Courage!

Read Acts 23

The following night the Lord stood near Paul and said, “Take
courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so
you must also testify in Rome.”
(Acts 23:11)

Food For Thought… “Take courage!” “Fear not!” “Be strong and courageous and do not be afraid!” In one form or another, the directive to be bold and courageous in the face of trouble is the command issued from the Lord’s own mouth more often than any other command in the entire Bible.

That is pretty amazing isn’t it? You would think the command to love, or to give, or to pray would rank at the top, but it is the command to be courageous. Someone has counted up all the “fear not’s” and its derivatives in Scripture and found that there are 365—one for every day of the year. That’s because the Sovereign God knew very well that our chief weakness—the tendency to abandon our trust in him and fall into fear—would be vulnerable to the Enemy’s daily assault. It is abundantly clear not only in Scripture, but in the reality of our daily lives, that Satan’s stock in trade is to entice us to doubt, worry, and ultimately, be paralyzed by fear.

Paul was in a heap of trouble in this account. However, this wasn’t unusual for Paul; his faith seemed to get him into a pickle on a fairly regular basis. Yet whether you are reading about Paul here in the historical account provided by Acts, or reading his own thoughts in the letters he wrote to the churches, he seems to face these life-threatening circumstances with an unusual degree of courage.

How is that? To begin with, Paul knew that his mission was to preach the Gospel, and ultimately to do so in Rome—the center of the empire—where the potential for untold numbers of people to hear the message of Christ was at its highest. It mattered not to Paul whether he went there as a preacher of the Gospel, or as a prisoner of the Gospel, so long as he got there.

Paul also knew that in general, his journey included suffering for the cause of Christ. Jesus himself had given Paul foreknowledge of that at his conversion in Acts 9:16. But in this specific instance here in Acts 23, the Lord himself had stood by Paul, perhaps in a time of prayer or in a night vision, and called upon him to take courage. God commanded Paul to boldness because he, the Sovereign God, was with Paul and was going to accomplish his purpose through Paul no matter what.

Now the real lesson here is that God wants to do that through you too! You may not be facing life-threatening circumstances like Paul. Then again, maybe you are. The point is, God has a purpose for you, and Satan will throw all kinds of circumstances at you to hinder your Divinely commissioned purpose. However, those circumstances are irrelevant. Not unimportant—just irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the Sovereign God is standing by you, and he will accomplish his purposes through you come what may—opposition, hardship, failure, cancer, or any other circumstances you would not have chosen for yourself.

Take courage, my friend. The Lord is standing by you! He knows what he is doing, and he knows how to bring you through this rough patch in a way that will bring him the greatest glory and you the greatest good.

That is your God’s stock in trade. So fear not!

Prayer… Sovereign Father, today I will face the temptation to fear, but right here and now, I resolve to face that fear with faith—and courage. I will be strong and courageous.

One More Thing… “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die.” — G.K. Chesterton