On August 15, two Americans on a UFC fight card said the quiet part out loud.
Prelim winner Tresean Gore had just secured a decision that cost him two front teeth. With a mouth full of blood, he told Joe Rogan that he no longer smoked weed, drank, or watched porn and that Jesus Christ had saved his life and soul.
King Solomon foresaw the day of physical failure: ‘If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.’
On the main card, winner Jalin Turner’s first statement to Rogan was also a profession of faith.
Professing athletes are not new. Tim Tebow, Harrison Butker, and the Oklahoma women’s softball team have all said the same thing in public: Prowess and its rewards are not solely their own doing.
Toga-clad therapist
Gore and Turner moved us for a narrower reason. During our Bible study, we had been talking about the decline of masculinity among Christian men. When those men surrender responsible, loyal, trustworthy headship — as Scripture defines it under God the Father and His Son — instead of becoming humble, they disappear, leaving a hole that the spirit of the age fills.
American Christian men have forgotten, or were never taught, that their King was the strongest man who ever walked the earth, physically and spiritually. Jesus is the pattern for both. Following Him should produce men who pursue strength of body as well as strength of soul. Too many church leaders have taught the opposite. They have offered a Jesus who is only mild, never mighty: a toga-clad therapist who affirms all and judges none. That is not the Christ of the Gospels, and it is not the men who preceded and followed Him.
Other than Christ, no man in the Bible is without sin. God shows us these men so we will learn that Christianity requires faith, repentance, and obedience — not a clean record. Adam shifted blame. Samson and David yielded to lust. David’s sin was worse than just appetite: he deceived, murdered, and committed adultery. Scripture hides none of it.
Restored to strength
It also does not hide what these men were and what they did. Blind Samson pulled down a Philistine temple with his hands. David defended his flock against wild animals, then dropped Goliath with a stone. His elite guard, the Gibborim — Josheb, Eleazar, Shammah, Abishai, Benaiah — were remembered in 2 Samuel because they could fight. Four times God tells Joshua to be “strong and courageous.” Joshua then defeats 31 kings on the way to the promised land. God preserved Moses’ vigor at 120 (Deuteronomy 34:7); fed Elijah strength for the desert road (1 Kings 19:7-8); and promised through Isaiah that those who wait on the Lord will not faint (Isaiah 40:29-31).
The God of mercy and love is the same God who trained David’s hands for war and his fingers for battle and helped him bend a bow of bronze (Psalms 18:32-34 and 144:1). In 1 Peter 4:11, the apostle directs all who serve God to do so with the strength that God provides. All these men knew sin, fear, and confusion. Faith restored them to strength and courage for God’s glory. It did not restore them to softness.
RELATED: Do you follow a diluted Jesus — or the full-strength one?
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The weight of the cross
Then there is Jesus. He walked the land for three years knowing His own people would reject Him and kill Him, and He finished the work. The distances of that ministry are measured in thousands of miles, on foot.
On His last day, He was beaten and scourged, and He marched the Via Dolorosa under a patibulum that likely weighed 65 to 110 pounds. He fell because of pain and blood loss that would put most modern men on the ground before the first step. The contrast is not cute. A church that cannot tell the difference between meekness and weakness will baptize the second and call it discipleship.
We would rather live in the world Jesus describes: among people who worship without shame, who speak of Him as plainly as Tresean Gore and Jalin Turner did, and who pursue the holiness He demands. He is not playing. In the wedding parable of Matthew 22, the man without the garment of faith and repentance is bound and cast into the outer darkness. That is the same Lord who walked those miles.
‘Act like men’
So the question is not whether Christian men should be kind. It is whether they will be men. No more porn. No more anesthesia by weed and liquor. No more sexual chaos. Less devotion to entertainment that mocks the faith and more time in churches where men teach what Paul taught: Put your house in order (1 Tim. 3:1-5; Titus 1:5-9 and 2:1-2 and 6-8), and “be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13).
Drawing on the Old Testament, Jesus does tell His followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27, from Proverbs 24:17 and 25:21 and Exodus 23:4-5).
That command is real. It covers the neighbor who hates you, the official who slanders you, even the man who would harm you. It is not a mediation tip. It is imitation of the Father. It is also not a ban on strength. Prayer for a human enemy does not mean pretending he is harmless, refusing to restrain him, or talking to Satan as if he were your neighbor. Scripture never asks anyone to treat the devil as a prayer partner. It does ask men to resist him, to protect the innocent, and still not let hatred become their creed.
King Solomon foresaw the day of physical failure: “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small” (Proverbs 24:10). The next two verses are the gut punch. If you stand by while people are led away to death, God sees, and He will weigh your cowardice.
This is a day of adversity. American Christian men will come up big or small. They will find their strength in God, or they will keep drawing upon a smaller Jesus who demands nothing of their bodies and their nerve. They should pick up where Tresean Gore and Jalin Turner left off: Believe and profess the truth with blood still in your mouth, and then live as if the truth has hands.
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