Be A Man Of God & Of Courage
A warrior, prepared and ready for (spiritual) battle - 1 Chronicles 12:24-37
These men have turned the world upside down - Acts 17:6
Deuteronomy 31:6
Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble...for the Lord your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.
Joshua 1:9
Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
1 Kings 2:1-3 (King David's blessing and charge to his just anointed son, King Solomon)
Be strong, act like a man, and observe what the Lord your God requires: Walk in obedience to Him, and keep His decrees and commands...
Psalm 46:1-2
God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea...
Isaiah 41:10 (HCSB)
Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be afraid, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you; I will help you; I will hold on to you with My righteous right hand.
(Psalm 46:5 - Our God is not watching from afar; He is walking beside us.)
1 Corinthians 16:13-14
Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong. Do everything in love.
Philippians 3:25, 30
Epaphroditus, my brother, fellow worker and fellow soldier...almost died for the work of Christ, risking his life...
The Martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna
As Polycarp was being taken into the arena, a voice came to him: “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man!” The Proconsul tried to persuade him to apostatize, saying: “Reproach Christ, and I will set you free.” “Eighty-six years I have served him,” Polycarp declared, “and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?”
John Bradford, Reformer and Chaplain to Bishop Ridley, when informed that he would be burned at the stake the next day, July 1, 1555 on the order of Queen Mary I; in Light From Old Times by J.C. Ryle
O Lord, I thank thee for it; I have looked for this a long time; It comes not suddenly to me, the Lord make me worthy of it.
Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London
"Last Farewell"
I thank my Lord God heartily for (my impending death), that it hath pleased him to call me of his great mercy unto this high honour, to suffer death willingly for his sake and in his cause: unto which honour he called the holy prophets, and his dearly beloved apostles, and his blessed chosen martyrs. For you know that the causes wherefore I am put to death, are God’s causes and the causes of the truth. And to have a heart willing to abide and stand in God’s cause and in Christ’s (battle) even unto death, I ensure thee, O man, it is an inestimable and an honourable gift of God.
“A Second Conference Between Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer In Prison”
O Heavenly Father, the Father of all wisdom, understanding, and true strength, I beseech Thee, look mercifully upon me, and send Thy Holy Spirit into my breast; that when I must join to fight in the field for the glory of Thy holy Name, then I, being strengthened with the defence of Thy right hand, may manfully stand in the confession of Thy faith, and of Thy truth, and continue in the same unto the end of my life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Hugh Latimer encouraging Nicholas Ridley while being led to be burned at the stake, October 16, 1555.
Be of good comfort, Mr. Ridley, and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace, in England, as I trust never shall be put out.
A Gothic Cross was placed atop a spire in Oxford in 1841 in memory of Latimer, Ridley and Thomas Cranmer (executed March 21, 1556). The inscription on the cross reads:
"To the glory of God and in grateful commemoration of His servants, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who, near this spot, yielded their bodies to be burned, bearing witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome; and rejoicing that to them it was given not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for His sake . . ." (Philippians 1:29)
At the graveside of John Knox, “The Thundering Scot”, Regent James Douglas of Morton said, “Here lies one who neither flattered nor feared any (man).”
John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; when Christian and Faithful are on trial in Vanity before Lord Hate-good
Now, Faithful, play the man, speak for thy God:
Fear not the wickeds' malice; nor their rod!
Speak boldly, man, the truth is on they side;
Die for it, and to life in triumph ride.
Faithful - "There can be no Divine faith without a Divine revelation of the will of God. Therefore, anything that is done...that is not in agreement with Divine revelation...will not bring eternal life. As to the king you talk of, since he is Beelzebub, the enemy of our Lord, I defy him and all his angels."
Samuel Rutherford, Letters, No. XXI To Lady Kenmure (Published 1664 after his death in 1661, and by Andrew Bonar in 1863)
Let us be faithful and care for our own part, which is to do and suffer for him, and lay Christ's part on himself and leave it there; Duties are ours, events are God’s.
Matthew Henry, An Exposition of All the Books of the Old and New Testaments (1708-1710)
Good men are more solicitous and desirous to know the duty that is to be done by them, than to know the events that shall be concerning them; for duty is ours, events are God’s.
Thomas Edmund Harvey The Rise of the Quakers
Soldier of Christ, you are in an enemy's country; "Keep to the Lord's watch."
