Vince Miller explores the pressing challenges men face in today's world. He discusses the five key issues as well as personal growth and overcoming temptations.
Vince Miller, author and speaker, is a man set on a mission to help men with manhood, masculinity, fatherhood, mentorship, and leadership. Vince joins us on the podcast this week to discuss these 5 areas of men's lives and how they can become better at them. We talk about issues that men struggle with, how to fix them or help them, and how you can apply Vince's advice to become a better father, better husband, and better man.
Vince Miller is an author and speaker to men on topics that include manhood, masculinity, fatherhood, mentorship, and leadership. He has authored 20 different books for men and is hosted on major video platforms like RightNow Media and Faithlife TV. One of his most widely read resources is the Men's Daily Devo read by 100,000’s of men all over the world (beresolute.org/mdd). He is a 28-year ministry veteran and the founder of Resolute, a men's ministry platform that provides bible studies aimed at building better men.
VINCE'S SOCIALS
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincemiller/
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMTXiJbuAVrF2hTJgnYK5qw
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/millervince
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/vinceleemiller/
VINCE'S WEBSITE
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Men face all kinds of issues: Relationships, Marriage, Health, Work, etc. Vince Miller and I discuss the 5 issues that men are facing right now in today's world. We go over the choices that lead up to these issues and what men can do to prevent falling into bad habits or the temptations of the world. Tune in if you want to learn how to better yourself as a man and work towards being a better man.
I have Vince Miller on the show with me. Vince is an author and speaker on men's topics, including manhood, masculinity, fatherhood, mentorship, and leadership. He's authored around twenty books for men. He's hosted on major video platforms RightNow Media, Faithlife TV, and he's one of the most widely read resources for Men's Daily Devotionals, read by hundreds of thousands of men all over the world. His website is BeResolute.org. This is a great show for men. We talk about men's topics and the five issues that men are facing right now, what is the biggest challenge and the need that men are craving for, but they're not stepping up to the plate on. We dig deep into this episode with Vince Miller.
Before I introduce Vince, I want you guys to go over to IronDeep.com. We are super excited, guys. We're setting up some cool events, a couple of men's awakenings. We're setting up a Soulmate retreat. It's going to be pretty awesome. We're bringing in the wives. We're setting up that. We're going to have that on the website.
Go over IronDeep.com. Check out what we're doing. I love pointing to businessmen that want more relationships and intimacy with the Father, more intimacy with each other and their families, and digging in deep and helping live out their truest legacy and true identity. Go over IronDeep.com. Also, go over to YouTube, and we have a lot of videos that are coming out each week.
We have this particular show. We also have a monthly video that's coming out on a certain topic. We released one on Eternal Life, and that was an amazing one. We did one on family, the dynamics of family and the business, the tension and all the crazy stuff. We did that one. We've done one on humility and pride. Check out the videos on our Iron Deep Channel on YouTube. I want to introduce you guys to Mr. Vince Miller.
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What's going on? I'm with our guest. I got Vince Miller with me in the house. What's going on, Vince?
Not much. Thanks for having me.
I'm looking forward to this. I love talking about this subject that we're going to be talking about. You've been in men's ministry for 28-plus years, which is awesome. You've been around the block and pouring them in for more than two decades. This is what I'm stepping into with our ministry Iron Deep. I'm looking forward to sitting with you and talking about the challenges that men face and what, in modern-day culture, men are facing right now that you're pouring into these men. Before I get into all that, let's talk about you a little bit. Who is Vince Miller?
Yes, 1 wife and 3 children that are all out of the house. My wife's a designer. My kids, one is married, my oldest, Faith. I have one kid down in Tennessee at Knoxville. I got my youngest one, Riley. He's out of the house. They are a great family. I love them all to death. They are my life. They're why I do what I do. I met my wife down in Oklahoma, where we went to college, and she dragged me up to the state of Minnesota. I've been in the state of cold ever since, trying to figure out how to escape this place.
Has that been a conversation in your guys' family multiple times ever?
Yes. Beginning right now, as soon as it hits 20. In the next six months, every year.
What's this season been for you with your family? I got off of a call with my wife, and we have four kids. There are different seasons. You're in the season now of the kids out of the house, moving on, getting married. What's that been for you? What's it been for your wife? I know it's sometimes challenging for the wife.
It's been pretty good. I actually have been enjoying it a lot. It has afforded us more time together, more conversation. I know some people get disrupted by this new thing but we like it. We're enjoying every second of it. We're starting to travel more and do more things together. We eat out more. We have more conversations together. I don't think we were ever very disrupted by this. It blessed our lives more. As long as we can stay right here. There'll probably be a time someone moves back into the house.
