8. Pharaoh 

Maybe you have seen the animation or have been in enough school plays and assemblies growing up that Pharaoh, his stubborn heart and the plagues is common knowledge. Read on, there are some valuable lessons here for us men.

Explore

Pharaoh had decided to dig his heels in and refuse in his heart and mind to budge. Pharaoh had done perhaps something lots of us do, we say no and we refuse to let our pride, stubbornness and point go. 

He refused to accept the term ‘I yield.’ 

Idea 1:  Pride

Pride is a real killer, it can lock us into the most destructive of patterns that can have the most terrible outcomes for us and for other people. Road rage and other pointless adventures we can find ourselves embarking on during our simple commute home can be about us being unwilling to let something go. 

Not being willing to say sorry, to seek reconciliation or to pick up the phone and sort out a disagreement can be rooted in our pride and our stubbornness to admit some sort of weakness. 

Maybe just take some time in this session to explore this stuff. What has pride looked like in your life? Have you seen and felt its impact? Have you been the victim of someone else’s pride in life? A big part of dismantling this stuff is by calling it out and being real with one another. 

Idea 2:  Defeat

Pride and stubbornness can often be strong in our lives, when we really dig our heels in. To admit defeat, and possibly risk losing face, credibility or some sort of false sense of power, influence and control by letting pride go is felt as defeat and pride and stubbornness jumps in. The idea of being ‘done over’ as a bloke or feeling like a failure, defeated and unable to ‘hold our own’ is a very difficult place to be and for most of us is never something we want to happen.

If illness has meant you have been utterly defeated and at the mercy of others, it is a tough place to be. Being made redundant in our lives, or admitting to a failed marriage leaves us with feelings of defeat and vulnerability that can be in one sense desperately challenging but in another way incredibly freeing as men. 

When we hold this stuff out and refuse to let it control us, when we let pride go and openly embrace defeat in situations that have had the better of us, we begin to have the better of the situations again! 

What does this look like in your group today? Have you experienced this cycle and process in your life? Be real! 

Idea 3: Yield

One of the things we see in the Bible is a gradual process in men of God, an awareness of the mess, the pride, the control, the admittance of defeat and the victory in yielding control back to God again. 

David is perhaps a prime example of this, and I think Pharaoh could have been.  As we yield ourselves to God and to the work of the Holy Spirit we will discover some of the greatest victories we can ever find in our lives. 

Action

Have you yielded some stuff to God? Do you need to? 

If you can, spend some time at the end of this session praying for each other and the ‘stuff’ that has come to the surface.