Richard Baxter A Christian Directory Vol. 1 "Directions to Unconverted, Graceless Sinners, For the Attainment of Saving Grace"
O what is the breath or fury of dust or devils, against the Lord Almighty! The Captain of your salvation has gone this way before you. Do not be afraid where Christ is leading the way. Do not draw back when you see his steps and his blood.
On Revelation 7:9-17 "...these are they who have come out of the great tribulation..."
All the saints in heaven have gone this way. They have overcome oppositions and difficulties; they were tempted, troubled, scorned, opposed, and now they triumph in glory...nothing should seem too difficult, or sufferings too great.
Thomas Watson, The Godly Man's Picture, Drawn with a Scripture Pencil, or, Some Characteristic Marks of a Man who is Going to Heaven, 1666
https://www.gracegems.org/Watson/godly_mans_picture2.htm
John Owen Works, Volume 6 "Temptation and Sin"
Our Saviour teaches us the ways to prevent our entering into temptation, and there are two: 'Watch' and 'Pray'. To watch means to be on guard, to take heed, and to consider the ways the enemy might seek to approach us and entangle us in his baits and methods. The second direction is to pray.
George Downame
The Christian soldier must avoid two evils—he must not faint or yield in the time of fight, and after a victory he must not wax insolent and secure. When he has overcome, he is so to behave himself as though he were presently again to be assaulted. For Satan's temptations, like the waves of the sea, do follow one in the neck of the other.
William Gurnall The Christian in Complete Armour
When the Christian must turn (recant) or burn, leave praying, or become a prey to the cruel teeth of bloody men; how many politic retreats and self-preserving distinctions would a cowardly unresolved heart invent? The Christian that hath so great opposition had need be well locked into the saddle of his profession, or else he will soon be dismounted.
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another.
(St. Augustine - Fear God, which is above all, and no need to fear man at all.)
Do not say you have royal blood running in your veins, and you are born of God, except you can prove your pedigree by this heroic spirit; to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.
When the fight is hottest, and the bullets fly thickest from men and devils, to think, it is heaven all this is for, where it is worth having a place, though we go through fire and water to it.
John, Viscount Kenmure' in Voices From The Past - Puritan Devotional Readings
...howbeit you be named a Puritan, and mocked, yet care not for that, but rejoice and be glad, that they who are scorned and scoffed by this godless and vain world, and named Puritans, would admit you to their society...
Simeon Ash "Good Courage Discovered, and Encouraged; in a Sermon Preached Before the Commanders of the Military Forces of the Citie of London", on Psalm 31:24. In the parish church of Great St. Helens. May 17, 1642
Christian courage is the undaunted audacity of a sanctified heart in adventuring upon difficulties and undergoing hardships for a good cause upon the call of God.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Cheque Book of the Bank of Faith on John 12:26a “If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also…”
Come, my soul, pluck up courage, and put down thy feet in the blood-marked footprints which thy Lord has left you.
Lectures To My Students, “The Necessity of Ministerial Progress”
Be consumed with love for Christ, and let the flame burn continuously... We need indomitable perseverance, dogged resolution, and a combination of sacred obstinacy, self-denial, holy gentleness, and invincible courage.
"All Of Grace"
https://ccel.org/ccel/spurgeon/grace/grace.xii.html
Take a firm grip on this truth--"Christ died for the ungodly while they were yet without strength." This is your way out of your cowardice. Get this wrought into your soul, "Christ died for me," and you will soon be ready to die for Him. Believe it, that He suffered in your place and stead, and offered for you a full, true, and satisfactory expiation. If you believe that fact, you will be forced to feel, "I cannot be ashamed of Him who died for me." A full conviction that this is true will nerve you with a dauntless courage.
“The Broken Fence”
https://www.biblebb.com/files/spurgeon/3381.htm
Dare to be singular. Resolve to keep close to Christ. Make a stern determination to permit nothing in your life, however gainful or pleasurable, if it would dishonor the name of Jesus. Be dogmatically true, obstinately holy, immovably honest, desperately kind, fixedly upright.
“Lord, Open Their Eyes”
https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/young-man-a-prayer-for-you/#flipbook/
Play the man. Gird up the loins of your mind; be sober, and hope to the end; for if the Lord has opened your eyes, you will perceive that you are on the winning side, and that HE is coming soon who will smite his enemies. If you are on the side of God, and of his truth; if you do the right; if you believe in the Lord Jesus; if you commit yourself to the keeping of the hand which was pierced with the nails; heaven and earth may pass away, but the Lord can never desert you. Hold fast your integrity. Believe the truth of God even to the end; for the Lord Jesus will not fail, nor be discouraged, till all his foes are beneath his feet.
