the governed fire

chapter one

two lies about a man’s heart

The two lies belong side by side, plainly, because most men are being crushed between them without ever seeing either one clearly, and you cannot fight what you cannot name.

The first lie is the old one, and it is the one most men were raised on: that a real man does not feel, or if he feels, he never shows it. Boys are told not to cry almost before they can talk. Men learn to bury grief, to swallow fear, to wall off tenderness, to show the world one flat and unmoved face no matter what is happening underneath. And a great many men have gotten so good at it that they can no longer find their own hearts even when they go looking; they have stuffed everything down for so long that they have gone numb, and they call the numbness strength. It is not strength. It is a man slowly suffocating his own soul and calling the silence manhood.

He has stuffed everything down for so long that he has gone numb, and he calls the numbness strength.

The second lie came later, in reaction against the first, and it looks like the cure but is only the opposite ditch. It says: since bottling it all up is so plainly killing men, then let it all out, feel everything, follow your heart, honor every emotion, and never deny what you feel. And so the pendulum swings from the man who feels nothing to the man who is run entirely by his feelings, who does whatever his anger or his fear or his desire tells him to do in the moment and calls it being authentic. This is no better than the first; it is worse in some ways, because a man ruled by his feelings is a man with no hand on the wheel, and the Scripture has a hard word for him that we will come to.

Both lies share one buried assumption, and here is where they are both wrong at the root: they both assume that feeling deeply and ruling yourself are opposites, that you must either kill the feeling to keep control or surrender the control to have the feeling. That is false. It is the great false thing under both ditches. The truth, the third man, feels everything the first man buries and rules everything the second man obeys, and there is no contradiction in it at all. Deep feeling and iron control are not enemies. They were always meant to live in the same man.

chapter two

the god who feels

Before we say one more word about what a man should do with his feelings, we have to settle where feeling comes from in the first place, because if you get this wrong everything after it goes wrong. And here is the truth that pulls the floor out from under the stone-faced lie: emotion is not a weakness God tolerates in us. It is something God Himself has.

Open the Book anywhere and you find a God who feels, and feels intensely. He grieves; it repented the LORD that He had made man, and it grieved Him at His heart. He burns with anger; His wrath is real and hot against sin. He delights; He rejoices over His people with joy, He will joy over them with singing. He loves, with a love fiercer than a mother’s for her nursing child. He is moved, He is grieved, He is pleased, He is jealous. The God of the Bible is not the cold, unmoved, feelingless abstraction of the philosophers. He is a living God with a living heart, and the whole range of deep feeling is in Him.¹

We feel because we are made in the image of a God who feels.

Now put that together with what you already know: that man was made in the image of God. If the God whose image you bear is a God who grieves and rejoices and loves and burns, then the capacity to feel all of that is not a flaw in your design, not a womanish weakness that slipped into you by mistake. It is part of the image. It is one of the ways you resemble your Maker. The man who has numbed himself down to feel nothing has not become more like God; he has become less like Him, more like a stone than like the living God whose image he carries.

So get this settled in the foundation, before we go on: your capacity to feel is not a defect to be ground away. It is a God-given thing, a godlike one. The problem was never that you feel. The problem, when there is one, is only ever what you do with the feeling once you have it, and that is a different question entirely, and it is the question the rest of this booklet is about.

chapter three

jesus wept

If you want to see the whole thing lived out perfectly, in a single Man, you do not look to the stoic of the movies or the swaggering strong man of the culture. You look at the Lord Jesus Christ, the only perfect man who ever lived, the fullest and most complete man there has ever been. And when you look at Him honestly, you find a Man who felt the entire range of human emotion, deeply, openly, and was never once ruled by any of it. He is the pattern, and He shatters the stone-faced lie by simply being who He was.

Watch Him feel. He stood at the grave of His friend Lazarus, a man He was moments from raising, and knowing He would raise him, He still wept, openly, so that the crowd said, behold how he loved him.

