From the devotional, “Becoming Your Most Masculine Self”:
We become what we do, we are the sum of our habits. I should say quickly I do not believe we are only the sum of our habits. There is more at work in our lives than the product of what we do. Thank God! To be a Christian is to believe the grace of Jesus breaks the unending, hellish cycle of cause and effect. I don’t want to live forever in the cancerous wake of my evil deeds. Grace intervenes. The Spirit makes me new. I’m freed, even from myself.
Still, even after grace comes to us, virtues have to be perfected. Our habits have to be formed. Our actions have to be aligned with the grace we have received…
We are given faith and we are taught knowledge, but to make both productive, we have to devote ourselves to a lifelong project of developing traits, attitudes, and habits. . . . Otherwise, we’ll be “ineffective and unproductive” despite the grace and knowledge we possess.
If we lived in an ideal world, every man would learn the traits of manliness as part of a dynamic body of righteous men. He would have models in these older men. He would have a tribe. He would be initiated, honored, challenged, trained, corrected, and commissioned by these men. In fact, in an ideal world, a man would barely be able to identify what had made him a great man, a genuine man. It would all be natural and woven into life. It would just be. . . .
Ps 119:45 – And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.
2Peter1:5-8 – And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; 6And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; 7And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. 8For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
2Peter1:10 – Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall:
Barnabas Man 