The Brave are few, aren’t they? Not many people can be counted on to do what is right, to fight for the rights of the weak, to stand up in the face of the bully, to refuse to cower when called on to make a difference, even if only a small one. The Brave make headlines. The Brave change cultures. The Brave are to be envied. But the Brave aren’t just the ones who fight against the odds or who run into burning buildings to save puppies. The Brave aren’t just tough guys who fight against the dictators of the world and the dictators of their emotions as well. The Brave are people like you who endure the anger of friends with love and compassion, who live in a less than perfect family but don’t return drama with drama, who don’t give up when others say “there’s no hope.” They are people who have enough faith to pray for help when no help can be seen. They resist temptation when they desperately want to give in. Bravery takes place not just on the outside where all can see it but on the inside as well, in your thoughts and your beliefs.

The Brave have faith—faith that what they believe in makes all the pain and fear in the world endurable, and faith that what they have to do is doable because of this belief. The Brave aren’t easily knocked around. They don’t cower in fear; they aren’t consumed with worry, doubt, or anxiety, because those are the opposite of faith. They have a confidence about them that makes them easy to be around.

The Brave also have convictions. When Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that would become “The Star-Spangled Banner,” he wrote about “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” “The brave” were the men and women of our new country who believed so strongly in their freedom that they were willing to endure long, hard winters with little comfort or ease and long, hard battles that would threaten to take the lives of everyone who fought in them. These colonists believed so much in their new country that they had the bravery to fight against the odds. Bravery, in order to endure, has to come with some kind of belief—belief in what it is that the Brave stand for, fight for, or endure. The Brave must believe.

So the question is, what do you believe in? Is your belief strong enough to make you one of the Brave? The truth is that most of us lack courage from time to time. We worry, we fear, we get stressed out—all because we don’t have enough faith.

Bravery is fueled by belief, but belief in what? You can have belief in yourself and your abilities. This kind of self-esteem, or self-confidence, can go a long way. A lot of battles have been won by confident people who believed something so strongly that they were willing to die for it. In the movie Braveheart, William Wallace calls on this kind of bravery when he says,

I am William Wallace, and I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. . . . Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live. At least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives . . . but they’ll never take . . . our freedom![1]

The desire to fight for what you believe in is such a powerful one that it leads people all over the world to amazing feats of bravery. But it can also lead to amazing feats of stupidity when what is believed in isn’t 100 percent good or 100 percent true. Belief in anything other than what, or shall we say who, is 100 percent good and 100 percent true will eventually lead to disappointment, if not end in disaster.

That’s because if the thing or person you believe in isn’t perfect, then the thing or person will most definitely disappoint in its moments of imperfection, and because of that, your bravery will lose its strength. But the Brave who base their courage not on the imperfect but on the perfect will never be disappointed.

Where do you look for such perfection? Who or what can be trusted so completely that they can be given the title “perfect”? Though you may or may not believe it right now, there is a Perfect One, one who can be fully relied on by the Brave who look to him for courage. In him can be found all that is needed for perfect faith and perfect courage, because his very character confirms that nothing in this life is bigger or “badder” than him. Nothing can shake him or anyone who believes in him. His name is God. In Deuteronomy 32:4 the Bible describes him like this: “He is a rock. What he does is perfect. All his ways are fair. He is a faithful God, who does no wrong. He is honorable and reliable.” Reliable means you can put all your confidence in him without disappointment. No shame comes to the person who believes in God enough to trust him (see Rom. 10:11). And that’s the key: the belief must be strong enough to offer him complete trust in his character, which then translates to bravery.

A lot of people—you might even be one of them—have been disappointed by God. When God doesn’t show up as hoped for; when trials come and pain lingers; when dreams die and plans are dashed to pieces, disappointment seems like the most obvious emotional response. But the person who truly trusts God doesn’t translate their pain and suffering into doubt. That is, they are so completely convinced of who God is that they know that he can be trusted, even when things look bad.

In the amazing allegory Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard, a little girl named Much-Afraid (because of her great fear and doubt) was going on a journey up the mountain with the Shepherd, who represents Jesus. As she began to freak out, the Shepherd asked her this question: “Would you be willing to trust me . . . even if everything in the wide world seemed to say that I was deceiving you—indeed, that I had deceived you all along?”

