Being God’s Man by Understanding a Woman’s Heart is an eight-week Bible study in the Every Man Series, published by WaterBrook in November 2004.
Three authors, not one
This page credited Stephen Arterburn alone. The book is by Stephen Arterburn, Kenny Luck, and Todd Wendorff, and the other two are not junior contributors.
Kenny Luck founded Every Man Ministries and was men’s pastor at Saddleback. Todd Wendorff holds a Th.M. from Talbot, also served as pastor to men at Saddleback, and has since pastored at Kings Harbor Church. Arterburn is the best-known name, having founded New Life Ministries and hosted New Life Live!, which is presumably why he is the one that survived on this page.
This is the second book in this series we have found miscredited the same way, and the pattern is consistent: keep the famous name, drop the working pastors.
It is a study, not a book you read
Worth being clear about the format. This is a workbook built for a group meeting over eight weeks, with questions, Scripture work, and assignments between sessions. Christian retailers file it under Bible studies rather than under general reading, and that is right.
If you buy it expecting a book to read on a plane you will be disappointed, and you will get very little out of it working alone. The design assumes other men and a discussion.
What it is trying to do, and where CalledToBetter stands
The stated aim is helping a man build godly character and strengthen his relationship with his wife or future wife. Much of it is about listening, honesty, and paying attention to someone whose inner life is not identical to yours.
The old version of this page said the book calls men to “step into their God-given roles.” That phrasing was ours, not the book’s, and it needs correcting.
Our position is that men and women have different but equal roles. Equal in worth and dignity before God, with distinct callings that Scripture describes. We hold that, and we deliberately do not go further. We do not publish rulings on the contested specifics of how those roles work out in a marriage, because faithful Christians who take Scripture as authoritative land in different places on exactly that question.
A study like this one, written out of an early-2000s Saddleback men’s ministry context, carries assumptions about marriage that were more settled in that world than they are across the church generally. Weigh those against Scripture rather than absorbing them because they are in a workbook. The core of what it teaches, that a husband should actually pay attention to his wife, needs no such qualification.
Its age matters here
2004. A study about understanding women written before smartphones, before social media reshaped how couples communicate, and in a men’s ministry idiom that now reads as dated to a lot of younger men.
The relational content holds up better than the framing does. But go in knowing the illustrations will feel like they come from another decade, because they do.
What we removed
A sentence in quotation marks attributed to Arterburn, a quotation from an unnamed reviewer, and a paragraph reporting how a group leader in “our community” used the book. None could be verified and all are gone. The page was also displaying a leftover template heading reading “Final CTA Block,” which was never meant to be visible.
Who it fits
A men’s group willing to commit eight weeks, where the men are married or heading that way and are prepared to be honest in front of each other. Used that way it is a solid, well-built study and the questions do real work.
Not the right pick for solo reading, for a mixed group, or for a man wanting current thinking on marriage. For that, look for something written in the last few years.
Being God’s Man by Understanding a Woman’s Heart on Amazon