I went to a dad teen camp with her last time. They were talking about the seasons of raising your children. You're in that season now. The longest parenting season that you'll be in is when the kids are out of the house. That's an awesome time where you start to build depth and relationship and friendship with your kids. I look forward to that. I look forward to all the seasons. My kids are all different ages right now, but that's cool.
I want to have you on this show to talk about your ministry. You've been in the Men's Ministry for many years, and you've written nineteen books, I believe. You're on RightNow Media doing a lot of Men's Ministry and videos, and you have a daily devotional that is geared toward men. Be Resolute is your website. Let's start there. What got you into the passion of ministering to men, first of all?
There were a couple of events. First, I was raised by my grandfather. I moved into his house when I was about 15 and he died when I was about 20. It was the investment of his life into me that I would say was the initial cause for me to jump into ministry. He poured into my life. He was a great man of faith. He was very simple. He did simple things with me, taught me simple disciplines, talking to me about what it meant to be a man in a time and a cycle when my last previous two dads, my bio dad, and my stepdad had stepped out. My mom had stepped out as and he stepped in. That was probably the impetus behind all of it.
He mentored, discipled and poured into me. Therefore, I felt compelled to do the same for other men when it came to my turn. When he died when I was twenty, I felt this longing and calling to do for others what my grandfather had done for me because it made such a significant impact in my life for the years he was there. There were specifically probably about six months of that journey that were very impactful for him and me.
As you move forward in time, I have done various ministry roles in churches and nonprofit organizations, but there came a time right when I was probably in my early 40s or young 40s. Kids are all teenagers at the time. I was growing weary of the corporate church. My wife said, “Why don't you turn that small group of yours of guys into a ministry?” That second push, I told her she was crazy. She said, “I'm not crazy. God wants you to do this thing. I want you to do it, but you better not fail.”
That's the man's biggest fear. It puts more pressure on you.
Having her behind me with that course gave me that second impetus to go out on my own. From there, I wanted to see God use all of who I was, all my experience and all I had developed in ministry to impact men's lives. I realized that there was very little content for men on the market. Publishers focused a lot on women. Church life focused a lot on women, but there was no real focus on men and how to understand manhood through the lens of the Bible, even though preachers occasionally preach about it.
I felt convicted that we needed more tools. Then that's when I started developing Bible studies for guys, a written material curriculum, then a daily devotional that is obviously read by many. The whole idea was to get men into the Bible with a men's perspective, from men to men, so that they might become men. That's what launched the whole thing. Ever since then, that's what I've been doing.
You’ve poured your heart and soul into this over the last several years. I want to bring us up to date because things may have changed from when you first started in your ministry to the modern culture and what we've seen. What's your biggest passion right now for men as you look at men in our culture? What's the biggest need that you see? Take some of that.
First off, the biggest need is for Jesus. We got to begin there. We got to begin with the need for salvation. The desperation men have in searching for meaning, purpose, and significance in this life is only fulfilled by Jesus. Men are running around all over the place. We have our own vices and things, but it boils down to finding our identity and all that we are in Him. That's where we got to begin with persuading men.
Next after that, men are trying to understand how to navigate that path in their Christian life. Now, if we're speaking to men who are Christians, they're trying to figure out, “How do I grow in my relationship? How do I understand my identity? How do I accept forgiveness? How do I overcome patterns of sin? How do I take the first steps of spiritual discipline?”
Men are complicated by some of those things. The spiritual world is such a new world for men that they often don't know how to take those first steps. I believe you can lead men to Jesus and help them understand that if they can overcome their pride. It's all those next steps that men have stumbled. They fall when trying to understand some of those things. I've tried to work in both worlds, helping men understand who Jesus is and how to take some of those first steps. If I was to pick a couple of issues that would be predominant that would complicate this whole thing, the first one would be men’s arrogance.
It's our arrogance and thinking we do have it all figured out that we can satiate our desires by the things of this world, whatever that might be. It could be significance. It could be a drive for fame status. It could be titles. It could be a sense of accomplishment. Whatever that sense of pride is that emanates from a man's life, we got to address that. That's a big piece of the picture.
Self-disqualification is another big thing. Pain from the past, issues from the past, problems of the past, compulsions, addictions, you name it. Pride and self-disqualification are probably the two big issues that I see men deal with on a pretty regular basis, pride that keeps them from Jesus, and self-disqualification that keeps them from growing and understanding their faith and their identity in Christ.
