Many Successful Men Are Broken by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Wounded Child Inside Every Adult

Every adult is a child on the inside. When an adult begins to display certain behaviours, you can identify the age and stage at which that child stopped growing.

Successful people — people with every metric of achievement — can become insecure about small recognitions. They cannot handle being ignored. They cannot handle not being the centre of attention in every room. They cannot handle not being number one. These are not signs of success. They are signs of a wound that was never healed.

There is a difference between success and the need to always be the object of attention. And people who cannot attend another person's birthday — because they do not know what to do with themselves when someone else is being celebrated — those people are not envious. They are broken.

If you cannot enjoy a moment without making it public, you are broken. Because whoever can validate you can break you.

Trauma as a Coping Mechanism

Trauma, at the moment of tragedy, is actually useful. It minimises the effect of the event and keeps you functional. That is its purpose. The problem is that trauma keeps serving you until it no longer serves you — and it does not know when to stop.

A child who stutters and gets bullied withdraws from social scenes. That withdrawal is trauma doing its job: reducing exposure to pain. But when that same person becomes an adult, they find themselves withdrawing from people who love them. Their spouse says, I do not understand you. Their children feel their father does not love them. The coping mechanism has now become a cage.

• Work can be a coping mechanism. Those who cannot be still — who work 30 consecutive days without rest — may not simply be industrious. They may be running from something.
• When work stops being possible in old age, those people do not know what to do with themselves. They become bitter. They say: I worked so hard for you people and you have abandoned me.
• The pattern is the same whether the coping mechanism is work, sexual behaviour, social media, spending, or substance — the question underneath is always: what are you running from?

Performance-Based Love

Many men tie their self-worth to what they bring to the table. When they stop bringing, they stop feeling worthy of love. This produces a pattern:

• They buy love. Not out of generosity but because they cannot believe they are lovable for who they are.
• They perform in front of their wives — putting on the best version, the untroubled version, the competent version — and the real man never gets seen.
• Because the real man is never seen at home, a different woman who only sees the performance gets perceived as the one who truly understands him. That is an illusion. She sees the actor.

A wife once said to her husband: do you realise you can be loved for just being yourself? For some men, that sentence is profoundly foreign. Being loved for just being — without performance, without provision, without achieving — is a language the broken man has never learned.

The Total Man

A solid man is one who has done the work of identifying and processing his pain. He knows where his wounds come from. He is managing his current pressures without bleeding on the people who depend on him. He understands pleasure as a reward for effort — Sabbath, rest, recreation — not as an escape from pain or a bid for validation.

He is pursuing his potential, knowing that he can become a better version. And he is moving toward purpose — asking: how is my life benefiting other people in my absence? What would be missed at my funeral, and by whom?

The father of the prodigal son is the model: a man whose heart is so enlarged that no matter what is done to him, he has capacity to forgive. He can watch half his net worth walk out the door and still say — I love you more than my resources. That is what the broken man is working toward.

Men who are broken and do not know it are the most dangerous, because their damage is invisible to them. David took Uriah's wife, killed him, and felt nothing wrong until Nathan told him a story. That is what unrecognised brokenness looks like in power.

Why Men Need Men

Women were not built for the kind of pressure men carry. When a man keeps depositing his pressure into his wife, he exhausts her. She was designed for connection, not to be a pressure valve.

Brotherhood disperses pressure. When a man has brothers who truly know him — who sat with him in sackcloth and ashes the way Job's friends did — those brothers can carry something that a spouse was never designed to carry alone.

The conversation must be started. The diagnosis must be made. Even without a full treatment plan, naming what is wrong is the beginning. These conversations about male brokenness, about wounds and coping mechanisms and performance-based love — they are the conversations that, when held long enough, produce the divine solutions that can actually heal.