The shortest verse in the Bible, and one of the most important for a man to understand, because it is God in the flesh, weeping, in front of everyone. He was moved with compassion again and again, His gut turning over at the sight of the harassed and the helpless and the grieving. He took little children up in His arms. He looked on the rich young ruler and loved him. And this is the same Man who made a whip of cords and drove the money-changers out of the temple, overturning their tables, blazing with a righteous anger that sent grown men running. The same Man who called the proud hypocrites a generation of vipers to their faces. The same Man who, in the garden, was so overwhelmed with sorrow and dread that He sweat as it were great drops of blood, and said His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.²

The fullest man who ever lived felt everything, deeply, openly, and was never once ruled by any of it. That is the pattern.

Look at the range of it. Grief, compassion, tenderness, affection, love, righteous anger, sorrow, dread, and through it all an unbroken joy set before Him. He felt the whole spectrum a human heart can feel, at full strength, and He showed it, and He was not ashamed of a single bit of it. And yet, mark this, He was never once ruled by it. His grief never made Him faithless. His anger never made Him sin; be ye angry, and sin not, and He never crossed that line. His dread in the garden never turned Him from the cross; not my will, but thine, be done. He felt everything and obeyed anyway, felt everything and governed all of it, and that is what a whole man looks like. Not a man who feels nothing. A man who feels everything and rules it.

chapter four

the whole range, not a narrow band

Now I have to guard something here, because even the men who will grant that a man may feel tend to grant it only for a narrow, approved band of emotions, and quietly forbid the rest. And that partial permission is its own trap, so we pull it into the light.

Here is how the caricature of manhood works. It will allow a man anger, usually, because anger can be made to look strong. It will allow him a certain grim resolve, a hard determination. And it quietly forbids him everything else, treating grief and tears and fear as unmanly. It shames him out of tenderness, as though gentleness were weakness. It shames him out of compassion and empathy, out of open affection, sometimes even out of joy, as though a man laughing too freely had let his guard down. And so you get men who will let themselves be angry and let themselves be hard, and have walled off every other room in the house of their own heart. That is not mastery. That is just a different kind of amputation.

They allow a man his anger and forbid him his grief. That is not mastery. It is just a different kind of amputation.

But look again at the men God actually holds up, and you find the full range, not the narrow band. Look at David, the mightiest warrior in Israel, the lion-killer, the giant-slayer. This same hard man danced before the LORD with all his might, undignified and unashamed. He wept, openly and often; the Psalms are soaked with his weeping. He raged, he ached, he exulted, he trembled, he longed, he broke. He felt with the whole furnace of a great heart, every color of it, and God called him a man after His own heart. Look at Jeremiah weeping over his people, at Paul writing that he served the Lord with many tears, at the Lord Jesus Himself running the whole spectrum. The godly men of the Book are not men with one or two permitted feelings. They are men fully alive, feeling the whole range God built into a human heart.³

So do not let anyone hand you the amputated manhood that permits you anger and forbids you everything tender. That is not the biblical man; it is a cultural counterfeit. God made you to feel all of it, grief and joy and compassion and love and empathy and holy anger and every other color besides, and the goal was never to cut most of them off and keep two. The goal was to feel the whole range, fully, and to bring the whole range under God. Which raises the real question, the one we come to now: what does it actually mean to govern a feeling without killing it?

chapter five

without passion

Here I want to do a little digging into some words, because there is an old idea that has been badly misunderstood, and understanding it rightly will hand you exactly the thing you have been reaching for. The idea is the one the ancient Stoic philosophers were after, and the modern world thinks it knows what they meant and has it almost exactly backwards.