They feel pinched between these two things. Pride and self-disqualification keep them from hearing the voice of God, as I say to guys. We got to help guys to navigate that. It becomes very complicated when you add sin into the equation because sin complicates both of those things. It makes pride very complicated because there are a lot of different versions of pride for men. It makes self-disqualification and sin very complicated because there are a lot of manifestations of sin in a man's life. Every man's a little different. There are common sins to guys. I see them all the time. At least a few that I see irregularly in a man's life. Aside from all this, those are a couple of the big issues that I see men struggling with in our world now.
I could definitely, see that. I got back from a men’s retreat, and I talked a lot about pride, arrogance, and keeping us from God. If we have it all together, we don't need anything. We can do things alone. Grind it out and then the other side is shame. “I can't be close to God because of what I've done, and I don't deserve it.” You go down that road.
Did those guys listen to you? Did they hear that call?
Yes. We talked a lot about identity. We dug into identity. Who does He say that you are? How does He see you? We have written that out. You've been working with guys. This is messy. It's a long journey. It's not like this quick fix. This is the human psyche, and it's messy. It's relationships. Before the show, that's what you've dug into, that men need deeper relationships and deeper communities.
I want to talk about that. That's probably what Be Resolute and your organization are about. We can't do this alone. We need Jesus, but we need each other as well. What have you seen with your organization when men finally say, “I can't do this alone. I need Christ and when I do have Christ, I also need other men in my life to come around me.” Talk to us about what you've seen and how you've form formed that in Be Resolute.
Yes, absolutely. Basically, what we do as an organization is provide tools that allow men to get together. Over the years, I have seen five common issues that men face. It's funny, but there are only five. There's absolutely not a sixth one. I'm going to list them because they're going to draw attention to this very question right here.
The first one is marriage and family. The number one prayer request I get on my website is regarding marriage. It's often the desire to reconcile their marriage because of some sin in their life. The second one is, of course, compulsions or addictions. Some battle with some addiction in their life or compulsion, whatever that might be.
The third big issue is finances. “I'm in desperate need of help with my finances, or I've made some mistakes, or I gambled my money away. I took risky investments with my family.” The third one is the things that revolve around career. What am I supposed to be doing with my life? What's God's path for me? I feel unaccomplished.
The last one is vision. What is next for me? I've learned from these five things that men pray about and five issues that men deal with. Not how to pray specifically for those five things for guys, but I realize that they all have one thing in common. When people share those things, they begin to realize that the one thing they don't have in their life is community. They've been trying to do these things alone, but they don't have the answers. They're reaching out for the answers because they can't find their way to them.
I travel the country. I've been all over the country speaking. Men are all the same. Even if you travel outside of this country, even go to predominantly male-driven countries, which is basically every country like America, you're going to discover that men are all exactly the same. Go to the poorest countries in the world. Go to Haiti. Men are all exactly the same. There are no differences between them.
There might be cultural nuances to the whole thing, but they're pretty much the same. What I have discovered is that if you look at guys out there with all these compulsions and issues, and especially if you survey American ministry, you are going to discover an American ministry that a lot of the ministry to men is pain based.
It revolves around things like addiction recovery, financial recovery, divorce recovery, pornography recovery. You name it, we got every recovery ministry covered in the church nowadays. We're pretty messed up. I'm not against these ministries, by the way. They're fantastic for men. They're a great first step. Some of them have great principles in them.
I will tell you, every man that goes to one of those things because they're in desperate need of help. They got pain. You got pain you want to get fixed. I break my arm and I want it fixed immediately. I want the pain to go away and I want it to heal. When men have pain in their life, they want to get it fixed. Pain is our predominant teacher. They get into those groups and discover two things they didn't have in their life. The first thing is the Bible. The second thing is brotherhood.
I promise you, while they may learn great principles from financial recovery, divorce recovery, addiction recovery, pornography recovery, they discover two things in each of those groups that they'll say to themselves. They'll literally say it out loud. They'll say, “Why did I wait long to get these two things?” time and time again.
I would say that's a pretty reactive approach to dealing with our need for community. Would you not say? Most men would. I'm trying to inspire men to be more proactive with that. They want to be proactive with their health, proactive with their fitness, and proactive with your spiritual life. I always want men to be less reactive and to actually take steps to seek out the Bible and brotherhood inside a community. If you had that community, you would never get into those problems in the first place.
If I had the Bible and brothers around me all the time, I would never be probably in need of addiction recovery, financial recovery, divorce recovery, or you name it recovery. That's what I'm trying to inspire men to do. It’s to find that brotherhoodhood before things fall apart. If we could be a little bit more proactive spiritually, then maybe our lives would be different on the other side.
