead. What happened? Well, early signs pointed to like, maybe this could have been an elephant, but that's odd because elephants aren't really enemies of rhinoceri or whatever, so what would it be, what would be causing this?

And over time, they found out, they ended up even killing an elephant or two, I believe. Over time, though, they found out that what was happening was there's this hormonal, I can't even remember what it's called now, but there's this hormonal period that the male elephant goes through.

Typically, it's a little bit older in life, but these young ones were going through it a little bit younger, and their hormones are really out of control. They're very, very highly excitable and aggressive, and what happened was there was nothing to temper that, and so they wound up killing these rhinoceroses.

And before, there was this one scientist that was like, all right, we're gonna figure this out before we gotta keep killing more and more elephants, and so he came up with the idea that instead of killing these elephants, we will introduce older elephants into the preserve.

What was amazing was as soon as they entered, brought these older elephants, these older male elephants into the preserve, it balanced everything out almost immediately because how God has designed it is these younger male elephants, they do go through this hormonal cycle, but what happens is it's tempered pretty quick by the older elephants, so when they try to buck up against the regime or whatever of the older elephants, they're able to push that back a little bit and be like, no, no, no, know your place, son, and it keeps everybody in check, keeps everything functioning rightly, and it was amazing how quickly all that got back into the way it was supposed to as soon as they reintroduced these male elephants.

Anyway, you can look all that up, early 90s, the whole situation's fixed, it was just interesting, but the analogy is, and what I'm seeing too much in some of our circles, the reformed circles, if you will, and I'm gonna talk about older men in just a minute, but let me just talk about the younger men first, and that is, for lack of better wording, hormonal imbalance.

We might call it spiritual hormones, but we have these younger men, and I say younger men, I'm 40, so men maybe my age and younger, maybe a little bit older than me and younger, but middle-aged, younger men, a lot of younger men, so really heavy with younger men, and the idea is they see these things and they just wanna kill their rhinoceroses.

They see things that are wrong, and it's good that they see those things, but the response is almost like over-correction, like to say something like, just a tangible example, so we see feminism, which is a cancer, which is ungodly, which is wicked, which should be repudiated, but the response is, well, I don't even know if my wife can read a theology book, right?

Like, what, where have we gone with all this? There's other examples, tons of examples that you could think through practically, just maybe some heavy-handedness. Of course, sometimes it manifests itself in this idea that hyperinfatuation with ethnicity, so this is some of the reason that it gets labeled woke right is because it becomes institutional sin rather than personal culpability, and not that there's not institutional things to deal with, but the point is, and this is, by the way, this is why it gets kinda hard because I'm in this camp in many ways and on the same team in many regards of the things that we need to be stepping up against in our culture and preaching against and leaning forth to charge for, but what happens is you get a lot of these guys who have this spiritual immaturity, and what happens is they just wind up amassing more and more like-minded people to themselves.

The old adage of immaturity breeds immaturity, and so they just end up blasting everybody, and then you're supposed to have the older men that are able to say, hey, look, bring them under their shoulder, and they end up blasting those guys and ridiculing guys and really, the idea is magnetization.

Immaturity attracts immaturity, and so just saying outlandish things to bring more and more young men under the fold. Biblically, it reminds me of, and I don't have my Bible open here, so I've gotta open it for just a second, but it reminds me of 1 Kings, if I can get there.

Rehoboam Rejects the Counsel of Older Men

1 Kings 12, this is where you have Rehoboam and Jeroboam, and Rehoboam, Solomon's son. Jeroboam, basically asking to, well, I'll just read it in verse four. Your father made our yoke heavy. Now, therefore, lighten the hand, service.

Sorry. Your father made our yoke heavy. Now, therefore, lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke on us, and we will serve you. He said to them, go away for three days, and come again to me, so the people went away.

Then King Rehoboam took counsel with the old men who stood before Solomon, his father, while he was yet alive, saying, how do you advise me to answer these people? They said to him, if you will be a servant to this people today and serve them and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever.

