The Mark of a Man: Following Christ's Example of Masculinity

Books by Elisabeth Elliot

A Lamp Unto My Feet

Be Still My Soul

Guided by God’s Promises

The Journals of Jim Elliot

Joyful Surrender

Keep a Quiet Heart

The Mark of a Man

Passion and Purity

Quest for Love

The Path of Loneliness

A Path through Suffering

On Asking God Why

Secure in the Everlasting Arms

Seeking God’s Guidance

The Shaping of a Christian Family

These Strange Ashes

A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael

© 1981 by Elisabeth Elliot

Published by Revell

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

RevellBooks.com

Repackaged edition published 2024

ISBN 978-1-4934-3448-0

Ebook edition created 2021

Ebook corrections 03.20.2024

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-3448-0

Scripture marked RSV is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked NEB is taken from The New English Bible. Copyright © 1961 and 1970 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture marked PHILLIPS is taken from The New Testament in Modern English, revised edition—J. B. Phillips, translator. © J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

Scripture marked YOUNG CHURCHES are from LETTERS TO YOUNG CHURCHES by J. B. Phillips. Copyright © 1968 by J. B. Phillips. Used by permission.

Quotations from I’m an Ordinary Man, © 1956 by Alan J. Lerner & Frederick Loewe Chappell & Co., Inc., owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. International Copyright Secured. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Used by permission.

Author image courtesy of the Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

In this book, Elisabeth Elliot brings into focus the separate functions that God assigned to Adam and Eve, which show that the sexes are gloriously and radically unequal. Written as personal advice to her nephew Pete, her convictions on manliness will help you to see the glory and purpose of true masculinity—and reassure you as you shape your own Christian sexual identity.

Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) was one of the most perceptive and popular Christian writers of the last century. The author of more than twenty books, including Passion and Purity, The Journals of Jim Elliot, and These Strange Ashes, Elliot offered guidance and encouragement to millions of readers worldwide. For more information about Elisabeth's books, visit ElisabethElliot.org

.

For Peter Henry deVries

Contents

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

About The Author

Dedication

Introduction

  1. The Way Things Are

  2. Equal in Being Created

  3. Equal in Image

  4. Equal in Moral Responsibility

  5. The Inequalities

  6. The Maker of Distinctions

  7. Just a Person

  8. The Trouble We’re In

  9. A Local Vertical

10. The Ancient Story

11. Too Wonderful for Solomon

12. Nothing Buttery

13. Masculinity Means Initiation

14. Femininity Means Response

15. The Design

16. Divine Imagery

17. Prejudice or Gift

18. Two Theaters

19. The Cast

20. Not Merit, but Order

21. A Take-Charge Man Is a Servant

22. The Word Spoken

23. Right and Wrong

24. Authority Is a Source of Power

25. Initiation into Manhood

26. The Route to Life

27. Authority Is Fitting

28. Who Does the Wooing?

29. Authority Means Sacrifice

30. Leadership through Suffering

31. Trustees of the Mystery

32. Courtesy

33. From Silken Self

34. Endurance

35. Heroes

36. Manliness Means Obedience

37. Forgiveness

38. Tenderness

39. Love Is a Refiner’s Fire

40. Making Love or Loving

41. Having a Family

42. A Checklist

43. How to Help with the Checklist

44. When You Don’t Understand Her

Source Notes

Back Ads

Back Cover

Introduction

You would be surprised, Pete, at how often you are in my thoughts. And as often as you are in my thoughts, you are in my prayers—you and my other two highly marriageable nephews, Gene and Steve. I pray that God will make you real men and give you for wives—if He wants you to marry—real women.

You are in my thoughts on this dark, winter afternoon. The sea, on which I look out through the window near my typewriter, is battleship gray, running in long swells before a northeast wind. Three little coots ride the swells, vanishing altogether beneath the surface, from time to time, only to pop up again, like corks. The waves churn and foam and slap against the great rocks below the bluff, praising God. Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. And he established them for ever and ever; he fixed their bounds which cannot be passed. Praise the Lord . . . you sea monster and all deeps.

It was just over a week ago that you drove Lars and me to the airport, in the little black car that needs new seats so badly—the car that gave you what you called a Saab story when you first bought it, thinking you were getting a bargain. I remember your troubles that school year—just the sort of troubles one would expect a young man to have: your car, your grades at the university, your girl friend(s!). And, when you called to ask advice, I said, You know what I’m going to say, don’t you, Pete?

Yup. that’s why I called. I needed to hear it again.

So we talked about learning to know God. Faith has to be exercised in the midst of ordinary, down-to-earth living. Ordinary living includes trouble. When things are going as we would like, faith doesn’t often seem necessary. It’s when things get messed up that we look around for answers or for help. Where, exactly would you expect the tests for a young man’s faith to come, if not in the three areas where you were having trouble?

