How can men really become men? How can a man become the man Christ wants him to be? On the next HAVEN Today, join Charles Morris and the morning host of Chicago radio station WMBI for a program called "Ten Passions of a Man's Soul . . . with Mark Elfstrand".

Ten Passions of a Man’s Soul with Mark Elfstrand

There’s a blessing that some men never receive. That something lacking is what we’ll be talking about in the next few minutes with a special friend of mine. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story that’s all about Jesus on a program called, “Ten Passions of a Man’s Soul with Mark Elfstrand”. Our special guest will join us and relate those 10 passions to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And that’s also the title of a book by today’s guest and we’ll repeat that title later on so if you like you can get a copy from your Christian bookstore or from amazon.com. One other thing before we first open with worship. Last week we had on the program a New York Times bestselling children’s author. Sally Lloyd-Jones is the author of a brand new Bible storybook that’s all about Jesus. I couldn’t believe the number of people that made contact with us for the very first time last week. One woman in her 80s said she had been listening to this program since she was a little girl and all that time we’d ministered to her so very much but she had never called or written in and made a gift. Well we had Sally Lloyd-Jones on the program and that did it. She just had to call and offer her very first gift and for her support we’ve sent her a copy of this Bible storybook. Now maybe that’s you and if that’s so I’ll give you all our contact information a little bit later and tomorrow, one more time I’m going to have Sally back on with me reading one of her Bible stories and that story will be the theme of the entire program so come back again then. Now let’s begin then as we do every time together here on Haven Today, with a time of worship. This is a time where, together we glorify the King of all things.

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Welcome to Haven Today. We’re coming to you from Chicago today, WMBI radio where Haven has been on, well, maybe 60 years. We’re at the main studio and I’m with the morning show host Mark Elfstrand. Mark, my brother in the Lord, good to be here on your turf today. Mark, we have known each other a number of years and you’re not just a former advertizing executive and you’re not just a radio show host, you’ve actually been involved in ministry personally. You’re not just a person behind a microphone you actually enjoy ministering one to one with people.
ME: Yeah, it’s the other side of the microphone that you don’t get to touch that often.
CM: I know.
ME: You always assume that people are listening, just as we do right now
CM: Sure
ME: But then when you actually touch lives, I mean and shake hands with people and they say, “Oh this program, or what you did made a difference in my life,” that’s when the pay off for us I think happens when we realize that what we do has very tangible effects on a day to day basis for radio listeners, so –
Cm: That’s right. And you know what I think we should do is I’d just like to ask you to describe to people how you got into men’s ministry. And it happened after you came to Chicago
ME: Right
CM: After you were working for one of America’s great Christian radio stations.
ME: Right, well actually the history of that begins with the loss of my father and that happened when I was in high school and I was 16 and he died of a heart attack one Saturday morning. And I was just visited by our pastor and he gave us that news and it really heavily impacted my life. I was the only son. I had 2 sisters that were several years older than I was. Now my father was gone and I had no male figure left for me at all.
CM: And you were midway through your teens.
ME: Yes, we were living in a small town in Montana at the time and I didn’t have male relatives close by and I didn’t really have an authority figure over me at that point in my life either. So I was sort of lfet to navigate Charles, on my own.
CM: did you know Jesus at that time?
ME: I did, yes I did. I was raised in a home where Christ was taught from the earliest years of my childhood. When I went to Bible school after I graduated from high school, David Wilkerson came and preached one evening in October and it was in that particular setting that I recognized the personal connection of my sin to the death of Christ.
CM: Do you remember anything that he said that just really struck you at the time?
ME: You know it’s been so long ago and I’m not even sure it matter whether it was David Wilkerson or it could have been you or someone else
CM: The Lord, the Lord dropped someone into your life at that point that you needed to hear
ME: Right, at that point. Yeah, and I needed to reconcile the personal nature of my sin and the atoning work of Christ for my sin, not corporate sin but my sin.
CM: You’re talking about sin. People don’t talk about sin so much today.
ME: Yeah they don’t want to talk about it. Well, none of us really wants to talk about it, I guess.