Now, in verse eight, but he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. And he said to them, what do you advise that we answer this people who have said to me, lighten the yoke that your father put on us?

The young men who had grown up with him said to him, thus shall you speak to the people who said to you, your father made our yoke heavy, but you lighten it for us. Thus shall you say to them, my little finger is thicker than my father's thighs.

And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day, as the king said, come to me again the third day.

The king answered the people harshly and forsaking the counsel that the old man had given him, he spoke to them according to the counsel of the young men saying, my father made your yoke heavy, but I'll add to your yoke.

My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. So the king did not listen to the people for it was a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord that he might fulfill his word, which the Lord spoke by Ahijah, the Shalonite to Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

Yeah, so that's the kind of mentality that I'm talking about. This high hormonal, you're not gonna tell me what to do. I'm gonna run my own. I'm gonna be more brash. I'm gonna be more outlandish. And probably two of the biggest names like this would be like Joel Webben and Dale Partridge.

And I don't know these men that well at all. I was in a text group with Joel Webben years ago. In many ways, I see Joel on the same, to me, like the same as like Russell Moore. Like I don't consider Russell Moore a Christian and I don't consider Joel Webben a Christian.

I could certainly be wrong about both of those. I'm not their pastor. I don't have to interview him for church membership, but just an observational perspective, it is what it is. Just the years of fruit has borne itself to be pretty rotten and pretty immature, pretty outlandish, and frankly, in many ways, pretty wicked.

But this is the concept. Hormonal, spiritual hormonal immaturity, if you will. And we're just gonna keep pressing on in this direction and then when guys give us counsel, we're not gonna listen. And immaturity is gonna continue to breed immaturity.

Older Men Are Meant to Teach and Example Godliness

But I would argue that similar, except to a much greater extent, similar to how God designed younger men or younger, sorry, younger elephants to be shaped by older elephants, how much more has he designed younger men in the church to be shaped and edified by older men?

And you think about Titus 2. Older men are to be an example to the younger men. They're to teach them and to train them. And so they should be able to look at them and say, look, this is, follow me as I follow Christ, as the Apostle Paul was able to do with the churches that he influenced and wrote to.

Older Men Can Be Wrong, but Faithful Mentors Still Matter

It is the design of God for younger men not to shirk the oversight and example of the older men, but to follow in their steps and to pursue godliness as they have been instructed. Now, I know that the response would be, well, what about when older men are wrong?

And it's interesting, but just a little bit further, when you get to 1 Kings chapter 13, you have that example too. So I'm gonna read in verse 11. Now, an old prophet lived in Bethel and his sons came and told him all that the man of God had done that day in Bethel.

They also told to their father the words that he had spoken to the king. And their father said to them, which way did he go? And his son showed him the way that the man of God who came from Judah had gone.

He said to his son, saddle the donkey for me. So they saddled the donkey for him and he mounted it. He went after the man of God and found him sitting under an oak. And he said to him, are you the man of God who came from Judah?

And he said, I am. Then he said to him, come home with me and eat bread. And he said, I may not return with you or go in with you, neither will I eat bread nor drink water with you in this place. For it was said to me by the word of the Lord, you shall neither eat bread nor drink water there nor return by the way you came.

Now listen, the old man is gonna wind up saying, no, no, you can come. You know, the Lord told, but the text says in verse 18, but he lied to him. So the older man lies. So you have in chapter 12, verse 10, young people giving bad advice.

Now you have in chapter 13, verse 18, an old man giving bad advice. So I'm not arguing, no one should believe that just because a person is an older man, that that automatically makes him right. And in fact, in many ways, this is why it's so frustrating because you can look at older men, you can look at older ministries, you can look at things that have been going on for decades in evangelicalism, and you can say, things have gone bad on their watch.

The reason that things are wrong is because of these men. And so then you listen to these men try to tell you now about how things should go. And you're like, no way. Of course, a big, what was a big turning point in all this?

