Men Need Grace, Too: A Friendly Engagement with Kevin DeYoung
Over a decade ago, a gifted pastor named Kevin DeYoung wrote the following about delayed marriage in a valuable book called Just Do Something (emphasis mine):
But when there is an overabundance of Christian singles who want to be married, this is a problem. And it’s a problem I put squarely at the feet of young men whose immaturity, passivity, and indecision are pushing their hormones to the limits of self-control, delaying the growing-up process, and forcing countless numbers of young women to spend lots of time and money pursuing a career (which is not necessarily wrong) when they would rather be getting married and having children. Men, if you want to be married, find a godly gal, treat her right, talk to her parents, pop the question, tie the knot, and start making babies. (DeYoung, 108)
With this counsel, DeYoung sought to help young men and young women alike. No doubt he did help readers, perhaps many. As just one small example, I can say that DeYoung’s Just Do Something (2009, re-released in 2014) blessed me personally. I read it in the heyday of the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement, and it galvanized my walk with Christ. Alongside John MacArthur’s excellent short book Found: God’s Will, it freed me from an anxious conscience and paralysis over decisions big and small.
More than a decade later, I’m thankful that Kevin DeYoung was used—with MacArthur—to help me in this respect. Beyond this book, DeYoung has been—in general terms—a steady and helpful voice in our generation. I appreciate a good portion of what he has taught over the years. Further, when a number of his peers (and mine) have sadly flamed out of ministry, DeYoung has remained at his post, faithfully shepherding the flock entrusted to him by our great God.
Are Men to Blame For All That Ails Us?
Back to the subject of delayed marriage. In Just Do Something, DeYoung added the following to his remarks cited above about struggling young men (emphasis mine):
One of the other problems with delayed marriage is that it complicates career decisions, especially for women. There are too many fine Christian women sliding into careers they aren’t sure they want to pursue, while they not so secretly wish they could be married and raise a family. I’m not saying women can’t work outside the home, let alone that they aren’t capable of doing the work quite well. My beef is with the men. While young women are going along with their career path because marriage doesn’t seem imminent, young men are meandering through life, putting off marriage, struggling with lust (and sometimes masturbation), and doing nothing much in particular on the job front. (110)
Note where the emphasis is in the two cited quotations: failing men. Immature men. Passive men. This is how pastors commonly spoke in the YRR heyday. If there were problems in marriage or family or society, here was a common diagnosis: Men are called to lead; men aren’t leading and are in fact failing; men are thus to blame.
I remember reading words along these lines in a book by Douglas Wilson. In Reforming Marriage, he wrote this: “When a couple comes for marriage counseling, my operating assumption is always that the man is completely responsible for all the problems” (32). In similar terms, Mark Driscoll brought the thunder against men from his Seattle pulpit, scorching them for their sinful boyishness.
These pastors were not all cut from the same cloth, and they did not take the exact same stance. DeYoung was not Wilson, and Wilson was not Driscoll. But there was a general vision of men in this era that saw men as the problem (at least in large measure). To a degree, we can understand why: at the level of biblical teaching, men are indeed called by Scripture to lead as husbands and elders (1 Timothy 3:1-7). Under their headship, women must be treated graciously, understandably, and with sacrificial Christlike love (Ephesians 5:22-33; 1 Peter 3:7).
We need strong men in every era, with no exceptions to that rule (1 Cor. 16:13). In a general sense, I am thankful that young evangelical men like me heard a ringing challenge some 15 years ago to step up and take responsibility. There was much good in that call, and I was galvanized in some form by all three of the figures mentioned above. Without hesitation, we can say that it is right, completely right, to call men to responsibility, maturity, and leadership, for Scripture does.
However, my sense looking back on this season is that the common evangelical approach to—and critique of—men lost a bit of balance. So arose the phenomenon that Aaron Renn has perceptively noted in which men get punched (and blamed) and women get praised (and excused). On Father’s Day, the pastor’s sermon scolds men; on Mother’s Day, he paints womanhood in a golden backlight.
In the Bible, Men Are Definitely Sinners (But Are Not Always to Blame)
Men have much sin to battle (see Genesis 3:17-19). Men, furthermore, can struggle in a serious way to be honest about their sin. Men do need to be challenged, woken up, and summoned to action with the pastor’s “command voice” (as all Christians do at times). We men often fail to be humble as we should, listen as we should, and repent as we should. I know this personally; I am fighting a lifelong battle with pride, and have seen God work to humble me and grow me in needed ways (the work, I can report, is ongoing).
Even as we identify normal masculine failings, though, we can say this with absolute biblical confidence: men are not automatically at fault. As just one biblical example, Joseph was not the cause of the predatory sexuality of Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39). Joseph was blameless in his conduct. As a second example, Hosea was not the cause of his wife Gomer’s pagan sexual practice; he modeled loving perseverance as a godly husband (see the entirety of the book of Hosea).