The Stoics prized a thing they called apatheia, and you can hear our word apathy hiding inside it, which is exactly where the modern misunderstanding comes from. For we hear apathy and think it means not caring, feeling nothing, a flat and cold indifference. But that is not what the word was built to mean. It is a-, without, joined to pathos, passion, the thing that happens to you, the feeling that sweeps in and moves you. And apatheia did not mean having no inner life. It meant not being overthrown by it, not being mastered by passion, keeping the reason in command over the storms of the heart. It was never about the absence of the inner life. It was about who was in charge of it.⁴

Now that is remarkably close to something the Bible commands, and I want you to see both how close it is and where it finally parts ways. For the Scripture, in its list of the fruit of the Spirit, names a thing the King James calls temperance, and the Greek is enkrateia, which means self-mastery, strength held under control, power with a hand on the reins. It is not the killing of the passions; it is the governing of them. It is the war-horse trained to stand steady under its rider, all that power fully present and fully answerable to a hand. The Stoic and the Scripture are both after a man who feels the storm and is not blown over by it.⁵

It never meant feeling nothing. It meant not being ruled by what you feel. The feeling stays. The mastery is added on top of it.

But here is where they part, and the difference is everything. The Stoic meant to master himself by his own will and reason, gritting his own teeth, damming the river by the strength of his own hand. And that is a hard, cold, lonely, and finally losing battle, because no man has the strength in himself to rule his own heart for long. The Christian is after the same governed strength, but it is named as a fruit of the Spirit, which means it is grown in a man by God and not manufactured by his own willpower. It is not you clamping down on yourself by force. It is the Spirit of God producing in you, over time, the strength to feel deeply and rule it well. Same target the old philosophers saw from far off; a different and a living power to reach it. You are not called to be a Stoic gritting his teeth. You are called to be a Spirit-filled man whose great heart runs hot and stays under the hand of God.

chapter six

men who felt like a furnace

Widen your eyes a little, because here too you have been handed a false picture of the past, and it is keeping you from seeing what a man can be. You have been told, without anyone saying it outright, that the hard men of old, the warriors and the kings and the frontier men, were the stone-faced sort, that stoic silence is the ancient and manly way and open feeling is some soft modern invention. It is very nearly the opposite of the truth.

Go and look at the hard men of history and of the Book, and you find that they felt like furnaces and were not ashamed of it. Achilles, the deadliest warrior in all of Homer, weeps openly over his fallen friend Patroclus, throws himself on the ground, pours dust on his own head, and refuses to be comforted; and no Greek hearing that story thought the warrior less of a man for it. Alexander the Great, who conquered the known world, is said to have wept and shut himself away for days when his friend Hephaestion died. Augustine, one of the mightiest minds the church ever produced, wrote pages of open, unashamed grief over the death of a friend, saying his own heart had been made one soul in two bodies with the man and that he could not bear to live as the half that was left. These were not soft men, and none of them was mocked for the tears; the tears were simply understood to be what a great heart does when it is torn. They could kill without flinching and weep without flinching in the same day, and no one supposed the two had nothing to do with each other. Strength and deep feeling were not thought to be at war. The ancient picture of a strong man was a man who felt everything at full heat and commanded it like a general commands a fire he has set on purpose.⁶

They could kill without flinching and weep without flinching in the same day, and saw no contradiction in it.

And that is the picture the Bible gives too, of its hardest men. David the warrior wept and danced and raged and broke. Joseph, second in all Egypt, wept so loudly at the sight of his brothers that the whole house heard him. Nehemiah the governor, a tough and practical builder of walls, sat down and wept and mourned for days over his ruined city. Job, Jeremiah, Paul, hard men all, and all of them men who felt with the full furnace of a great heart and let it show. The flat, silent, feelingless man you were told was the ancient standard of manhood is nowhere to be found among them. He is a recent and a diminished thing. The real men, the strong ones, the ones God used, ran hot inside and held it in hand, and there was no contradiction in them at all, and there need be none in you.⁷

chapter seven

bring it under

So we get practical, because a man wants to know not just the idea but the how. If the goal is neither stuffing the feeling down nor being run by it, but governing it, what does governing actually look like when the anger is hot in your chest or the grief is trying to pull you under or the fear is screaming at you to run? Here it is plainly, in the order it actually goes.

