False Advertising...

Listening to a football game on the radio, I came across the most curious advertisement.  It is one that I had heard many times before.  However, like so many commercials, I simply had grown used to ignoring it or turned the volume down until the game came back on.  Yet, the advertisements just kept coming.  I would see them on TV during the sports programs I was watching.  I would hear them during the breaks of the political talk programs I frequent.

With so much support from many of the programs that targeted men, I decided to finally listen to their pitch and see if their product could change my life in the way that so many of these commercials claimed it could.  Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed.

What was promoted as a "male enhancement pill" unfortunately had nothing to do with magically making men the spiritual leaders of their family, the self sacrificial care giver of their wives, provider of their families or the protector of the lives of their household.  It simply had to do with having better sex.

I guess that is really the point and the problem.  Men have been reduced to disposable sex toys whose only value is how much pleasure they can have or give their current partner.

Before you get offended that a pastor dared to write "male enhancement pill" on his blog, ask yourself if your son knows more Bible verses than he does the names of the many pills going by that name on the market or top 40 songs glamorizing the pleasures of sex for the self.  (And if you are, realize that you are in the minority).

I don't expect that the advertising of this world is going to change anytime soon.  However, we can stop buying what they are selling.  And we must if we want the next generation to turn out differently than ours did.

Men, it starts with us, when we start being intentional about the mandate about being the spiritual leader in the home that God gave us (Deut. 6:4-9; 11:13-21).  When we begin to choose the Bible over the ball field, our wives over our children (and God over either), church attendance over playoff games, quiet prayer over video games (or TV programs), discipline in learning more about our faith than learning about the opposing team's defense, serving the least of those in Christ rather than obtaining the largest trophy or most prestigious job title, being content with provision that provides time with family instead of things to disguise how we are never home (stuff is a cheap replacement for your presence), and being more impressed that our children know Jesus and His Word than the grades on their report card...only then will our wives, sons and daughters understand what it truly means to be a man of God because they will have seen it in the only place that matters, our lives.

If we can actually do that, then maybe when our kids are grown they will be marketing and encouraging the importance of building up godly men for our culture instead of the pleasure seekers our culture is currently producing in men.  That would be a commercial worth listening to.

Looks like we have some work to do.  Let's get to it.