Right! you said.

Then there was the question about participating in a campus Christian group. Not many of us are much good at being Christians all by ourselves—we’re supposed to be a flock or a body. We’ve got to have help: somebody to study the Bible with, somebody to pray with, somebody to lift us up when we’re down. You promised to look for a Christian friend.

Of course my prayers were intensified for you after each phone call or letter.

Last week I thought of you again, at a student convention where I was speaking on—among other things—the married woman on the mission field. I was surprised to find in my audience, besides married women, several hundred men and single women. I realized how badly things have gotten twisted in the past decade or so, when—apropos of my thesis that there is a difference between men and women, that they’re not interchangeable—I called for a show of hands of the men who would like to be asked for a date. I was quite unprepared for the response. Hundreds of hands went up. I should have asked then to see the hands of those who would not want to be asked (I wonder if there would have been any), but I was too startled and confused. When I suggested that we post a sign-up sheet at the back of the auditorium, the clapping, cheering, and shrieking (loudest, I suppose, from the single women) was tumultuous. Everybody but me was amused. Children of their time, so accustomed to hearing about equality and rights and personhood, they no longer know what the difference is between the sexes. They even wonder whether it is legitimate to notice any difference or whether it might not be better to pretend there is none.

Well, Pete, there is one.

Come off it! I hear you saying, Think I don’t know?

Of course you know. Everybody knows. The biological difference is—so far, at least—an undeniable datum. There is a certain unbudgeableness about simple facts. They won’t go away. But science is working hard to change all that. God help us if it succeeds!

But in this era of ERA we’ve been trying our best to erase, ignore, overcome, or at least smudge the physical facts. Sometimes we hope that if we become truly civilized and freed up, we’ll be above all that and that perhaps, if we get terribly spiritual, we’ll manage to transcend it. The transcendence, however, is not that of real Christian vision at all, but rather of a thoroughly worldly compulsion to rearrange things to fit our humanism. Feminists are busy rewriting all of history, psychology, mythology, sociology, and even theology to suit the spirit of the age, and, if you dare say, Hey, wait a second! you know what you’ll be called.

There is a difference besides the biological one.

You mean all those tired old stereotypes: Men are supposed to do this; women are supposed to do that? Nothing but conditioning! Knee-jerk stuff!

I’ve heard that answer, too. Rosemary Radford Reuther, professor of historical theology, in From Machismo to Mutuality, speaks of exposing masculinity and femininity as social ideologies. Alas. Christians have lost their bearings when they accept a label like that.

No, Pete. I’m not talking about biology or stereotypes or social ideologies. I’m talking about what sexuality (masculinity and femininity) means. Ever stop to wonder if the physiology means anything?

I’m asking you to stop and wonder. There is a great deal more here than meets the eye. There is more than can be explained by custom or culture.

There is a mystery. It’s this mystery that I wanted to write about for you. You are a man, Pete, and I know it when I see you. I thank God for your manliness.

I have to catch my breath sometimes, too, remembering the little boy I knew such a short time ago. You hated carrots. But you were obedient, and, if your mother said, Eat your carrots! you stuffed them into your mouth. They didn’t always get much farther, as we found one day in Quito, Ecuador. Your family and I had been invited to a missionary’s home for lunch. You were about four, I think, and took a nap in the missionary’s bedroom while we chatted after the meal. On the way home, an hour or so later, you mumbled, Do I have to finish these carrots? They were still stashed away in your fat little cheek.

I have a photograph of you and your cousin Valerie chasing pigeons on the Atlantic City boardwalk. It calls up memories of how she would tiptoe ever so delicately, trying to get as close as she could, and you would clump heavily in your tiny Buster Brown shoes and be so disappointed when the pigeons flew off with a whoosh.

You grew up in a few days, it seemed. You lived in the Philippines, where I visited you only once. There you were at the Puerto Princesa airport, which wasn’t much more than a lemonade stand, waving a huge banner, WELCOME, AUNT BETTY AND UNCLE ADD! You were about thirteen, I think, but knew how to maneuver a motorboat, water-ski, skindive, run a diesel generator, man a shortwave radio, and beautifully play a violin.

You’ve added many skills to the list in the years that have intervened. You installed a fluorescent light for me in the kitchen during one Christmas vacation. You’ve learned to ski and ride horses, and you have a master’s degree in concert violin.

The world cries for men who are strong: strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer. I pray that you will be that kind of man, Pete, glad that God made you a man, glad to shoulder the burden of manliness in a time when to do so will often bring contempt. I say to you what Paul said in his letter to the Ephesian Christians:

Live life, then, with a due sense of responsibility, not as men who do not know the meaning and purpose of life but as those who do. Make the best use of your time, despite all the difficulties of these days. Don’t be vague but firmly grasp what you know to be