CM: No, no they don’t
ME: But because of that experience and also my earlier experience with the loss of my father I was still trying to reconcile this issue in my life of, “What is a man? Is Jesus the ideal man?” Well, yeah but we don’t know a lot about that, I can’t really see him face to face. What does a man look like? What is masculinity all about? And unbenounced to me that question was weaving through my soul for several years and then I ran into a book called, “Healing the Masculine Soul” years ago by Gordon Dolby. And I remember glancing at that title and going, “You know what, if I had to describe the masculine soul I’m not sure I could do it.” And so I read that book and then later Patrick Morely’s book “The Man in the Mirror”
CM: Yes, yes
ME: And I felt like I was getting closer to that. Simultaneous to that I was involved with small groups with guys and I was getting to hear familiar stories
CM: Others were feeling like you were feeling?
ME: yeah, well just the guys sharing and sharing the difficulties of life or the things that were, that we had concerns about or things that were challenging to us and so I was involved with small groups of men meeting in cities that I lived like in Pittsburgh and back in Dallas and also in California. And so I was involved with small groups of men but just not involved in a men’s ministry, so –
CM: And then you got to Chicago and then actually in Naperville, one of the suburbs, you actually began leading the men’s ministry in a church yourself, didn’t you?
ME: Right. And I was asked by the pastor to come out and sort of based on my men’s small group experience he said, “Would you like to develop that in a little broader scale?” And so I took that job for 4 ½ years and that’s where the material for the book that I eventually wrote came through.
CM: And I guess before we talk about just some of these passions that you came away with, I need to mention that a couple of years ago you just hit a real wall yourself. You were feeling a little sluggish. You didn’t know what was going on with you but you finally went to the doctor. You’ve talked about this on Haven Today before. Obviously listeners to WMBI know but not everybody knows so tells us just a little bit about how God finally got through to you in an even bolder way.
ME: Well this will be the connect now to that father issue that I was talking about
CM: OK
ME: When my father died, there’s, you know, there’s the grief process and people tell you about that process, but you have anger in there and you have certainly the waves of loss that you feel but another one of those points is fear. And I didn’t develop it quite initially but within the next couple of months after my father died my world became very insecure. And for the next 30 some years of my life I never wanted to be around doctors because my father died in a doctor’s office.
CM: Yes
ME: And I never wanted to go even close to a doctor’s office.
CM: So you didn’t even normally go get physicals and just the routine things?
ME: Oh no. I would avoid ambulances, any contact with things that would remind me of what happened to my father, because of the pain of the lss of my father. So I had some symptoms of diabetes and finally my wife said, “You just have to go and have this taken a look at.” So 2 years ago I started on that process in January and sure enough my diabetic number counts were up.
CM: And that wasn’t all
ME: That wasn’t all, blood pressure was up and a number of other things. They sent me in on several stages of examination which eventually led to an angiogram and lying there on that table they took my wife back and showed her the results of that angiogram and I had 100% blockage in one of my main arteries and 95% in the other. And so the next day they did a double bypass on me.
CM: And you look pretty good today.
ME: Thank you. I appreciate that
CM: Tell us about how this led you, I know you started writing, I guess maybe you started journaling. Maybe that’s how many of us write a book, but you started writing and you came up with “10 Passions of a Mans Soul”. And what is the one thing that really comes through from your spending time not just journaling but really, that’s a time of almost prayer, it’s communication with God to start writing.
ME: it really is. I don’t consider myself a writer. I’m more of a speaker and therefore a lot of what I did was preparation for speaking on this subject, the 10 passions of a man’s soul. But here was the benchmark event for me. We brought a fellow up, a good friend of mine from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, Pres Gillam, to speak on one of our men’s weekends. And this was early on in my men’s ministry and he spoke to the various issues that guys would relate to and the very last session, I wasn’t there for this, I had to come back down to Moody for an event that night and so I missed it. But we talked about it at lunch the next day. But the last session he said that he got before the guys and he said, “You know there are men in this room who have never felt embraced into manhood. You just never felt like you made it. I’d like to make this a benchmark moment in your lives. If you are feeling this way and you’d be willing to stand, which I’m going to ask you to do in a moment, we’re going to make this the night that we declare that you’re welcomed into manhood.” Now, you know it would be one thing Charles if these were 18-35 year old guys.
CM: We’re talking about some older guys, tough guys, rough guys.
ME: Oh, yes, oh yes, all over the board 40, 50 years old. When he told me that he did this I thought, “You can’t be serious?”
CM: At a women’s group meeting?
ME: this is a Men’s group, yeah right.
CM: Yeah, yeah, yeah
ME: Exactly. So I was troubled by the thought that he did this, even more troubled when I found out the results
Cm: People stood.
ME: Over half the room, he said, stood.