From these passages, it is clear that the Bible itself deflates the claim that men are always to blame, only to blame, or even mostly to blame in every circumstance. Some men are profoundly wronged by their spouse; some men try to get married but cannot do so; some men have been deeply wounded by real sins committed against them, and understandably struggle to move on. For men in these situations (and many like them), we should offer the tender mercies of God, not the fierce heat of condemnation.
In Kevin DeYoung’s writing, he offered some such balance in his preaching and writing. In Just Do Something, for example, he offered a needed challenge to young women about unrealistic marital expectations:
Don’t fret about finding your soul mate. And especially after you’re married and you’re having difficulties, don’t tell your pastor, “I’m going to file for divorce; he just wasn’t the one.” The problem with the myth of “the one” is that it assumes that affection is the glue that holds the marriage together, when really it is your commitment that safeguards the affection. So ditch the myth and get hitched. (109)
From this passage and others, it’s evident that DeYoung did not see men as the sole contributor to the troubling phenomenon of delayed marriage. Men and women alike were struggling, and needed reframed expectations. I agree with his general presentation. However, in re-reading the quoted sections from this book, I think there was—and is—more to the story than this presentation captured.
(By the way, I reached out to DeYoung about the content of this essay before publishing it. With a gracious tone, he said this: “My challenge to men was borne out of my experience then as a pastor seeing many more godly, serious Christian women than godly, serious men. I have gotten a good deal of flack for that statement over the years. I don't think what I said 15 years ago was wrong, but it wasn't all that needed to be said. And 15 years later, I certainly wouldn't make the same point in the same way.” I found this a humble and edifying response.)
Four Ways to Help Struggling Men Today
In what follows, I’ll offer four friendly responses to DeYoung’s charge to men. I’ll seek to honor the good while painting a fuller picture of the struggles of modern men.
First, young men were (and are) struggling. DeYoung put his finger on a big problem in Just Do Something: men were not doing great. Fast forward some years and this major issue has not gone away; it has intensified in scope and effect. Men today are in general terms not doing well; they’re leaving jobs, quitting college, getting hooked on pornography, not marrying women (when they are called to do so by natural constitution), not leading families, and committing suicide in striking numbers.
As I state in no uncertain terms in my recent book The War on Men, we will not help struggling men today by making excuses for them. We should not baby young men. We should not turn them against women in anger. We should not ignore their real spiritual problems. We should not fail to call out their sins. To their shame, many men today are embracing sin and shirking responsibility.
At the level of mega-trends, for example, many men today are failing to grow up. The wreckage of this common failing is all around us, and will affect us for the duration of our lifetimes, I expect. All this means that, as DeYoung did in Just Do Something, we must confront this malady, and not in a way that coddles men.
Second, young men have been hit hard by many problems that they did not create. In 2024, we can see in full what was only gradually coming into focus 10-15 years ago. Men are under fire from every angle. Men, said more simply, cannot win. If they assert themselves, they are inherently bad in a domineering way; if men fail to assert themselves, they are inherently bad in a passive way.
The key concept advancing this double-sided claim is “toxic masculinity.” Men, woke feminism tells us, are fundamentally flawed in a way that women are not. Men have a nature that is aggressive, angry, controlling, insecure, and generally bad. Women, on the other hand, have a nature that is peaceable, collaborative, empathetic, and generally good.
This assessment of manhood and womanhood surely has a good dose of truth in it. But the Bible does not view manhood as essentially “toxic” and womanhood as essentially flawless. The Bible calls both men and women to die to different aspects of their predilections. You could say it this way: God does not want men to be women; God wants men to be redeemed men, men of real gentleness and serious conviction, men who are tough and tender like Jesus (John 2; Matthew 18).
The chief problem of every boy and man is (and always will be) their sin nature. But in 2024, we must add numerous factors that contribute to their struggles: fatherlessness. No-fault divorce. Loss of good work opportunities. Woke feminism that attacks manhood. Weak preaching. Few mentors. The erosion of free speech (which hinders boys from communicating). A general spirit that reads boys as flawed and girls as good.
Suffice it to say that young men are walking into a losing contest today. When the game begins, they’re already down 20 points on the scoreboard. This is not their fault. They have not asked their fathers to leave the family; they have not requested that discipleship collapse in the local church; they have not lobbied for jobs to leave their area and head overseas; they have not cheered as wokeness divided our society and many of our churches.
At the level of trends, those just mentioned leave many young men without guidance, discipleship, and most significantly, without love. Where young men lack such graces, they will struggle. Some will drop out; some will flame out; some will lash out; some will puff their chest out. In the simplest form, young men untrained and unloved is a recipe for disaster—and disaster, as I am at pains to say, is what we increasingly face.
