Boys With Beards: Time to Man Up?

There is a certain glory to a good beard.

Some are majestic, cultivated with patience and wisdom. Others look like someone fell face first onto the floor of the barbers and hoped for the best. And when you picture the great men of faith, it’s hard not to imagine spectacular facial furniture. Moses? Definitely beard. John the Baptist? Surely he needed a risk assessment for his wild whiskers.

Now, before anyone gets twitchy, this is not a theology of beards. And just to be clear, this is not an attack on young men. It is an encouragement towards godly manhood. Not a finger pointed in condemnation, but a hand of brotherhood extended by a middle-aged geezer who wishes he had learned some of this stuff much sooner in life.

Because here’s the point: facial hair is not the same thing as maturity.

Looking Like a Man Is Not the Same as Being One

A beard might make you look older, wiser, or like you can reverse a trailer and explain Leviticus without notes. But it can’t make you a godly man. You can have a beard, a job, a gym membership and strong opinions about football and still be spiritually childish.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

That verse is awkward because it doesn’t define manhood by age, appearance, income, confidence or relationship status. It points towards maturity.

You don’t wake up prayerful, disciplined, humble, pure, accountable and sacrificial because your beard finally connected at the jawline. Growing in Christ has to be pursued, practised and sometimes fought for.

You Are Becoming Someone

That’s especially important for men in their late teens, twenties and early thirties. Those years are full of choices about faith, work, dating, sex, friendship, church, money and character. Whether you realise it or not, those choices are forming you. You are becoming someone.

Your private habits are forming you. What you watch is forming you. How you speak about women is forming you. The way you respond to correction, failure and temptation is forming you.

One of the great temptations for young men is passivity. You can be disciplined with your body and careless with your soul. Confident with your mates and silent before God. Serious about finding a girlfriend but casual about purity. Keen to have a godly wife one day while doing very little to become a godly husband now.

You can even turn up to church every Sunday without ever really taking ownership of your faith. At some point, borrowed faith has to become personal conviction.

The Boy with a Beard

This is where the boy with a beard shows up. He wants the privileges of adulthood without its responsibilities. He avoids hard conversations, blames others rather than repenting, hides sin rather than confessing it, consumes more than he contributes, and wants respect while avoiding responsibility.

This isn’t about personality. You don’t need to become loud, extroverted or ridiculously confident. Some of the godliest men I know are quiet men.

This is about character. Do I keep my word? Admit when I’m wrong? Serve when nobody notices? Take responsibility when I’ve messed up? Am I becoming someone other people can safely trust?

That’s a much better measure of maturity than impressive facial furniture.

Love Honours Rather Than Uses

This matters in relationships too. The world can teach young men to see relationships primarily in terms of what they provide: feeling wanted, curing loneliness, satisfying sexual desire or gaining status.

But that isn’t love. That’s consumption with romantic lighting.

Christian manhood doesn’t use people. It honours them. The question can’t simply be, “What do I want from this person?” It needs to become, “How can I honour God in the way I treat this person?”

Paul tells husbands in Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Christlike love doesn’t ask, “What can I get?” It asks, “What can I give?” Jesus doesn’t use his bride. He gives himself for her.

So What Does It Actually Mean to “Man Up”?

This is where we need to be careful, because depending on which corner of the internet you wander into, “being a man” can mean wildly different things.

I recently watched Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere, which spends time with some of the influencers currently shaping the way young men think about masculinity. I found quite a lot of it desperately sad.

The world presented by men like HS TikkyTokky, and perhaps most famously associated with Andrew Tate, offers young men a particular vision of manhood. Get rich. Get ripped. Get women. Get cars. Get status. Never look weak. Dominate the room. Make sure everybody knows you’re winning. And apparently at some point you need to acquire a Lamborghini.

Like all the most destructive lies, there are fragments of truth buried in there that make it harder to spot. Young men should take responsibility. They should work hard, develop discipline and resilience, protect rather than exploit, and be prepared to lead where God calls them.

But disconnect those good instincts from Christ and strength becomes dominance, confidence becomes arrogance, leadership becomes control, sex becomes conquest, women become trophies and money becomes the measure of success.

It’s shallow. Worse than shallow, it’s spiritually bankrupt.