CM: Wow
ME: and he said he gets about the same results in the other places where he has done this. We have to assume that men listening probably fit into the same sort of dimension. Those numbers would probably hold true which means that about half of the men listening to you right now are struggling with this issue of manhood. So we began to take more seriously this call that men needed to say, “How do I know that I’m a man, that I belong to the fraternity of men?” And over the next few years in our men’s ministry that’s what we worked on and the last project that I worked on before I resigned my position there was this book.
CM: Wow, OK the book is called, “10 Passions of a Man’s Soul”. It’s put out by, of all things, Moody Press
ME: Of all the places
CM: But how does Jesus figure into your passion now as a man? Just journaling, writing this book and also having gone through the point where I remember talking to you, we prayed about this on the phone.
ME: Right, we did
CM: You know, you could have easily died
ME: Yes
CM: when you were hit with this news from the doctor. And your wife was probably fearful that you might die.
ME: Well it’s very interesting as I walk through the questions about what makes a man and how does that relate to the passions, I’m just going to walk through quickly some examples of this.
CM: Please do
ME: Jesus: was he a man that lived with purpose? Well that’s almost a ridiculous question. It’s rhetorical. Of course he did. He knew his purpose. He knew it ultimately and sovereignly. I mean there wasn’t an issue. And because of that he lived his life in a certain way, so Jesus impacts the idea of what purpose is all about. A man of adventure. Would you say that Jesus had an adventure filled life? I bet his disciples would tell you in a heartbeat, “Oh yes! Living for Christ –.“ And the Apostle Paul, you live for Christ and it will be an adventure. I would say it would go deeper than that. Jesus was willing to take all the risks that come along with adventure. That’s part of it and when a man loses that sense of risk or he’s willing to take risks, he’s missing out on a very important piece that God has designed for him. The passion for power, this is one that usually hangs people up a little bit. They say, “Oh, but Jesus – “
CM: We don’t think of that as a Christian, as a Christian virtue.
ME: That’s right but every couple of years we have elections in this country. Why? Because people want positions of power and why do they want those positions? Well, really it would depend on the soul. Only God can judge the heart but when done properly they want positions of power in order that they can do good. They want to make a difference. They want to even claim that they’re public servants.
CM: Even bad politicians want to do good.
ME: Well they claim they do anyway, sure.
CM: Well, I think they do.
ME: Yeah, with that in mind, what’s wrong with the use of power? Nothing when it’s used for good.
CM: In a good way.
ME: The passion for winning, the same thing. Well, you say wait a minute here. How does winning fit into that dynamic? Well, I remember the Apostle Paul saying specifically that we ought to run the race, we ought to run the race not to show, not to just place
CM: But to win
ME: But to win.
CM: Sure. And it’s quite a race, yes.
ME: So you have to put everything in its context, but winning, this passion, what does it do for us? The passion for winning causes us to say, “I’m going to strive harder for excellence.” And there’s nothing wrong with excellence in fact, it’s a dynamic that should have precedence in our lives as believers. So when you strive for excellence, you overcome your weaknesses, you’re pursuing this idea of winning. There’s some ideas.
CM: You’re, you’re doing good. Just let me through out one more. This is the tough one, wealth. You mention wealth.
ME: Yeah, of course in America we live in a capitalist society and we live in a society where free enterprise has its opportunities. Because of that we have one of the most amazing amounts of resources in the world to make a difference for the benefit of others. You probably know Rick Warren. You may have interviewed him. You know he’s a reverse tither. He’s taken now millions of dollars and invested it for the kingdom of God. We’re able to do incredible things. Bono from U2 is going around the world begging for what? For money, in order that he might take care of a problem called AIDS. Yes we can do wonderful things with resources if they’re yielded to God’s kingdom. And that’s our biggest challenge in this idea of wealth. I think it’s healthy to say, “Should we make a profit in terms of our business?” Why? Because that’s the fruit of our labor and it enables us to do things for the Lord.
CM: That we couldn’t have.
ME: Right, that we couldn’t otherwise do.
CM: Let me ask you a question. Last time I think you were on the program you were sharing the life of William Borden
ME: yes,
CM: Do you remember that?
ME: Yes
CM: You were on and we talked about this in terms of his life, but what about your life? And I ask this, Mark, Mark Elfstrand from WMBI in Chicago is on with us. He’s the morning show host. This is Haven Today – got to get that in. What does Jesus mean to you personally, at this point in your life? Healed, forgiven, you know, you’ve got a lot of years left, Lord wiling. What does Jesus mean to you Mark?