Her answer might shock you, but even in her fear she said this: “‘Yes . . . I’m sure I would, because one thing I know to be true, it is impossible that you should tell a lie. It is impossible that you should deceive me. I know that I am often very frightened at the things which you ask me to do,’ she added shamefacedly and apologetically, ‘but I could never doubt you in that way. It’s myself I am afraid of, never of you, and though everyone in the world should tell me that you had deceived me, I should know it was impossible.’”[2]

It’s easy to believe God when things are going well. It’s logical. But when things start to go bad, that’s when faith is put to the test. A lot of people fail the test of faith because they don’t have enough faith for the hard and scary times. But those are exactly the times that faith is meant for, and the Brave understand that. Bravery is fed not by testosterone, alcohol, or sheer determination but by the power and the presence believed in and counted on—by the One who came to save us.

The Bible is pretty clear that faith is a requirement for courage. When the disciples were out on their little boat, caught in a storm, they freaked out and woke up Jesus, accusing him of not caring for them enough to wake up. In the midst of the turning and the tossing of the water they screamed, “Don’t you care?” (Mark 4:38). Sound familiar? Have you ever wondered if God even cares? We all do at times, and it’s not right, but it is human. These guys were scared to death, and his response to them was, “Why are you such cowards? Don’t you have any faith yet?” (Mark 4:40). See the connection? Why are they cowards? Because they don’t have faith. Faith is required for courage. Doubt leads to fear and worry and stress. Doubt destroys the Brave and makes them the scared.

Not only that, but this problem of not quite trusting God, of doubting his love and care for you, leads to a lack of blessing. When Jesus went home to Nazareth, the people had a hard time believing in him. They knew him as the kid down the block, not as the Son of God, and so they doubted him. It was unfortunate for them, because the Bible tells us that “because of their unbelief, he couldn’t do any miracles among them except to place his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their unbelief” (Mark 6:5–6 NLT). If your life needs a miracle and you can’t find the courage to believe in the one who saves you, then your unbelief will be your own destruction. The Brave have the ability to trust God, especially when times get tough, and in that belief they just might find the bravery they were looking for in the form of a blessing. But even if they don’t find a blessing, they are blessed just by the mere fact that they were overrun with faith rather than fear, with confidence rather than doubt. Get this: bravery is your reward when you can believe all things good and perfect about God.

But if bravery hasn’t been yours, have no fear. All you need is a better understanding of who God is. Knowing more about God allows you to put all of your confidence in him and removes the power of fear and doubt in your life. So let’s take a look at the God of the Brave.

The Brave Know God

The Brave have at least one thing in common, and that is their belief about who God is. The faith of the Brave isn’t just about believing in God, though; it’s about what you believe about God. It is essential to the brave in your life that you aren’t believing a lie. Fear, the kind that controls you and makes you suffer, is evidence that you don’t really get who God really is. The Bible makes it clear: “No fear exists where his love is. Rather, perfect love gets rid of fear, because fear involves punishment. The person who lives in fear doesn’t have perfect love” (1 John 4:18). The fear in your life comes from your inability to believe in God’s perfect love, which might mean that you just don’t fully know the character and the person of the God you so desperately want to believe in. That’s natural; it happens all the time. We get mixed-up ideas of who God is because of the things that happen in our lives and the ways other human beings translate those things for us. If you’ve always been told a lie, it’s really hard to see the truth. So before we go any further, we have to set down the foundation for the brave in your life, and that is the person of God. Who is he really? Can he be trusted to do and to be what he says he will do and be?

In order to answer these questions, you have to understand three things about God: his omnipotence, his omniscience, and his omnipresence. These form the foundation of his character. They are big words that aren’t used to describe anyone but God, so they don’t get used a lot. Let’s take a quick look at them.

First, God is omnipotent. That means he is all-powerful or almighty. The Bible uses the word almighty 360 times to describe how powerful God is. No one else in heaven or on earth can be called almighty, having all power. In order to truly know God, you have to understand that he has all the power—all of it! There is nothing he can’t do. Even if you feel like something in your life is more than he can handle, it’s not, because nothing is more powerful than he is.

Second, God is omniscient or all-knowing. There is nothing you can inform him of or teach him, because he already knows everything (see Isa. 40:13–14). You aren’t off his radar or out of his mind. You are always on his mind because he is all-knowing, which includes knowing what you are doing, thinking, and even feeling, all the time (read Ps. 139).

Third, God is omnipresent—he is everywhere. This is good news. It means you are never alone but are always near the all-powerful and all-knowing God who loves you. Deuteronomy 31:6 is meant to make you brave when it says, “Be strong and courageous. Don’t tremble! Don’t be afraid of them! The Lord your God is the one who is going with you. He won’t abandon you or leave you.” When you feel like God is distant, gone, or not paying attention, that’s a lie. The truth, confirmed by God’s Word, is that he is everywhere, all the time. He cannot be distant or out of reach, or he wouldn’t be everywhere; he’d only be most places.

