A wall built in childhood rarely feels like a wall by adulthood. It feels like personality. Many Christian men already agree that hardness is not the same thing as manhood, yet their chest still tightens when someone asks how they are really doing. This guide helps you close that gap in three moves: locate the wall you built, practice honesty and presence with a few trusted people for one week, and test where your sense of being a man actually comes from. The anchor text is 1 Samuel 16:7, where God tells a prophet that he does not judge by what a man shows on the outside.
Alone, you can work through it in about an hour and carry the practice through the week. In a group, plan two meetings: one for the first four sections, and one a week later to talk about how the practice went. Nobody has to share anything he would rather keep. Every exercise works whether you say your answers out loud or only write them down.
Begin with what God is looking at
Read 1 Samuel 16:1-13 in one sitting before you focus on verse 7. God has sent Samuel to Jesse’s house to anoint the next king. The first son walks in, Eliab, and Samuel is sure this is the man. Then God corrects him: “for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
Notice what the passage is about. It is a story of God choosing a king, and the correction is aimed at a prophet impressed by height and bearing. It is not a lesson about emotions. What it does establish is how God evaluates people: the presentation is not the measure. David, the son nobody bothered to call in from the field, is the one God chooses.
Write short answers to these observation questions:
- What did Samuel see in Eliab that made him confident? List only what the text mentions.
- Where was David while the others were presented, and what does that suggest about how his own family saw him?
- If God is not grading the outside, what exactly is the wall around your heart protecting you from? Is it God’s judgment, or someone else’s?
Hold onto that last answer. You will come back to it.
Find your wall
Because the wall passes for personality (I am just quiet, I am just private), start by tracing where it came from.
Maliek Blade, of the Kingdom Diversity Initiative of the President’s office at Southeastern Seminary, discussed this with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast, using the film Moonlight as a case study. Blade describes how its main character, a timid boy verbally abused for being quiet, later reinvents himself as a muscular, intimidating drug dealer. In Blade’s retelling, the character explains the change this way: “I started over and I built myself hard.”
Fields points out what the hardness did not fix. The character still cries, often and alone, but “he’s not able to verbalize how he feels to anyone really.” That is the honest shape of most walls. They rarely stop the feeling. They stop other people from reaching it.
Take a sheet of paper and work through this inventory. Be specific.
- The lesson. Write down one moment when you learned, in words or without them, that a man should not show a certain feeling. Who was there? How old were you?
- The move. Name what you do now when that feeling shows up. Some men go silent. Some get busy, make a joke, change the subject, or let it come out as irritation.
- The cost. Name one relationship where that move has kept someone at a distance.
- The witness. Think of one person close to you. If you asked what they run into when they try to get near you, what would they say?
Blade observes that anger often becomes the one permitted outlet. He says “we’ve really demonstrated how to express anger a lot of different ways,” while other emotions go without words. If your inventory shows anger standing in for grief, fear or loneliness, write that down plainly. Naming the substitution is the first crack in the wall.
Read John 11 the way a witness would
Now turn to the man Blade holds up as the standard. Read John 11:17-44, then slow down at verses 33-36.
When Jesus saw Mary weeping, and the mourners with her, “he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled” (John 11:33). Two verses later comes the line most people know: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). Then the narrator records what the onlookers concluded: “Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:36).
Read the scene three times, each time standing in a different place.
- As Mary: what did it mean to see Jesus moved by your grief before he did anything about it?
- As one of the mourners: what did you conclude about Jesus from his tears?
- As yourself: what would you have concluded about a man who cried in public like that?
Compare the second and third answers. If you read the tears as love in Jesus but would read them as weakness in another man, or in yourself, then the standard you live by is not the one you claim to follow. That gap shows you which voice is actually defining manhood for you.
Blade draws his point from this scene: “we see the ability to identify with others emotionally, the ability to process through your emotions and express them, and sometimes through crying, and Jesus is the model.” Notice the order. Identifying with someone else comes first, then processing, then expressing. Crying appears as one possible form, not a requirement. John 11 is narrative, so it describes rather than commands. It does not tell men they must cry. It does remove the claim that tears make a man less of one, because the one perfect man wept and the crowd read it as love.
Test the reason the wall went up
Here is the honest objection most men carry: the wall is there for a reason. For some, it went up in a home or a neighborhood where showing softness got you hurt. Lowering it feels like stepping into traffic.