ME: I remember lying on that gurney and getting ready to go in for surgery, for my open heart surgery. I said, “Farewell” to my wife as I was going into surgery.
Cm: it could have been farewell too.
ME: And it could have been. So the line that I chose to use was I said, “Well, I’ll see you on the other side.” Of what, the other side of surgery, on the other side of this earth? What exactly? I don’t know the outcome of that but I remember this, that as I was being wheeled into that surgery I knew for a fact that if I was to encounter my Savior that day, Lord of the universe, that I could not look at him and say there is anything of merit in my soul that allows me and enables me to come before you and stand here justified.
CM: Wow
ME: It is strictly on the basis of who you are that I can claim my right to eternity. We can put Jesus in various – nice man, wise man, good teacher – all true but far short of the greatest thing of all and that’s who his position is in terms of the Heavenly Father and he is the redeemer of all mankind.
CM: You know as you’re saying that it’s not exactly “man talk” in terms of the 21st century but Jesus truly is the lover of our souls. And that’s why he loves us in the first place. He loves our souls. Mark, would you mind leading us in prayer? Pray for men listening right now to Haven Today.
ME: Certainly.
Heavenly Father, we thank that as we’re speaking at this hour that your Holy Spirit is at work. We’re going to trust in that fact and with that in mind we realize there are men who perhaps have now grown up. They’ve come through their little boy years or teenage years but somehow that connection has never been made. They’ve never quite felt embraced in that fraternity of men. We ask them to start pursing the relationships with other men that might enable them to perhaps just say, “You know guys, I have this need. Would you affirm me in this fraternity? Let me know that I’m a man and I want to be a man after God’s own heart.” Lead us in that direction and teach us your values and what it means to be a follower of Christ and we know that in that we will find a satisfaction that’s unmatched anywhere. We pray this in Jesus name, amen.
CM: Mark Elfstrand, my brother in Jesus thank you for joining me on Haven Today.
ME: Thanks Charles.

“10 Passions of a Man’s Souls” is the name of this program and that’s also the title of a book by our special guest Mark Elfstrand. If you would like a copy of that book, “10 Passions of a Man’s Soul” you can order and get it through your local Christian bookstore or get it online at amazon.com. A special thank you to Mark for being on the program with me today. Earlier I mentioned a woman in her 80’s who has grown up with this program which was originally called, “The Haven of Rest”. There have been 4 speakers on the program and my predecessor, Ray Ortland, shortened the name to just “Haven” because we were getting so many calls thinking we were a retirement center or a funeral home. I’ve got to tell you we’re alive and well. We’re even growing and that’s thanks to you. After 9/11 we did add one more word to our name and we called it “Haven Today” which is still the name today of course, because most days we start out by talking about what’s going on in this world and in our lives but then we always relate that to the great story that’s all about Jesus. Well, I need to tell you this summer we’re facing a real financial crisis and that’s where you come in. Just like the woman who called us last week and said, “I’ve been listening and being blessed for, well, 70 years but I’ve never made contact, and I want to change that today.” I’d like to give you, too, an opportunity to really become part of what we’re doing: telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. May I hear from you today? And if you’d like, we would be more than happy to send you a copy of Sally Lloyd-Jones’ Bible storybook that’s all about Jesus. We’ve had people getting multiple copies as gifts, single copies for their own child or grandchildren, and people giving above and beyond the suggested gift amount. So, for everyone who’s already responded to help us out this summer, thank you to each and every one of you. But do you know how to get in touch with us? I’m going to give you our toll free number and do it a couple of ways. First, just the numbers, you can reach us and make your gift, get a copy of Sally’s book if you want, at 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. Now you may be driving right now and you need a little pneumonic learning tip to help you remember our phone number if you want to call us later, and please do call us later. So here’s a way to do that. Just remember 1-800 – that’s easy enough, 65-HAVEN, 1-80-65-HAVEN. That should do it. At least it does for me. Or, if it’s a time that our office isn’t open here on the West Coast and it’s also a holiday today in Canada, you can go online at haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org. Please let us know the station you’re listening to when you make contact by phone or when you go online at haventoday.org. And I want to especially thank Beth for making that first time gift to Haven Ministries last week. I’m Charles Morris. Thank you for being with me and with Mark Elfstrand. Come back again tomorrow. Sally Lloyd-Jones back with us when again we will be telling, one more time, the story that never gets old. It’s the story of Jesus and we’ll do it together here on Haven Today.