Horatius Bonar
"True Revival and The Men God Uses"
"Bible Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 16:13-14", The Christian Treasury, 1864
Be men! In courage; not cowards, turning our back on the foe, or giving way in danger, or reproach, or evil days. In solidity; not shifting or shadowy, but immoveable as the rock. In strength. As the man is, so is his strength. Be strong! In wisdom. Foolishness is with childhood, wisdom with manhood. Speak and act with wisdom, as men. In ripeness. The faculties of men are ripe, both for thinking and working. They speak ripe words, think ripe thoughts, plan and execute ripe things. In understanding be men! In all things;—what you do, and what you refrain from doing, be men. Let nothing effeminate, luxurious, sickly, childish, puny, little, narrow, be seen about you.
Christianity makes men, not babes. Adorn the doctrine of Christ by your manliness. In the Church, in the world, in business, in conversation,—in prosperity and adversity,—quit you like men! Let no man despise thee; and let no man despise the Gospel because of thee.
Phillips Brooks
“The Beauty of a Life of Service” on John 8:31-36, 1893
Men are questioning now, as they never have questioned before, whether Christianity is indeed the true religion which is to be salvation of the world. Christian men, it is for us to give our bit of answer to that question. It is for us, in whom the Christian church is at the moment partially embodied, to declare that Christianity, that the Christian faith, the Christian manhood can do that for the world which the world needs.
You ask, “What can I do?” You can furnish one Christian life. You can furnish a life so faithful to every duty, so ready for every service, so determined not to commit sin, that the great Christian church shall be the stronger for your living in it, and the problem of the world be answered, and a certain great peace come into this poor, perplexed phase of our humanity as it sees that revelation of what Christianity is.
Christ The Light And Life: Lenten Readings , 1905
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall not be a miracle, But you yourself shall be the miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself: At the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God.
John G. Paton, The Autobiography of the Pioneer Missionary to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 1898
I knew not when or how attack [against my life] might be made; and yet, with my trembling hand clasped in the hand once nailed on Calvary, and now swaying the sceptre of the universe, calmness and peace and resignation (surrender) abode in my soul.
Hudson Taylor, in Leslie T. Lyall, A Passion for the Impossible: The Continuing Story of the Mission Hudson Taylor Began, 1965
There are three stages to every great work of God; first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.
F.B. Meyer
Worrying will not help matters; it can alter neither the future nor the past, though it will materially affect our power in dealing with troubles. It will not rob tomorrow of its difficulties, but it will rob your brain of its clear-sightedness, and your heart of its courage.
"Marching Orders" on Joshua 1:9 "Have not I commanded Thee! Be strong and of a good courage: be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest."
It was a host of young men and women that stood on the verge of Jordan, waiting the signal to enter the Promised Land. God had said that He would give them every place upon which the sole of their foot should tread (Joshua 1:3). What an incentive this was for pressing on! Every time an Israelite put his foot forward on the territory of Canaan, he realized that piece of land would come into the possession of his people.
There is a counterpart of this in our own experience. We must learn to put down our foot upon the Promises of God's Word, and say: "These are mine by right, and shall be mine in actual enjoyment." In Gordon's journal (Major General Charles George "Chinese" Gordon, killed during the defense of Khartoum, Sudan January 26, 1885) he tells us that often before he reached some strange or hostile tribe, it seemed as though they had been given to his faith and subdued before he reached them. In combating your spiritual foes, dare to believe that God has given them into your hand, and go forward assured that not one of them shall stand before you. This is a blessed promise: "There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee" (Joshua 1:5). It does not matter how fierce the tempter, how often you have failed, how inveterate the bad habits, if you will dare to believe that God is with you, not one of all the band of besetting sins shall be able to stand before you. God cannot fail, and will not forsake; be strong, and go forward!
The one thing that God asks of all of us is that we should obey up to the hilt.
Here are our marching orders, and we must keep them well before us:
(1) We must meditate upon the Scripture day and night; it must not depart from our heart or mouth.
(2) We must be strong even when obedience seems impossible, and when all influences are brought to bear to weaken our resolution, we must still dare to obey the voice of God. And as we advance we shall find that the dreaded forms of opposition are but shadows; when they are touched with the spear-point of faith, they will divide and we shall pursue our way.
G. Campbell Morgan “The Problems of the Religious Life: Is the Religious Life Worth While?”
If you become a religious man, a Christian man, you are going to fight everything that spoils your brother, because the thing that spoils your brother wounds the heart of your Father. The world will gain another man fighting the wrong for the establishment of the right. The world will gain in you if you are a religious man, one full of sympathy for all who are scattered, distressed, wounded, and one who out of that sympathy will work in order to uplift and to bless.