I believe that by finding those things, and this is not the health and wealth gospel right here, we can accelerate our spiritual growth in some ways and ward off issues that we keep praying about, those same five things. Instead of praying reactively for those five things, we can pray proactively for our marriage, finances, career, issues, and whatever it is we want to pray about. We always have brotherhood around us, helping us to be God's meant.
I love the proactive versus the reactive. One of our even core values is to reject the passivity that men have. We're not passive in a lot of areas. I work with a lot of business guys. Very driven guys and very go-getters type A driven in finances and business, but sometimes passive in other areas of our life, very reactive. I want to dig deeper into the community. That word gets thrown around a lot. Obviously, there's a local church community you go. You worship together and spend some time in the congregation together.
Maybe you have a piece of pizza with one of your buddies or a few guys and have a beer. That could be a community there. I'm part of some mastermind groups, we get together, and we talk about real estate stuff, and that's community. When you say this community because obviously, guys might say, “I have community, I go to my networking event, and I'm with some business guys, or I go have pizza with my buddies once a month,” do you consider it something different when you say community?
Yes, absolutely. I do my own. I speak at a lot of other people's retreats, and then I do some of my own. At the ones that I do, I'm focusing on training men to experience and lead that community. I'm not against mastermind groups, business groups, or any of these groups, but most have a different focus. They're focused on accomplishing our selfish goals, whether it be networking with another guy, building our business, or building human relationships. Don't get me wrong, I do think that there are some Christian men that can step into those environments and have a very spiritual focus on why they're there. Most of the time, we are not thinking about that.
You talked about passive disobedience. We are passive to being obedient to God, but there's also active disobedience. We can be actively pursuing our own selfishness. Yes, you are correct. When it comes to things of this life, we are active towards those things, but why are we active towards those things? There's a carrot on the other side. Guess what? The carrot is us.
We have selfish tendencies. We want to grow our business, grow our status, grow our name, grow our website, and grow our followers. That's all we want to do. We want to grow, grow, for our own selfish intent. We are actually thinking about that 99.9% of the time. Even I'm thinking about that, but we have to work at thinking about how we bring glory not to our name but to God's name.
That means that we have to have different conversations with men. It can't be a business group meeting where we are tantalizing our own active disobedience that we could follow our own selfish desires. We're actually trying to have a conversation with other guys that draw out spiritual intent, that helps us to see our purpose, that helps us to have a conversation around the deeper issues of our life.
By deeper, I don't mean more emotional or getting more in touch with our father issues. I'm talking about our desire issues within our heart that we're having conversations at another level that gets after these selfish intense that we quietly live behind in this quiet desperation that's going on behind us. We feel very unaccomplished by all these things in this world now. What we need is another level of conversation.
When I'm at my retreats, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get guys to have spiritual conversations, trying to get them to open up, but get them to have a conversation at another level. Not just about emotional issues but about the desires that they have, so they can begin to address some of these actively disobedient desires and passively disobedient desires that we have.
That's where it all begins. It’s understanding that we find our identity in Christ. We're empowered by the Holy Spirit. We can live in step with that spirit so that we can become the men God designed us to be, not the man we want to be. There's a big delta between those two things. It's hard to get men to talk about these things. I believe what we're talking about right now is a very hard step for men.
We don't get there. We don't get there by attending church once a week. We've got to get there by having more meaningful conversations that go beyond what we experience at church, where we actually are living out the experience of the church daily. This is why Jesus called his disciples to follow Him. It wasn't, “Follow me on Sunday for an hour as I go over here and preach at the synagogue.” No, it was like, “Walk with me. We're going to dig after some of these issues. You're going to look at me, confront people about these issues, and I'm going to talk to you about them on the side. I may confront you about your own issues and why you're doing those things. Get behind me,” he said to Peter. He is always challenging their desires and their motivations.
That's where I want men to go. I want them to have the deeper dialogue with themselves about what they want. Get honest with those things and address them that maybe they'll shift their desires and perspective from, “I'm here chasing the carrot at the end of my stick, and now over here I'm pursuing God and his glory for his benefit, not mine.” If that makes sense, that's a big shift for God. You can only discover that in Bible and brotherhood.
I love that conversation because you're right. Even in our retreat, we sometimes focus again on the recovery things you talked about. It focuses a lot on the pain. We get into the emotional woundedness and father wounds, things like that. You take it that step further, which even in my own life, I gave my life to Christ when I was 30.
