The Heart of a Lion, the Way of the Lamb

A message for men about masculinity and our relentless attempt to stick to the script.

Photo by Alvin David on Unsplash.

There’s a moment in Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, to which I keep returning. There is a search for one worthy to carry the title deed to all of creation, and it seems like no one was worthy, so John starts to cry.

An elder tells John, “Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” (Revelation 5:5 NRSV)

Strength. Authority. Victory.

The kind of figure I learned, as a boy, to admire.

Long live the Great Lion!

But then John turns to look. And instead of a lion, he sees “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered…” (Revelation 5:6 NRSV)

I spent years overlooking the significance of that detail.

I grew up absorbing a version of masculinity I never thought to question, because it was just in the air.

There was a script for how to be a man, and many of us who have tried to stick to the script our whole lives have come to realize we’re still broken somewhere inside.

Because you can become tougher, meaner, and grittier. You can grunt and growl more, assert your dominance, and beat your chest.

You can keep climbing ladders over other people and finally reach the TOP!

Alone.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about the performance of strength. About faking it. It costs you the people you most want to be close to, and you pay the bill in increments so small you barely notice.

One stubborn argument. One withheld confession. One moment of going quiet instead of being honest. One more retreat into distance, irritation, work, distraction, or numbness.

You can lose intimacy without ever making a dramatic choice to do so.

You just keep choosing self-protection over truth.

Traditional masculinity teaches men to win approval through performance. Keep the vulnerable self hidden. If you are hurting, convert it into anger, silence, sarcasm, withdrawal, or overwork. Whatever you do, do not let it look like need.

You can see the consequences in the data: male loneliness, depression buried beneath numbness, anxiety surfacing as irritability, relationships starved by emotional absence.

But honestly, you can also just see it at any dinner table where a man is physically present and emotionally somewhere else.

You can see it in marriages where conflict never becomes intimacy because one or both people are still protecting an image. You can see it in church cultures where “strong leadership” sometimes just means polished detachment.

We were taught that vulnerability leads to humiliation, so we perform strength instead.

We posture, we dominate, we go quiet, we pretend not to care.

We call emotional distance maturity, and hope no one looks too closely.

I used to preach about “biblical masculinity.” I stopped long ago, not because biblical masculinity isn’t a good thing, in theory. It just falls short because, while the Bible is a gift from God, our interpretation and application of the scriptures are shaped far more by our cultural norms and values than we realize.

I’m a Christian, which means I follow Jesus. He’s the model. He’s King. He’s the humble servant-leader who prays for his enemies and loves everybody. Yes, he overturns tables, but not because he was insulted. He acted courageously on behalf of oppressed and marginalized people who were being squeezed out of the religious pyramid scheme they had going inside the Temple.

And when I actually look at Jesus, I do not see a man obsessed with dominance, hierarchy, or proving anything. I see a man so secure in who he is that he can be tender without apology, suffer without flinching, and lay down power without losing himself.

That is what arrests me in Revelation. Scripture is not replacing the lion with the lamb. It is telling us what the lion actually is.

Jesus becomes the Lion through the way of the Lamb. Through surrender. Through sacrifice. Through love that gives itself away. Through wounds that are not hidden. Through authority that does not need to crush in order to reign.

That should rearrange almost everything we think we know about being a man.

Jesus has immense authority and uses it to protect the vulnerable.

He confronts injustice and weeps in public.

He sets boundaries and washes feet.

He speaks with clarity but never needs domination to validate himself.

He is neither passive nor aggressive, neither controlling nor insecure.

He is integrated.

And I think that integration is what so many men are actually starving for.

Not the destruction of masculinity. It’s healing.

The strongest men I know are not the loudest in the room. They are the ones secure enough to apologize. The ones who can sit with grief instead of numbing it. The ones who can be fully present with their wives and children. The ones who do not need to win every argument to feel like themselves. The ones who can tell the truth about their fear, their exhaustion, their longing, and their failures without collapsing into shame.

They became lions, I think, by following the Way made visible by the Lamb.

Not weak. Not spineless. Just no longer at war with tenderness.

My old friend Larry Barker used to pray over me (and many other young men), “God, give him the heart of a Lion!…”

And I’ll forever be grateful for those prayers.