Theme of the Week: Godly Men Have A Vision for Life
Bible Verse: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6 ESV
Scripture Reading: Proverbs 22:1-16
What is the last beer commercial that depicted a male with a vision? That would be… uh… none. Men are seen as perpetually adolescent boys who act like junior high kids or dirty old men.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that losers like these exist. I actually know some of them. But there’s another kind of guy who exists too. You just don’t see him in beer commercials.
That being said, one of the greatest stories of vision I’ve ever heard is the story of a guy who actually founded a brewery. I read a book a number of years ago called The Search for God and Guinness about a man named Arthur Guinness who founded the brewery of the same name. Guinness noticed that older males around him were acting like boys. They were getting drunk and not taking care of their families because their only drinking option was Irish whiskey and hard alcohol.
He knew that getting men to abstain from alcohol altogether was a losing fight, and he didn’t want to start a war he couldn’t win. Instead, he decided to create an alcoholic drink that would allow someone to consume more ounces and not get drunk. Thus, Guinness beer was invented. He was a follower of Jesus who had a vision. The fascinating thing is he had a vision not only for the short term, one that some people would criticize him for, but also for how his family would be blessed by the business after his death.
He entered into a nine-thousand-year lease for his factory, for which he paid £100 up front. That’s about $147 US. Then he agreed to pay £45, or about $66 US, a year for the remainder of the lease. At the time, people must have said, “What are you doing signing a nine-thousand-year lease? That’s a lot of money!” But Guinness had a long-term vision. In essence he said, “This gives me water rights for the beer and everything else.”1 He knew that he had to sacrifice in the short term to reap rewards in the long term. That factory is still standing and producing beer today. He’s barely even a fraction into his nine thousand years. That $66 per year is looking pretty good.
That’s what men do. Vision, by definition, requires us to break out of our short-term, overnight-delivery, instant-download mentality and engage in the long game.
1 Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2014).
Taken from The Five Marks of a Man: Finding Your Path to Courageous Manhood by Brian Tome. Copyright ©2018 by Brian Tome. Used by permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, MI. bakerpublishinggroup.com.
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