These three attributes of God describe his power and his ability to do anything, know everything, and be everywhere at once. But all of this could be either really good news or horrific news, depending on how kind and loving God is. It’s good if God’s good, but it’s bad, really bad, if God can’t be trusted. A lot of us look at God that way. We think of him in human terms and assume he’s bossy, manipulative, uncaring, distant, or angry. When you think of him like that, it’s no wonder you are afraid. Who wouldn’t be afraid of a God like that? But that is not the nature of God; it’s the nature of fallen people. God cannot be known or judged by the hearts of broken human beings, stained with the residue of the sin in their lives. He has to be known by his Word. And his Word, the Bible, confirms an entirely different picture of God. In fact, the Bible confirms that God is the exact opposite of scary and distant when it says of him that he is love (1 John 4:8). A misunderstanding of this truth about who God is can lead to all kinds of emotional suffering and pain. If God isn’t love, then look out, because all that power in the hands of a vindictive or bitter God would be disastrous for his children. But since God is love, we can know that there is no darkness in him.

Now, this doesn’t mean that he’s a sugar daddy who gives you everything you want whenever you want it, like a parent spoiling his child. That’s not love; that’s making stuff an idol. As the perfect parent, God gives his children what they ask for if it is for their good, and if it would mean their destruction, he won’t give it to them. Like all good parents, God actually disciplines those he loves (see Heb. 12:6). He doesn’t abuse them, torture them, or shame them, but he protects them from unhealthy, sinful behavior so that they can be free from its bondage. His love produces all that is good in his children (see Phil. 2:13).

You have to be convinced that “love” is an accurate description of God in order to find the brave in your life. When your God is all-powerful and yet all-loving, then what do you fear? How can the child of such a perfect parent be in need? But wait, there’s more: God can be trusted not only because of these things but also because he is

If God is all these things, it follows that you can trust that all he allows in your life is meant for your good. When you consider your life and God’s role in it, you have to be willing to see him as sovereign—having absolute power to control everything. That means that nothing that happens catches God unaware. That means that whatever he wants to happen, he will make happen. Even if you are suffering, he will not let the suffering be in vain. He uses all things together for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his plan (see Rom. 8:28).

Fear has to do with doubt. When you fear, you doubt the character of God, and you believe a lie. It might be the lie that he won’t come through, that he isn’t involved, that he doesn’t know what to do, or that he wants to hurt you. When you fear, you doubt God’s goodness and “omni-ness,” or “all-ness”—okay, maybe a better non-made-up word is fullness. When he becomes less than all to you, the fear takes over. But when you are confident in his sovereignty, nothing can push you around, control you, or destroy you. Nothing can move you from the feet of the Father (see Rom. 8:38–39), which is a place, by the way, of perfect rest and peace (see Isa. 26:3).

Listen, there are going to be hard times, no doubt. Jesus confirms it: “In the world you’ll have trouble” (John 16:33). But what you think about those times and who you think they come from will either break you or make you. If you can see that everything in the life of the believer comes first through the hands of God, then how can you fear? Take a look at Lamentations 3:38, which confirms this: “Both good and bad come from the mouth of the Most High God.” How can you worry or doubt when you know that the most perfect being in the universe—the most loving, wise, and holy one—is actively and lovingly involved in every aspect of your life (see Prov. 16:9)? Every one! This means that even when things look bad, they are actually for your good. Sure, in this world you will have trouble, guaranteed, and that’s where your faith gets shaky, because somewhere along the way you became convinced that faith meant a trouble-free life. That’s not true. As it says in the book of John, the world comes with trouble, “But cheer up!” says Jesus. “I have overcome the world” (16:33). That means that it no longer feels like the world is against you when God is for you, because you see the world as just another tool in the hand of God. Though it might look like the world has the upper hand, it doesn’t, because God has it all under control, the good and the bad. All of it comes from him (remember Lam. 3:38). And when all of it comes from him, that means no one else has control over your life or can destroy you. Even if the enemy should want to hurt you, he must first ask God’s permission, as we see in the life of Job (see Job 1:6–12). This is freedom, and this is the foundation of all of your bravery. When you see God’s hand rather than the enemy’s, you are safe, even in the midst of destruction (see Job 13:15; Ps. 112:6–8; Prov. 3:25–26).

