Become the Man God Wanted You to Be

God had a man in mind when He made you. You are not him yet. Here is how you close the gap. Not seven ideas to think about. Seven things to do, starting today.

1. Kill your comfort zone.

"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it."

Matthew 7:13, NASB 1995

You are soft because you chose to be. Nobody made you this way. You picked the warm bed over the early morning on your knees. You picked the easy path over the narrow gate every single time it was offered. You picked playing it safe over being dangerous for Christ. Comfort is the wide road, and the wide road is crowded, and Jesus told you exactly where it goes. Start choosing the narrow gate on purpose. Kill the comfort zone before it kills the man God meant you to be.

2. Pray every day.

"Keep watching and praying that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

Matthew 26:41, NASB 1995

No excuses. You should never have a reason why you did not pray today, and honestly you should be praying more than once. Here is a truth that should scare you into your knees. Every man who falls, your pastor, your father, the leader you looked up to, trace his collapse back far enough and you will find the same thing: he quit praying. And it did not fall apart all at once. The darkness does not move fast. It moves slow. It forms a hairline crack, then works it, then widens it over time, and then one day, the total collapse. Prayer is not a when-you-feel-like-it thing. It is a lifestyle, and it is your armor. A man who takes his armor off in a war does not stay standing for long.

3. Bring your sin into the light.

"Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much."

James 5:16, NASB 1995

Every sin you hide keeps you chained. Secrecy is the chain, and confession is the bolt cutter. When you drag a sin out into the light and say it out loud to God and to another man, it loses its grip on you, because darkness cannot survive being seen. Here is the part men get backwards. Satan does not fear a man who never sins, because there is no such man. He fears a man who never stops confessing, because that man he can never get a hold on. Stop hiding. Start confessing.

4. Guard your eyes like your life depends on it.

"but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Matthew 5:28, NASB 1995

The battle for your soul starts at your eyes. Watch how it runs. One look becomes a thought. One thought becomes a craving. The craving walks you straight into the sin. And here is what nobody tells you: you do not beat lust with willpower. You will lose that fight every time, because willpower shows up after the look, and by then it is already too late. You beat it by cutting off what feeds it, and that starts with the gaze. Guard the eyes and you starve the whole chain. Feed the eyes and no amount of gritted teeth will save you.

5. Start fasting.

"Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do."

Matthew 6:16, NASB 1995

Notice Jesus said whenever you fast, not if. He assumed His men would do it. Fasting sharpens your mind and breaks your attachment to the thing your body screams for. It loosens the grip your flesh has on your decisions. It teaches your body a lesson it desperately needs to learn: that you serve the Spirit, and it serves you, not the other way around. A man who cannot tell his own body no, who caves to every craving the second it barks, will never beat the darkness, because the darkness works through exactly that weakness. Every man should be doing this. One caution, and I mean it: if you have a medical condition, talk to your doctor first, and follow what a medical professional tells you. I am not a doctor. But if you are just soft, start.

6. Surround yourself with real men.

"Iron sharpens iron, So one man sharpens another."

Proverbs 27:17, NASB 1995

You need Christian men around you. Men to talk to, to pray with, to tell the truth to. You were not built to walk this road alone, and the man who tries gets picked off. Now here is the hard word, and I say it because it is true. If you do not have men like this in your life, it is most likely because you have not yet become the kind of man they would walk with. That is not an insult. It is a door. Work on your walk with Christ. Do the work. Get serious. And as you become that man, God will send you others like you. The right men should challenge every excuse you make, match your effort, and drag you toward the man God is calling you to be, even on the days you fight them the whole way.

7. Die to yourself daily.

"Then Jesus said to His disciples, 'If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.'"

Matthew 16:24, NASB 1995

The longer you walk with God, the more you run into something you do not want to admit. The single biggest obstacle between you and the man God is calling you to be is you. Your ego. Your laziness. Your fear. Your endless excuses. It was never mainly them, or the circumstances, or the bad hand you got dealt. It was you, and it has always been you. The moment you stop blaming everything outside of you and start dying to everything inside of you is the moment your transformation actually begins. And here is the mercy in it: God is not asking you to fix yourself. You cannot, and He knows it. He is asking you to get out of His way so that He can do the killing, kill the pride, kill the excuses, kill the man who keeps choosing comfort, and build something in his place that the old you would not even recognize.

So now do something about this. Right now. Not later, because we both know later never comes for the man who says it. Stop reading and pray. Confess your sins to God, out loud, the real ones. And start, today, the daily work of becoming the man He made you to be. He has been waiting on that man a long time. Go and be him.