Of course, it was COVID. It was 2020. I mean, before that, it was wokeness had kind of started creeping in. Of course, all that kind of came to the forefront around the same time from 2018 on, and then 2020, you have COVID, and then after that, and it's like, you've got all this crazy stuff happening.

And so you have this generation of younger men trying to look at the example of the older men, and they're saying, wait, hold on. The example of the older men is not worthy of my imitation. And so there's a lot of truth to that.

There's a lot of reason that the younger men are coming up and say, we need leaders. We don't have any. And so we're just gonna be our own leaders, and we're gonna do our own thing. But my argument is that the immaturity has just bred immaturity instead of, because there are faithful, godly leaders.

There are faithful, godly leaders out there. You know, I think about my friend, Tom Haskell. I think about just how in this whole movement, and it just showed consistency in any areas that he's been wrong in, he's been willing to own it.

And there are, and I hate to start, if I start naming names, I'm gonna forget somebody, and so I'll offend somebody. But I'm just thinking about those kind of national conference speaker, big ministry guy, and founders, there's an example in Tom.

An example worthy to imitate. Of course, we lost, sadly, last year, Votie Bauckham. But again, if I keep naming names, I'll forget somebody, I'll offend somebody. So that's not my point to Mike. I'm not afraid of offending people.

But my point is not to just say, you should follow these guys and not these guys. I don't wanna miss the principle in this whole thing. I don't want the principle to get lost in the names, if that makes sense.

The principle is younger men should be guided by, and led by, and have an example in older men, older godly men. It doesn't mean you have to follow every older man. Some of them are wrong. Some of them need to be rebuked, but they need to be handled their faithfulness, they're truly Christians, they need to be handled gently and well, but they ought to be instructed, they ought to be rebuked.

If they won't listen, they won't listen. You find you another older man, but what you don't want to have, what you don't want to have, and this happens, so really, really began happening years ago in the old church plant movements, but where you would have a church plant of the oldest people were in their 40s or maybe in their 50s, and that was the oldest people.

That's not a good, that's not a healthy situation. If you're in a situation and the oldest men around you are only in their 40s or 50s, that's problematic. You need a situation where there are dads and granddads, to you, by the way, spiritually speaking, if not physically speaking.

You need men around you, and of course, speaking to the men primarily here, but you need men around you who can teach you. Their years of experience and godliness are able to guide you in ways that you haven't thought through, and some of the things you say, look, here's the thing, too.

Wisdom Helps Apply Sound Principles Faithfully

Some of the things you say, it's right, it's coming from the right place, but the application of it is wrong. Well, I'm not talking about tone police. We've gotta chill on that. You know how you just said it too harshly?

I don't mean that at all because if that was the case, if it's just like everything they're saying is right, it's just too harsh, well, we could deal with that. No, no, what happens is they find a right principle.

For example, feminism is cancer, and then they apply that and wind up applying that in a way that is not helpful at all. It goes upside, what is it, Luther said, the drunk goes upside, one side of the horse falls off the other.

That's the kind of thing that's happening, particularly in Reformed evangelicalism. And so the temptation is, ironically enough, is just like the old church growth sort of movements, is that you just wanna keep appealing to the flesh in order to, you keep wanna appealing to the flesh in order to keep gathering goats around you.

Remember, that was the old church growth movement. We would talk about entertaining goats and just keep everything surface level and let's just appeal to the flesh and let's use hip words like community and those sorts of things, but there was no depth and those things kind of fell apart because it was appeal.

There's not, it's not Christ-centered that the gospel was lost. Okay, this is happening all over again, just in a different vein. It's like we're gonna appeal to the flesh, we're gonna appeal, like it doesn't just appeal to believers for a man to be the head of his home because this is a natural thing.

Men should be the head of the home. So you pull this thing, like yeah, yeah, these women, this is wrong, and I wanna have the macho man or whatever. And so you keep appealing to that and you get more outrageous and you get more outlandish and you just keep pressing in that direction.