First, you feel it, honestly. You do not deny it is there, do not pretend to yourself that you are fine when you are not, do not slam the lid down and go numb, because that is lie number one and it only buries the thing alive to rot. You let yourself feel the full weight of what you feel, and you name it to yourself, and you can name it to God, who knows it anyway; the Psalms are full of men telling God exactly how bad it is, holding nothing back. Feeling it and naming it is not weakness. It is the first act of a man who intends to master a thing, because you cannot govern what you will not even admit is there.

Second, and this is the hinge, you refuse to let it take the wheel. You feel the anger fully and you do not let it make you cruel or a fool. You feel the fear fully and you do the right thing anyway, in spite of it, which is the whole definition of courage; courage was never the absence of fear but the mastery of it. You feel the grief fully and you do not let it drag you into faithlessness or despair. The feeling is a passenger, sometimes a very loud one, and it is allowed to be in the vehicle, and it is never, ever allowed to drive.

The feeling is a passenger, sometimes a very loud one. It is allowed in the vehicle. It is never allowed to drive.

Hear the weight of that proverb, because it is the whole thing in one picture. A man with no rule over his own spirit is a city with its walls broken down, wide open, defenseless, anything at all can walk right in and sack him. The ancient city lived or died by its walls; a city without them was not really a city, just people waiting to be overrun. And that, says the Spirit of God, is a man who cannot govern his own inner life, at the mercy of every passion that rises, sacked again and again by his own unruled heart. The walls are not the absence of a city inside them; a walled city is full of life, markets and homes and people, all of it protected precisely because the walls hold. So it is with a governed man. He is not empty inside the walls. He is full of a great and living heart, all of it kept and protected and useful, because he has rule over his own spirit.⁸

chapter eight

the standard, not the scorecard

And now hear the mercy, My Friend, because I promised it to you at the start and I will not end without it, and because a booklet like this can do real harm if it leaves a man measuring himself against a bar and hating himself for falling short. So I will say the last thing as plainly as I have said anything: this is the standard, and it is not the scorecard your soul is graded on.

You are a fallen man, and a simple one, as we all are, and you are going to fail at this. There will be days the anger takes the wheel and you say the thing you cannot unsay. Days the fear runs you and you shrink from what you should have faced. Days the grief pulls you under, or the numbness wins and you go cold when you should have been tender. That does not mean the standard was wrong, and it does not mean you are a fraud, and it does not mean you should throw the whole thing over and go back to one of the ditches. It means you are a man, and men stumble, and the mark of a man is not that he never falls but that he gets up and aims again.

The mark of a man is not that he never falls, but that he gets up and aims again.

And here is the deepest comfort of all, the thing that separates this from every self-help scheme the world ever sold a man: the strength to do this is not finally your own. We saw that the governing of the heart is a fruit of the Spirit, grown in a man by God, and that means the whole project does not rest on your willpower holding out, which it will not. It rests on the Spirit of God doing a slow and certain work in you over a lifetime, growing the walls up stone by stone, teaching your great heart to run hot and stay in hand. Your part is to keep showing up, keep feeling honestly, keep refusing to let the passions drive, keep getting up when you fall, and to let Him do in you what you could never do in yourself.

So aim high and aim without fear, because the standard is good and it is worth everything, and carry it lightly because grace is underneath you the whole way. Feel deeply, the whole range of it, because God made you to and God does it Himself. And govern it, all of it, under Him, by His Spirit. Not the dead man who feels nothing. Not the ruled man dragged about by his own gut. The whole man, the governed man, the great heart running hot inside walls that hold. It is good to be that man, and by the grace of God and the work of His Spirit, you are becoming him, one honest, stumbling, getting-back-up day at a time.