Telos.
Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
—Matt. 18:3
When I began writing this volume, I thought I was trying to answer a single question.
What is man?
As the months passed, that question seemed to multiply.
What does it mean to become a man?
What does it mean to become a Christian?
Why did Christ become man?
Why does He ask us to love our enemies?
Why marriage? Why family? Why sacrifice?
Why does Christ tell us that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven?
At times, these questions felt entirely unrelated.
One essay led to another.
Genesis led me to Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes led me to the Gospels.
The Gospels led me to the Cross.
The Cross led me to love.
Only now, looking back, do I realize I may have been asking the same question all along.
Not simply,
What is man?
But rather,
What was man created for?
I expected a complicated answer.
After all, Christianity has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, saints, kings, and ordinary men for two thousand years. Surely the answer would be layered, technical, perhaps even beyond my understanding.
Instead, I found something much simpler than I expected.
Love.
Not because Christianity is simplistic.
But because the deepest truths often are.
Looking back over this volume, I think love has always been the thread running beneath each essay.
When I wrote about the Fall, I was really writing about love distorted.
When I wrote about grace, I was writing about love restored.
When I wrote about worship, I was writing about love rightly ordered.
When I wrote about becoming a man, I was unknowingly asking what a life shaped by love actually looks like.
For much of my life, I assumed growing up meant becoming more independent.
More capable.
More accomplished.
More admired.
Yet Christ reveals something altogether different.
The fullest expression of humanity is not found in taking.
It is found in giving.
He does not reveal His glory by placing Himself above others.
He reveals it by washing the feet of His disciples.
He reveals it upon the Cross.
Perhaps that is why the Cross stands at the center of Christianity.
It is not simply where Christ died.
It is where love was most clearly revealed.
The more I have reflected on this, the more I have found myself drawn toward fatherhood.
Not because it is comfortable.
Not because it is easy.
But because it is one of the clearest images of self-giving love.
A father gets up in the middle of the night for his crying child.
He works long hours so his family has what they need.
He sacrifices comforts no one else will ever notice.
His love is often expressed in quiet ways the world rarely applauds.
Yet perhaps those are the moments that matter most.
I also wonder if children are among God's greatest teachers.
Perhaps children do not simply need fathers.
Perhaps fathers need children.
Children have an extraordinary ability to slow us down.
A walk becomes an adventure because someone found a caterpillar.
An afternoon pauses because someone wants to watch a plane fly by.
A schedule is interrupted because a little voice says,
Dad, look!
Somehow, everything else can wait.
Children receive the world as a gift.
Adults often receive the world as something to organize, improve, or master.
Somewhere along the way, we stop looking.
We stop wondering.
We stop receiving.
Perhaps this is why Christ tells us to become like little children.
Not because adulthood is something to escape.
But because childhood reminds us how to see.
How to receive.
How to trust.
How to love.
As I reach the end of this volume, I realize I never truly found a definition of man.
I wish I could’ve given a longer answer.
Instead, I found man’s purpose.
If we are created in the image of God, and if God is love, then the deepest truth about man is not found in what he accomplishes, what he possesses, or even what he becomes.
It is found in what he loves, and in his willingness to give himself away.
Perhaps that is what Christianity has been telling us all along.
Not simply how to avoid sin.
Not simply how to reach heaven.
But how to fully become human.
To love God.
To love our neighbor.
To receive creation with gratitude.
To offer ourselves freely for the good of another.
To become, however imperfectly, an image of the One in whose likeness we were made.
Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ (Gen. 1:26)
I began this volume searching for the measure of a man.
I think I leave it knowing something far simpler.
I never found a perfect definition of man.
I found something better.
Man was made for love.
Everything else follows.
Telos.
God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16).