And what happens is you lose the gospel. Like a lot of these things, the gospel becomes about all its implications in the way that I interpret it instead of gospel proper and Christ and the preciousness and glory and wonder of Christ and all these things become lost and we're seeing it before us in some of these sort of fringe, which in some ways are not fringe, right?

I mean, in some ways they press on closer and closer to the center, which is problematic. Now, thankfully in some of these circles, more and more things are being said publicly that these young men aren't leading in the right direction.

That's good. Hopefully we'll have more boldness and hopefully have less guys wanting to be connected with some of these younger guys. What they need is they need to sit under faithful preaching. They need to sit somewhere where they're not the one speaking all the time or they listen.

I mean, some of these guys, think about all they do is talk. You know, they're either preaching from the pulpit or they're doing hours upon hours of podcasting and online exchanges and conferences and you're just like, are you guys even in the real world, you know?

And if you're not careful, and I've been guilty there too. I remember years ago in the SBC, just that consuming so much of me. If you're not careful, these things will consume you in such a way that you begin to think this fantasy world that you live in is reality.

You're not dealing with the real world. You're not dealing with real people. So I guess the heart of the episode today is just an encouragement to like intergenerational, intergenerational community in a local church.

Like that's important. Young women need to be, and that's something else too. We hadn't even talked about that, but for all these guys that talk about, you know, the influence of women, it's like, it's their circles of younger women that have all these crazy sort of outlandish requirements and there's much less listening to the older women.

I mean, there's the same application that we could do a whole episode on that. But anyway, the point is we need younger Christians to be shaped by and led by and guided by older Christians. And what about when older Christians won't do it?

Learning from Faithful Older Generations

Well, you keep pressing on, but if you keep pressing on, you're eventually going to find, sorry, here's how you know if you're pressing on in godliness and faithfulness. You're gonna come across the older people who do agree with you because God doesn't just have one generation of faithfulness.

He has older generations too that we need to listen to and learn from. And I know that we can go back in history, we can think about the people God used in the great awakening and primarily younger people.

But I think about even in that, you know, there's probably a great example just came to my mind. But even the idea of some of the ways that George Whitefield was doing things and Jonathan Edwards on that horse ride after Whitefield had spoke at his church had to rebuke him about some things and talk to him about some things.

And Edwards being the older one and Whitefield being the younger. And here's a beautiful thing, Whitefield listened. His ministry became better. He was sharpened because of Edwards. You think about how different it would have been if he would have just rebuked Edwards for, you know, being a boomer or whatever.

I know it's historically, you know, you can't do that, but you know what I'm saying. Oh, shut up, boomer. He just presses on and does his own thing. His ministry would not nearly have been successful.

God would not have blessed it and we may not even know Whitefield at least in his fullness like we know him today. So it's just things to be thinking about. I know this could have been more polished of a presentation.

I'm just thinking off the cuff here. No preparation notes or anything like that. But I hope it's helpful and I hope you understand that the point is that we don't need to be in a situation that we're like those elephants in Africa with no leadership, hormonal imbalance, and we wind up just doing more harm than good.

Let us invite and even seek and look for the older elephants, the godly older men to shape us, to let our zeal encourage them and let their wisdom temper us in the appropriate ways, of course, not throw cold water on zeal.

Intergenerational Church Life Displays the Glory of Christ

But let us be men and women as well that are willing to walk alongside one another intergenerationally and grow and show forth. Like the church is so much more beautiful than this. Let us press on and show the glory and benefit of the church for the glory of Christ.

Hope this is helpful. If you have any thoughts or feedback, you're free to reach out. Actually, I can point you to our website now. You can contact, so thankful for our new website, providencebaptistar .org, providencebaptistar .org, or right now you can also use providenceperryville .com.

That'll take you to our church website. You can contact me there. I hope you benefited this week on the Real Church Podcast. We'll catch you guys next week.

If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.

How are you gonna respond?