Third, young women have issues of their own that call for growth. To be sure, the added strength and aggressive capacity of men entails that men are—generally—more volatile than women. The sins of men can carry outsized consequences, and often do. As just one relevant metric, men on average have more than 50% more upper-body strength than women, for example, enabling men to do major physical damage to those weaker than they.
But we cannot only indict men for their weaknesses. While young men have much need for growth and spiritual transformation, young women do as well. Young women have the same sin nature that young men do. They need Jesus equally as much. We cannot think otherwise, and we cannot address young women as if they are functionally better than young men.
For their part, what do women battle today? Many things: An unsubmissive heart. Or, on the other side, an uncultivated heart, where you are functionally listless, and men do everything. A spirit that is never pleased, and that in truth not even a man who has the mind of Jonathan Edwards, the heart of Francis Schaeffer, the joy of C. S. Lewis, and the looks of Brad Pitt could satisfy. The view that having a family “completes you”—or, on the other side, the view that not having a family fulfills you.
In terms of delayed marriage, men have surely messed things up. If men are not leading, after all, the vehicle is stuck in mud. But women have contributed here as well. We all, it turns out, stumble in many ways (see James 3:2). We all know examples of women who are struggling to find a spouse, and our heart very much goes out to them. But so too do some of us know about men who have tried to move ahead here but face real challenges—not caused by their sin alone—in doing so.
If we want to address our modern predicament well, then, we cannot say that our “beef” is with men alone. We must start with men, this is true. As stated, in God’s creational design, men are the ones who must leave father and mother in order to form a new family, after all (Genesis 2:24). (We also celebrate the calling of singleness upon some men, and recognize it as a valuable calling before the Lord per 1 Corinthians 7).
But this is not all we must tackle. In love, here’s our mandate: we have to sit both young men and young women down. Out of deep concern and affection, we have to help both sexes. We have to frame expectations; we have to help both sexes see that while marriage is good and should be pursued by many, it is not that which “completes” us or gives us our identity. This only Christ can do.
From there, we have much discipling and training to do. To that point, we now turn.
Fourth, young men need a lot of encouragement and discipleship. Young men are different than young women in certain respects. But we must not think that men need only forge-hot law, and women need only syrupy-sweet grace. Young men need what Christ offers us in full: “grace and truth” (John 1:14, 17). In these terms, men need help just as women do. Men need someone to talk to just as women do. Men need gospel healing just as women do. Men need biblical counsel just as women do.
I am not saying that men and women need the application of revelation in exactly the same ways. Men and women do have some unique wiring. (I’ve written a good bit about that uniqueness here.) But with that said, men must not be treated as if they do not feel strongly, do not get seriously wounded, do not suffer greatly, do not need large gobs of assistance, and do not break. Men do break. In fact, all around us, men are breaking, and few seem to notice, and even fewer seem to care.
Men need help. But many men won’t get help. Why is this? In the simplest form, many men—in our entrenched pride—see getting help as unmanly. This is a common instinct, and it is as wrong as it is common. It’s not that women need help, but we men are impenetrable, bullet-proof, and indomitable. Without any exceptions, every man needs a ton of help. We need admonition and challenging; a lot of encouragement; gracious discipling; and brothers who can help us process and sort our emotions.
In the greatest form, we men (including long-time Christian men) need to re-encounter the Savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus specialized in rebuilding broken people and broken men. We think, for example, of how Jesus was betrayed by his beloved disciple, Peter, but did not vengefully attack him in response. Instead, Christ came near to his fallen protege, identified his sin with probing questions, and then restored him in a flood of forgiveness (John 21).
This is our example, and this is our empowerment, in rebuilding men: the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is grace; he is truth (John 1:17). All our discipleship is anchored in Christ. Start here, go everywhere.
Conclusion
Kevin DeYoung was right to call men to maturity in 2009. His stirring critique represented a needed word in evangelical circles, and it still rings out in 2024. While DeYoung was not wrong about struggling men, however, I do believe that his diagnosis and prescription needed some filling out. This was true not merely of his writing, but of how pastors—at least some of the time—engaged men. Men were nails, and pastors were hammers.
Moving ahead to our day, we cannot offer perfect ministry to men. What we can do, though, is glean some lessons from the past and especially from the Scripture. We can continue to call men to the high standard of biblical manhood, but we can add other dimensions to our discipleship as well. We can be kind to men; listen to men; put an arm around men; and in general terms anchor men not in condemnation borne of uninterruptable failure, but in redeeming love rippling from Christ’s cross and empty tomb.
We serve a God, after all, who is making all things new (Revelation 21:5). This work, thankfully, includes all of us Christian men, sinful and needy, undeserving and too often unteachable, broken and straying—yet loved with an everlasting love by a Father who delights to bind up just one bruised reed, and quench even a single smoking flax.