If the pinnacle of manhood is a six-pack, an expensive car, loads of money and lots of women, Solomon absolutely smashed it.

Ecclesiastes is basically his review: meaningless!

“Toxic Masculinity” Isn’t the Answer Either

But the answer isn’t found at the opposite cultural extreme. I’m equally convinced that the language of “toxic masculinity” is a load of nonsense.

Toxic behaviour is toxic because it is toxic, not because it is masculine, or feminine for that matter. Arrogance, violence, manipulation, cruelty, sexual exploitation, pride and abuse are toxic regardless of whether the person doing them is male or female.

Christians should be careful about allowing politically loaded cultural terms to become our categories for understanding men and women. The Bible already has a perfectly good word for destructive human behaviour: sin.

The problem isn’t that masculinity becomes toxic when there’s too much of it. The problem is that masculinity, like every other part of human life, can become corrupted by sin. And the answer to sinful masculinity isn’t less masculinity. It’s redeemed masculinity.

We don’t need young men ashamed of being men. Neither do we need them learning manhood from influencers posing beside supercars while explaining how women work, or being discipled by rhetoric that treats masculinity as something of a bygone era we need to move on from.

Christians don’t need to choose between the manosphere’s chest-beating “alpha male” and a culture increasingly suspicious of masculinity itself. We have another option.

Actually, we have a much older one…Jesus.

Biblical Manhood Looks Like Jesus

Andrew Tate doesn’t get to define manhood. HS TikkyTokky doesn’t get to define manhood. Our education system doesn’t get to define manhood. The media doesn’t get to define manhood…Jesus does!

And when you look at him, you discover something far richer. Jesus was strong, but never cruel. Gentle, but never weak. Courageous, but never reckless. Authoritative, but never abusive. Compassionate, but never spineless.

He wept openly and confronted boldly. He welcomed children, touched lepers, stood against hypocrisy and washed feet. He could turn over tables and allow a grieving woman to soak his feet with her tears.

He’s wonderfully difficult to squeeze into our modern categories. Too gentle for the alpha bros. Too authoritative for anyone who thinks masculinity itself is the problem. He simply refuses to fit.

Jesus carried responsibility without ego, exercised authority without domination, served without needing applause and loved sacrificially even when it cost him everything. That’s manhood worth pursuing.

So perhaps the better question isn’t, “Do I look like a man?” It’s “Am I becoming a man who looks like Jesus?”

Young Men, Stand Up

So, young men, in fact all men, hear this as a loving but firm call: stand up!

Not in a chest-beating, alpha-male sort of way. You don’t need to start a podcast, buy a Bugatti or refer to yourself as a high-value male.

Stand humbly, prayerfully, faithfully and sacrificially. Work hard. Manage your money. Keep your word. Learn to apologise. Stop treating basic life admin like it’s nuclear physics.

But take spiritual responsibility too. Pray. Read your Bible because you want to know God. Serve your church rather than merely attending it. Find older godly men and learn from them. Find brothers who know the real you, not just the edited highlights. And when you sin, don’t hide. Repent.

Grace That Restores and Forms Men

This could all start sounding like one enormous spiritual performance review: do better, try harder, grow up.

But that’s not the gospel.

Jesus doesn’t simply expose immature men. He restores them and then forms them.

Look at Peter. He was impulsive, proud and spectacularly overconfident. He effectively told Jesus, “These other losers might abandon you, but not me.” Hours later, he denied even knowing him. Three times.

Not exactly apostolic man-of-the-year material.

Yet Jesus didn’t discard Peter. He restored him, recommissioned him and, by grace, transformed an impulsive disciple into a shepherd.

That’s what grace does. It takes imperfect, immature, sinful men and, over time, makes them more like Jesus.

So grow the beard if you can. Oil it. Comb it. Stroke it thoughtfully while reading the Minor Prophets. But don’t settle for simply looking mature.

Repent where you need to repent. Confess what you need to confess. Find brothers who will tell you the truth. Take responsibility for your faith. Own your choices. Serve when nobody applauds. Love people rather than use them.

And stop waiting for maturity to arrive like an Amazon parcel.

Age doesn’t guarantee maturity. Neither does a beard.

But by the grace of God, you can become something far better than a man who merely looks the part.

You can become a man who looks like Jesus..