Courage

             “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. (Joshua 1:7)

 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. (Ephesians 6:10)

One of the books I’ve read recently is The Christian in Complete Armour, Volume 1. It’s the first of three, and I got it because I wanted to see what it had to say about Ephesians 6:14-18: The Armor of God. Of course, the author doesn’t start with verse 14. He goes back to 10. As noted, I have finished reading it, but that’s really all I did: read. I highlighted some passages, but I didn’t pause to reflect.

In the first chapter, he restates the call to be strong as “Marshall all the powers of your soul and muster up your whole force, for you will need all you can get!” (p. 24) He goes on to say in reference to the first passage above that it is “why you need a more courageous spirit to obey God faithfully than to command an army of men.” (p 24)

Being courageous isn’t easy. It’s not fun. When recruits go to boot camp, they spend their time getting ready to go to war. They may hope war doesn’t come, but the whole idea of becoming a soldier is to be ready to be strong and courageous. They wake up in the morning with the goal to be ready to fight. I tend to wake up wondering what the day will bring. My perspective is passive. The day is going to happen to me, in me, or around me, and I shall possibly respond. Courage? Yes, it might be needed, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. In the meanwhile, let me saunter along.  

What the book tells me I’m lacking are 1) an established knowledge of God’s Word, and 2) a heart set in the right direction. I don’t believe that there’s a war going on, or if it is, it doesn’t involve me. I don’t study as hard as I once did. I generally know what God’s Word says, but I don’t treat it as the thing that stands between me and death today.

But this is what the author calls us to do. He tells us that we must have an established knowledge of God’s truth and a heart set in the right direction. We must be doers of the Word, and not hearers only (James 1:22.) We need to see the world in the light of the Word and set our hearts on being and doing it.

Life has beaten me up a little, I think. When I was young, I used to set my heart on things. It might have been a toy, or a boy, or something else. My mother told me that she had learned not to tell me the ideas she and my father were considering, because if she said we might go someplace, I would start packing. Like the old Marine saying, “See that hill? Take that hill!” I would set my heart on that objective and go over, under, around or through obstacles. And if my parents didn’t follow through with their idea, a crime had been committed.

But now? When it comes to life in general, as I’ve noted, I’m more relaxed, to the point of being passive. That probably makes me easier to get along with, but it also makes me easier prey for those who come against me in battle. That attitude is probably the spiritual equivalent of shooting myself in the foot.

I’m not suggesting that we should all become martial in our behavior toward others, but at the very least, we should get our heads on straight, and recognize that if we’re going to make it through the war, or even just the day, we need to step into our days with a stronger grip on our purpose than I tend to have.