It was Good Friday, and my pastor was preaching. Somewhere in the middle of it he said we live from the love of Jesus. I had to write it down before it got away from me.
So I did what any reasonable man does with a half-formed thought in the middle of a church service. I texted it to Luke.
Here is part of what I sent him: if we live from love, does it stand to reason that when someone is not loved, their actions reflect their emptiness rather than their brokenness?
Luke got that with no context and figured I was working on something about the crucifixion. He gave me a quick answer. I told him that was not where I was going, and then I answered my own question. His reply was fair: why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?
I bring it up because we all live from the love of something.
What are the five pillars?
The five pillars are five things every man who follows Jesus needs in his week. Deepen your relationship with Jesus. Devote time to your family. Develop yourself. Deliver value to others. And do nothing for Jesus.
If you cannot fit those five into a week, you are overbooked, and something has to come off the calendar to make room.
None of them is new. You already do some version of all five. Doing them on purpose is what changes the way you live.
The first one holds up the other four
If a man's relationship with Jesus is off, it is going to be off everywhere else.
Luke said it better than I did on the show. Where he is with Jesus on a given day tells you exactly where he is with the other four. I call them five pillars, but the first one is closer to a foundation. The other four stand on it.
That is what the Good Friday note was about. Something is filling us, or trying to, even if all it is doing is handing us the next hit of dopamine. The question is whether we are letting God be that something.
John put the whole thing in seven words: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19, CSB).
Why is it a framework and not a system?
A system hands every man the same steps in the same order. Following Jesus has never worked that way.
There is no such thing as cookie-cutter Christianity.
If you go back to the first year of Men After God, almost every episode after the first handful is an interview. Men from different walks of life, with different stories. I wanted a show that let men hear that following Jesus looks different for each one. I wrote this framework out of my own brokenness, and I wanted to hand it to other men without handing them a mold.
It stays grounded in Scripture. Nothing here gets separated from the truth of God's Word. But how you live it out on a Tuesday, with your kids and your job and whatever season you are in, is yours to work out.
Do nothing for Jesus
The fifth pillar is one of my favorites, mostly because of the look on a man's face when he hears it for the first time. You can almost watch his brain glitch.
Do nothing for Jesus means rest, taken as obedience to the God who commanded it.
Luke told me on the show that he agrees with the idea and still struggles to do it. I think most of us are right there with him.
What if your week does not look like mine?
Then good.
Some men lift their hands in worship. I can, and I have. What does the most for me is turning everything else off and paying attention to who I am singing to and what I am singing about. Both are worship. We are all different.
Some of you read a chapter of the Bible a day. Some of you read seven. A pastor in California has read through the whole Bible in ninety days this year and is going around again. That is phenomenal. And if you cannot do that in this season, then don't. And don't feel bad about it.
You do not need my permission to follow Jesus the way He made you. God already gave it. But some of you have never heard anyone say it out loud, so there it is.
We all live from the love of something.
What are you living from?