It’s so important that you have a right-on view of the character and person of God. It’s essential, because without it, all the trouble in this world will lead you to doubt, and then doubt will lead to worry, and worry will lead to panic, anger, depression, or hatred. All of your hope, any chance at being brave, lies in your ability to believe what is true about God and to take that with you into the battle of life. Without it there is no real and consistent bravery and no hope. So find out today who God is, and hold tight to that. He won’t let you down. And then you can say, “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Who is there to fear? The Lord is my life’s fortress. Who is there to be afraid of?” (Ps. 27:1).

The Brave Are Certain of What They Don’t See

Your physical and emotional senses tell you all about the world around you. And when any or all of your senses warn you danger is near, it’s natural to react by either fighting or running. Your heartbeat races, your body sweats, your face gets flushed, and your mouth gets dry, all in response to your sense that something is wrong. But as a believer you have another aspect to your senses, and that is the sense of your spirit or, more accurately, Christ’s Spirit within you. With this spiritual sense you can override a lot of your physical and emotional senses with the calm truth that you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you (see Phil. 4:13). Knowing that there is a world around you that can’t be seen with human eyes, where the Spirit is fighting for you and surrounding you with protection, is an essential part of the mind and spirit of the Brave who are sure of what they hope for and certain of what they do not see (see Heb. 11:1).

You cannot see the hand of God in your life with your physical eyes, but it is there (see Isa. 41:10). You cannot see the angel that God has sent to protect you, but he is there (see Pss. 34:7; 91:11). You cannot see the future, but you can be sure that God can and that he has plans for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you (see Jer. 29:11).

Faith, and therefore bravery, is not about what you see or feel around you but about what you believe to be true in spite of what you see and feel. In this life you will have trouble, and you can’t let that trouble either define you or control you, but you have to live by faith—faith that sees beyond the physical, into the spiritual, with all truth and wisdom. God’s Word confirms the courage that comes from this way of life when Paul says, “So we are always of good courage” because “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:6–7 ESV).

The Brave Let God Do the Work

Being certain of what they do not see, the Brave are able to be fully convinced of the presence of God at all times. Not only that, but the Brave know that it isn’t by their own strength or might that they do anything, but it’s only through the Spirit of God that lives inside of them (see Zech. 4:6). Knowing where all the power to fight fear, worry, sin, and all the other bad and oppressive things in your life comes from is a major step toward becoming one of the Brave. When life threatens to get the best of you and everything around you is chaos, God has something to say about it. “Do not be afraid!” he says (2 Chron. 20:15 NLT). This isn’t just a suggestion or a positive mantra to repeat in order to feel better. This is a command, and one that comes with an exclamation point for emphasis. If it’s a command, that means it can be done! Reversing fear has to be possible, or it would be insanity to command people to do it. The next part of the verse explains how to defeat your fear when the enemy attacks: “Don’t be discouraged by this mighty army, for the battle is not yours, but God’s.”


When a “mighty army” stands up against you, either figuratively or literally, it can feel like it’s all on you to defend yourself, but this verse says nope, that’s not true. When the world attacks, the battle is not yours but God’s. And furthermore, if it’s his, then he will fight it for you. That’s the good news surrounding the commands of God. When something is commanded, you can be sure that you can do it, because you don’t do any of it alone but with the help and the power of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the weaker you are, the stronger he is. Paul found this out when he had something bad in his life that just wouldn’t go away. God told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9 ESV).

The battle that the Brave fight isn’t fought alone; in fact, it isn’t really even fought by the Brave but is fought by the God in whom the Brave put all their confidence. Your weakness doesn’t matter. All you have to do is have enough strength to believe.

The Brave Accept God’s Protection

God wants you to know that you don’t go into battle alone. When bullets fly and the flaming arrows of criticism or temptation start to zoom toward your head, you aren’t unprotected, unless you choose not to put on the armor that God offers you. Ephesians 6 lays out the believer’s spiritual armor, and part of that armor is a shield. The shield protects your core—your heart, your lungs, the important organs of your body—so it is very important. This shield is called the shield of faith, and you are told to “hold up the shield of faith to stop the fiery arrows of the devil” (Eph. 6:16 NLT). When you drop the shield, you lose faith and doubt takes over. Then nothing is blocking those fiery arrows of the devil from getting to your heart. That’s a poetic way of saying that when you start to doubt the providence and the sovereignty of God, your heart becomes open to lies—lies that are meant to distort your idea of the true character of God. These lies, once believed, wreak havoc on the life of faith and on the believer’s ability to be brave. Remember, bravery can’t exist without faith. So if you lack the faith you wish you had, you can find it when you use the truth to block the lies that come at you.


