Courage

1 Corinthians 16:13

Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong. Do everything in love.

It's so easy for me to look around at others and think I am not a very brave person. When I think of bravery, I think of firefighters risking their lives to save others, missionaries giving up everything and traveling to third-world countries, or pastors imprisoned and tortured for the sake of the gospel. I don't think of average me sitting in my room reading books or babysitting down the street or blogging late into the night or any of my other day-to-day activities. My mundane, everyday actions are not what I consider brave.

But God whispers to my heart that I can be brave, and that bravery doesn't have to be big.

While risking your life to save others or sacrificing everything for a cause is certainly courageous, courage is not always in the form of grand gestures. God doesn't ask for our actions or our sacrifice, He asks for our heart and all of it. That is the courage God asks of us: that we completely trust Him with our heart and lay everything down at His feet.

Being brave is asking God to guard your heart, the heart he fearfully and wonderfully made and the heart in which He abides. Everything you do flows from this heart (Proverbs 4:23), and letting go of the battle to protect your own heart and trusting Him to guard your heart is an act of great courage.

Being brave is rooting your faith in the Rock that can't be shaken and standing firm on His unbreakable foundations (Psalms 62:2). It takes courage to step off of the comfortable but unstable earthly foundations we've built for ourselves and standing firm on the foundation that always was and always will be steadfast.

Being brave is realizing Christ's power is made perfect in your weakness and allowing this truth to make you strong (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). It is when you come to Christ with your weakness and desperation that He empowers you with His strength and not your own. There is bravery in seeing the beauty in our inadequacy and in God's exceeding ability to provide.

And being brave is loving. For when we love, we are living out the identity of God for His being is love and He desires for us to mirror Him in that that live out love. Love recklessly. Love unconditionally. Love purely. And love bravely.

We can live out courage for Christ by worshipping Him in these ways, for when our lives become acts of worship, everything we do is brave. Even the smallest breath that is breathed in a life dedicated to Christ is courageous in that we have offered that breath of our lives to Him in an act of faith to Him.

Lay your heart at His feet today in boldness, and offer to Him your life, your breath which He has breathed into your lungs. This is worship. This is courage.