“Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong.” 1 Corinthians 16:13

What is courage? Courage has been defined as bravery, but that is a pretty simplistic definition. Some have tried to explain it in a little more detail. One writer defined it as fear “that has said its prayers.” Mark Twain said, “Courage is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.” A courageous person is not someone who is fearless. (That is, in most cases, a stupid person.) A courageous person is someone who can control his or her fear and then do the right thing. It is overcoming the fear that we naturally have.

We see courage on display among those who are first responders. Certainly the soldiers serving our country display courage every day. These kinds of people tend to go toward danger rather than away because… well, because that is what they do. That’s their job.

Besides the courage fire fighters and soldiers show, there are other kinds of courage, too. There is moral courage, which is the ability to do right in the face of opposition or discouragement. We are faced with these kinds of situations much more often than we are faced with saving a child from a burning building. Everyday we will be tested to do the right thing and tempted to do the wrong. Having moral courage means being honest and having integrity. It means that we don’t cheat on the test, on our taxes or on others. Moral courage is honoring others by honoring our word, even when we don’t feel like it. It is saying our yes, is yes, and our no, is no, and not turning a yes into a no just because it is convenient for us.

It also takes courage to follow Jesus Christ. We are living in an ABC culture today: Anything But Christ. People are fine with whatever we believe, unless we say, “I believe in Jesus Christ, and I believe the Bible is the Word of God.” Suddenly we will have joined group of backward intolerants who at the best are laughed at and at the worst become public enemy number one. It takes courage to stand up for Jesus Christ. In some countries it takes the kind of courage we see in first responders because in the foreign field, many are truly running toward danger. Here, in most cases, we merely face discomfort. Of course, in some cases people might face job loss or public ridicule or more. But let’s face it, bullying is not the same as bullets.

We need more moral courage today or we will find ourselves in the same place that the rest of the world is in. Courage starts in our daily lives with the little things. I used to tell the athletes I coached that they needed to work as hard as they could in practice because victory over the little things in practice when there was no opponent prepared them for victory over the bigger things when there is an opponent. If we cannot stand for right in the face of little opposition, how will we ever stand against the real enemies.

A boy was trying to impress a girl he liked by saying, “I will climb the highest mountain, swim the swiftest river, and cross the driest desert for you, and I will come over tomorrow if it is not raining.” Can we show great things for God in great trials, if we struggle to do simple things for Him in everyday life? We all want to believe we are courageous, but courage is action, not just belief. We must stand firm in the faith. We must be courageous. We must be strong. That’s our job.