Take that seriously. The character Blade and Fields discuss had no safe place at home or at school. His armor was a survival response, and survival responses make sense when the danger is real. Nothing here asks you to expose yourself to people who have shown they will use what you tell them. Wisdom about whom you trust is part of the discipline.
The question is whether the conditions that built the wall still describe your life now. Blade answers from the gospel: “We know that through the gospel, we’re able to let those walls down knowing that God looks out for us.” His reasoning is that a wall assumes no one else will protect you. If God keeps you, the wall no longer has to do that job with everyone.
Blade also reports often hearing “Christian women complaining that they feel like their husband is emotionally distant or that they’re loving a wall.” If you want to test whether that describes you, ask your wife, or a close friend if you are single, a simple question this week: what do you meet when you try to get close to me? Listen to the answer without defending yourself.
Then write two short lists. On one side, the people and places where guarding yourself is still wise. On the other, the people with whom the wall now only keeps out love.
The practice: one true sentence, one stayed presence
Blade argues that “male to male relationships need to begin to go beyond just surface level communication.” He adds that “discipleship isn’t about necessarily just fellowship” and calls men to walk through life together “at more of a heart level beyond just the mental level.” This week’s practice puts that into motion with two disciplines, one for speaking and one for listening.
Honesty. Choose one person from your second list, someone who has earned trust. Once this week, tell him or her one true thing you would normally keep behind the wall. A single sentence is enough: I have been more worried about money than I admit. I miss my father. I do not know why I have been so angry. Say it, then resist the urge to take it back, explain it away or laugh it off.
Presence. Fields describes what hurting people need: “sometimes people need you to walk through with them through the process.” Once this week, when someone tells you something hard, practice staying instead of fixing. Ask one follow-up question. Offer advice only if asked. Do not reach for a verse to close the conversation. Thank them for telling you.
Each night, write one line under two headings: where I stayed hard today when I did not need to, and where I let someone see me or stayed present with someone else. Some nights the second line will be empty. That is information, not failure.
Galatians 6:2 says, “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” James 5:16 says, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” Read both at the start of the week. James speaks of confessing sin and Galatians of carrying burdens, so neither is a direct instruction about feelings. Both assume Christians will know each other closely enough for hidden things to come out.
If you are leading men through this
A group goes as deep as its leader. Answer one inventory question honestly yourself before asking anyone else to. Say at the start that what is shared stays in the room, and that anyone can pass on any question without explanation.
A room is only as safe as its response to the struggle men are most afraid to name. Blade observes that men in church will confess falling into drugs or alcohol, or leaving their families, while men wrestling with same-sex attraction rarely feel safe enough to say anything, which he traces to church responses that have not been Christlike. Whatever a man discloses, your first response is thanks, not correction. Your role in the moment is presence. Afterward, help him find longer pastoral care if he wants it.
Some men will find the wall was holding back more than awkwardness. A trained counselor can help with what a study group cannot, and seeking one is a faithful step. If a man in your group, or you yourself, feels hopeless or begins thinking about ending his life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and tell someone you trust today.
Questions for discussion
- Where did you first learn what a man is supposed to look like on the outside? Which part of that lesson do you still obey without thinking?
- Samuel was confident about Eliab and wrong. Whose judgment of you are you most afraid of, and how does it compare with what 1 Samuel 16:7 says God is looking at?
- When you placed yourself among the mourners in John 11, what did you notice that you had missed before?
- Blade says the gospel lets men lower their walls because God looks out for them. Where does that ring true for you, and where does it still feel like a risk?
- Which was harder this week, speaking one true sentence or staying present while someone else spoke? What does that tell you?
- What would have to change in your church or your friendships for a man to tell the truth there without flinching?
Come back to where you started
After a week of practice, reread what you wrote about what the wall was protecting you from. Fields makes an observation about the character in Moonlight that reaches every man doing this work. Almost everything he became was handed to him by others. She warns that “even well-meaning people that actually love us, will give us an identity that might not necessarily be our true identity.” The hard-man script is often that kind of inheritance, passed down by people who meant to protect you.
Blade believes “it will be freeing for everybody if men were freed up to be emotional.” 1 Samuel 16:7 explains why that freedom is possible. The armor was built for an audience that grades the outside, and God has never been part of that audience. So the question to carry into next week is a narrow one: now that you have named your wall, who is the next person you will let past it?