I’ll admit it.  I’m a Super Bowl grouch.  I can’t just enjoy the game and the commercials.  I have a compulsion to analyze the messages behind the commercials.  There were variations of commercials we see every year.  There were slapstick commercials.  There were sentimental commercials.  There were commercials that used sex appeal.  There were commercials that were just strange, and therefore memorable.  All of those have their own inherent messages.

The thing that stuck out to me this year were the number of commercials whose hidden message told of what it means to be a man.

There was the FloTV commercial that called a man spineless for hanging out with his girlfriend instead of sitting at home watching football.  There was the Bud Light book club commercial that had a guy give up playing sports in order to drink beer and ruin his girlfriend’s book club.

The FloTV’s message of course is that manhood=watching football at the expense of relationships.  The Bud Light’s message is that manhood=being intellectually inferior and inactive while drinking beer.

But both of those were lighthearted compared to the Dodge Charger commercial (watch it below).  In it we see a series of defeated men naming all the things that their girlfriends or wives nag them to do.  All the nags added up say, “I will be selfless and care about you.  I am defeated because being a man means being selfish and only caring about myself.”  It ends by saying man’s last stand is to drive a powerful car.  We will not give up that last stronghold of selfishness.

Here is the deal.  I am not a man when I am selfish.  I’m a jerk when I’m selfish.

As a Christian I aspire to be the kind of man that scripture says makes me a real man.  That includes being a responsible father, a caring, self-giving husband, and a spiritual leader.   Good marriages are rooted in both husband and wife being self-giving.  They include choosing to not do certain things for the benefit of your spouse and your relationship and for the benefit of the family.

Do I always succeed at being that kind of man?  Absolutely not.  But the kind of man that FloTV, Dodge, and Bud Light offer to me are the opposite of what scripture offers me.  I want to be the kind of man that chooses to spend time with his wife over football.  I want to be the kind of man that reads books and talks about them.  I want to be kind of man that cleans up after I shave because it grosses my wife out when I don’t.  Those are all ways I can love my wife.  I want to love my wife.

Additionally, when you add the rest of the commercials from the Super Bowl together you also get a message about women.  It is this: When women think or require anything, they ruin men.  Women are only worth something when they are mindless bodies there for men to consume.

That is not the kind of woman that I want my daughter to be.  That is not the kind of woman God dreams for my daughter to be.  I know that it is impossible to shield her from the message of the Super Bowl.  So I pray that God’s presence in her life is more powerful than that of these commercials.  I pray that she will know that she is God’s beloved and that he dreams for her to be thoughtful, intelligent, strong, selfless and prayerful.  I pray that she not settle for a man who thinks that being selfish is what it means to be a man.

As a pastor I get to see lots of relationships.  What is unfortunate is that too many husbands and wives believe the underlying messages.  I’ve seen marriages fail because one or the other spouse believed that it was their right to be selfish at the expense of their family.  My family isn’t perfect, but we hope that God works in us so that we might believe Him when He talks about what it means to be a real man or real woman, a good husband and a good wife.  I hope He does the same in you.