When you start to believe something that is inconsistent with who God is, that’s the beginning of your destruction. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent helped Eve convince herself that God was a liar. He said that God wasn’t being honest when he said that if she ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she would surely die (see Gen. 3:1–5). This lie about the character of God convinced Eve that eating the fruit was the best option, and as a result the world was introduced to sin, which would lead to the separation of humanity from God and all our troubles since that introduction. When you don’t take up the shield of faith to stop the lies from taking hold of your heart, sin takes over, and sin (not doing what God commands or doing what God forbids) plants the seeds of fear in your heart. This fear comes from both concern over your guilt (see 1 John 4:18) and doubt of God’s goodness. Sin is taking life into your own hands and not accepting the protection of God in the form of the shield of faith, which he offers to help you fight against the lies that convince you of God’s lack of care in your life and that lead you to step in and take over for him.

The Brave Know Anything Is Possible

Jesus said to him, “As far as possibilities go, everything is possible for the person who believes. (Mark 9:23)

The amazing thing about the Brave is that they think that things other people say can never happen are possible. They have hope that shines like the noonday sun. They are comfortable in chaos because they have an unwavering faith that it will all work out for good. It’s not that they are confident that miracles will be the answer to all their prayers but that they are comfortable with the idea that even if the miracle doesn’t come, life is still good, because the miracle was not God’s best for them. When you complain or whine about life, fear the worst, and work with all your might to avoid what you think will be your certain destruction, you accuse God of being either not as good as he ought to be or not as influential as he could be. But for the person who never doubts the character of God, it’s possible to believe that even a disaster could be God’s best. Job understood this when he said, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15 ESV).

Yes, the Brave know anything is possible, except that God would ever fail, leave, or give up. They know that with faith, all is not only survivable but beautiful. And they can find the courage to be brave not because of who they are but because of who God is.

The Brave Are Safe

A person’s fear sets a trap for him,

but one who trusts the Lord is safe. (Proverbs 29:25)

How can your trust in God lead to safety? How can you say that you are safe when you are being attacked, abused, or hated? Where is the safety in that? The safety is found not in the removal of the attacks from your life but in the removal of the fear from your life. When others sin, you can’t do much to stop them. Everyone makes their own choices, and outside of physically restraining them, controlling another human being is almost impossible. The sin in others confirms what God’s Word says: “There is no one righteous, not even one” (Rom. 3:10 NIV).

In a world where others around you sin, sometimes horribly, how can you claim the safety of God? While God has saved many of his children from terrible fates, many others have had to suffer greatly. Just look at the disciples. All but John were killed in a gruesome way for not disowning Christ. These saints looked for something more important than the safety of their bodies: the safety of their souls. They knew that eternity waits for the soul that doesn’t lose faith. And as Paul says,

Our suffering is light and temporary and is producing for us an eternal glory that is greater than anything we can imagine. We don’t look for things that can be seen but for things that can’t be seen. Things that can be seen are only temporary. But things that can’t be seen last forever. (2 Cor. 4:17–18)

Fear sets a trap for your soul, because it deceives the soul into moving from faith to doubt. And when that happens you easily find yourself confused and alone. But when you stay convinced that God is all good, then no matter what might happen around you, you will still have faith, and you will be able to say these words that will encourage not only you but anyone else who listens:

God is our refuge and strength,

an ever-present help in times of trouble.

That is why we are not afraid

even when the earth quakes

or the mountains topple into the depths of the sea.

Water roars and foams,

and mountains shake at the surging waves. (Ps. 46:1–3)

Notice it doesn’t say that the earth won’t quake if you believe or that the mountains won’t topple. No, it says that all these terrible things might take place, but the people who trust God will be safe, no matter what might happen to their bodies.


As we’ve seen, the Brave all have one thing in common: faith. They all believe in a God who is not only good and powerful but also perfect in all he does. They have such a secure faith in who he is that nothing can topple them and nothing can truly hurt them. The world will still try. Mountains will still crumble, but the heart of the Brave will remain intact. All of this rests not on who they are but on who God is and what he has done in their lives. The Brave live by the power of the Holy Spirit within them that teaches them, counsels them, and guides them into the truth that sets them free from the fears of this world—free to believe, to love, and to hope.

If your faith is weak and you don’t feel that power yet, don’t let that be a reason to fear, but choose to hope. God has brought you to these pages for a reason. He has not left you alone in your misery. He is actively pursuing you, showing you his character and his desire to be all that you need. Take this chance to thank him, to confess your doubt to him, and to promise to find out who he really is and begin to believe in the goodness of who he is. Ask him for help, and he will give it. May today be for you the beginning of a new life and a new ability to become a part of the Brave.