E.M. Bounds Power Through Prayer “Men of Prayer Needed”
http://www.revival-library.org/catalogues/miscellanies/prayer/boundspower.html
Men are God's method. The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. What the church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men who the Holy Spirit can use - men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Spirit does not come on machinery but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men - men of prayer.
A.B. Simpson
God is not wanting great men, but He is wanting men who will dare to prove the greatness of their God.
When a Roman soldier was told by his guide that if he insisted on taking a certain journey it would probably be fatal, he answered, “It is necessary for me to go; it is not necessary for me to live.” When we are convicted like that we shall amount to something.
Although the Holy Spirit uses weak men, He does not want them to be weak after He chooses and calls them. Although He uses the foolish things to confound the wise, He does not want us to be foolish after He comes to give us His wisdom and grace. He uses the foolishness of preaching, but not necessarily the foolishness of preachers. God wants fit instruments for His power - wills surrendered, hearts trusting, lives consistent and lips obedient to His will. Then He can use the weakest weapons and make them mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.
A.W. Tozer The Next Chapter After the Last
We have developed in recent times a peace-loving, soft-spoken, tame and harmless brand of Christian of whom the world has no fear and for whom it has little respect. We are careful, for instance, never to speak in public against any of the false cults lest we be thought intolerant. We fear to talk against the destructive sins of modern civilization for fear someone will brand us as bigoted and narrow. Little by little we have been forced off the hard earth into a religious cloud-land where we are permitted to wing our harmless way around, like swallows at sundown, saying nothing that might stir the ire of the sons of this world. That Neo-Christianity, which seems for the time to be the most popular (and is certainly the most aggressive), is very careful not to oppose sin. It wins its crowds by amusing them and its converts by hiding from them the full implications of the Christian message. It carries on its projects after the ballyhoo methods of American business.
We stand in desperate need of a few men like Elijah who will dare to face up to the brazen sinners who dictate our every way of life. Sin in the full proportions of a revolution or a plague has all but destroyed our civilization while church people have played like children in the marketplace. What has happened to the spirit of the American Christian? Have we lost the spirit of discernment till we can no longer recognize our captors? How much longer will we hide in caves while Ahab and Jezebel continue to pollute the temple and ravage the land? Surely we should give this some serious thought and prayer before it is too late--if indeed it is not too late already.
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Church of England Infant Baptismal Service
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1662/Orig_manuscript/baptism.htm
"I sign this child with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world and the devil, and to continue as Christ's faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end."
Thomas Aquinas
Give me, O Lord, a steadfast heart, which no unworthy affection may drag downwards; give me an unconquered heart, which no tribulation can wear out; give me an upright heart, which no unworthy purpose may tempt aside.
John Calvin's prayer at the end of his sermon on Jeremiah 51:51-53
Grant, Almighty God, that when you hide at this day your face from us, that the miserable despair that is ours may not overwhelm our faith, nor obscure our view of your goodness and grace, but that in the thickest darkness your power may ever appear to us, which can raise us above the world, so that we may courageously fight to the end ...
Isaac Watts – “Am I A Soldier Of The Cross”
Am I a soldier of the cross,
a follower of the Lamb,
and shall I fear to own his cause,
or blush to speak his name?
Must I be carried to the skies
on flowery beds of ease,
while others fought to win the prize,
and sailed through bloody seas?
Are there no foes for me to face?
Must I not stem the flood?
Is this vile world a friend to grace,
to help me on to God?
Sure I must fight, if I would reign;
increase my courage, Lord.
I'll bear the toil, endure the pain,
supported by thy word.
Thy saints in all this glorious war
shall conquer though they die;
they see the triumph from afar,
by faith they bring it nigh.
When that illustrious day shall rise,
and all thy armies shine
in robes of victory through the skies,
the glory shall be thine.
Ethelwyn Wetherald
My orders are to fight;
Then if I bleed, or fail,
Or strongly win, what matters it?
God only doth prevail.
The servant craveth naught
Except to serve with might.
I was not told to win or lose,
My orders are to fight.
Sam Houston on the eve of the Battle of San Jacinto, April 21, 1836
Be men, be free men, that your children may bless their father's (THE Father's) name.
Deo adjuvante, non timendum - With the help of God there is nothing to be afraid of!
Warning
Mark 8:38
If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.