I've also seen myself, “Am I maturing? Is my soul maturing?” My wife and I have celebrated many years together. You talked about marriage as one of the biggest issues. I'm like, “How can we go deeper?” Many years in, we should be maturing in our connectedness, intimacy, and love, not the other way around.
The same thing with Christ. How do we mature? That's what you've helped guys. “I give my life to Christ now. How can I go deeper? How can I mature into that?” I love those questions that you have brought up. Do you have anything more to say on that? I've seen this time and time again, even in my own life. It’s like you were drinking milk. We gave our life to Christ. We had a great salvation experience, and then we stay there. We don't go deeper. We don't mature. That’s what I’ve seen.
I love that you bring up this question because it is an important question. Men like the idea of being saved and rescued from their sins. To be quite honest, guys like that. They connect with that imagery, the concept, but we are not comfortable with the idea of having a Lord. Someone who is a leader in our life, that is a very awkward first step for us. It is also an awkward second and third, fourth and fifth step. I've spent a lifetime trying to understand what it means for me to have a lord. I write daily. This is me confessing to you and to the guys reading that this is how I do it.
I wake up every day and I write that daily devotional. As I'm writing it out, I'm thinking about what does God want to say to me in this text and how does He want me to change? As I'm writing the devotionals, I'm sharing with other people. I'm having an experience where I realize there's probably another level that I need to allow scripture to work on me in a couple of verses.
I immediately went home at the end of the day and I shared it with my wife here. I shared with her, “Here’s what caught my eye today as I was working. I looked at this differently.” She sat there and I could tell she was glowing and taking it in at the same time where she was recognizing that I had a spiritual growth moment.
I have these multiple times every week. What I'm choosing to do is I'm choosing to put my life and who I am in front of God's word and allow that word to change me at a behavior level, but not first at a behavior level, at a desire level, so that my behaviors will change. This is one of the issues. This is why I mentioned this.
Honestly, that's what we want. I think that men want to be saved when it comes to Jesus Christ or they don't want to. Of course, there's a whole category of those people that don't want to be saved at all. The men that are saved don't want to be changed at the core because you start to take their things away from them, which is part of the sacrificial system that we're supposed to be involved in. When you have a Lord, you're supposed to give Him things and do what He tells you to do.
In the dance of that whole thing, when you start reading God's word, He starts taking things. As soon as He starts taking things, we get a little comfortable with Him like, “We like this idea of savior, but this whole thing of, Lord, I'm not sure about this thing, let's put the brakes on. Let's pump them a bit here because I'm not ready to give up my greed, business, vision, issues, or compulsions. I'm not ready. I like this thing that I'm looking at.”
“I like the way I feel when I do this. I like when I excessively drink. I like my anger or my lust or whatever it is. I'm not ready to give those things up.” That's what men misunderstand about the gospel. It wants to free you from all these compulsions, issues, and things, but you're going to have to give all of it up to be free from it so that you can discover.
It’s like what Joel Osteen said, “Your best life now.” You can discover the life that God wants to give you as a man that you can live on a daily basis, being free from all this stuff, but you got to be free from yourself. You got to be free from the desire to pursue those things. You got to live by the power of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis. I don't know, that's where I'm at with these guys, trying to push them to understand a lot that when they pick up God's word, they can see it that way.
There's a lot of complications before we get there. How do I read the Bible in a meaningful way? How do I understand my sin? There are many things, but you get my point. My point is that, we've got to take some steps in that direction and understand that we've got a Lord. We're going to have to sacrifice some things that we're going to have to crucify the flesh. We're going to have to give up all of our identity to receive his identity so that we can live out the life that He wants for us.
It's a lifetime journey. A lot of layers that we dig through. Vince, it's been awesome to have you on the show. I appreciate you and everything that you do. I want to give you the opportunity. I know you have nineteen books. You have a lot of group sessions. I'm going to be digging into some of this, too, to help with our ministry. Where can someone go if they want to find out more about you and your organization?
You can type in VinceMiller.com. That'll take you right to my website. I would encourage guys to pick up the Daily Devotional, which is my daily reading through God's word. I go one book at a time, usually a couple of verses at a time, that help men unwind the mystery of the Bible in a very practical, pragmatic way. Three to six minutes, maybe each day, you can see it in video, audio, or written format. Men use it in their groups. They use it for their personal growth. They use it to share with their kids. I would encourage guys to go there, VinceMiller.com.
Thank you much, Vince. It's been awesome. We're going to put that on our YouTube channel, so check that out. God bless you, Vince. Thank you much.
Thank you.
