You have two choices in life: either you can conquer your fear, or your fear can conquer you. There are no other options; you can’t peacefully coexist with your fear, because fear won’t allow it. Fear fights for control. It fights to establish its godship in your life. You can either give in to it or resist it. In the case of good fear, as in the fear of God, giving in to that fear is the best thing you can do. Then you have given God his rightful place, allowing him to call the shots in your life and to move you to action. But in the case of bad fear, which is most fear, giving in to it is giving it the place that God should have. For example, we have a friend who is afraid of flying, but unlike us, he doesn’t have to fly for work. Well, maybe he’s more afraid of crashing than flying, but either way, his fear is so strong that it rules his life. So when God called our friend to go to Africa to serve, he said no, because his fear trumped his God—or in this case, became his god.
Either your fear can conquer you, making you a slave to it, or you can conquer it. But conquering fear is an enormous proposition. For centuries humans have been controlled by their fear. They have missed opportunities, destroyed families, committed sins, and fought wars all at the foot of fear. Fear is a powerful force in this life, which is why an even more powerful force is required to overrule it. Your fight against fear will be a failure until you turn it over to the only one who can win it. If the brave in your life has been elusive, then have we got news for you: it won’t be anymore, because now you know the secret to the brave in this life, and that is that it doesn’t come from you. It isn’t possible for you to fight such a powerful foe. You don’t have the strength, but you do have someone you can rely on who does have the strength. He has given you his Spirit to live inside you not only to guide and counsel you but also to give you the power to live a life out from under the control of fear.
This is good news! This means that just like your salvation, the brave that you long for isn’t up to your strength or your will but simply requires your faith in the one who saves. In the book of Galatians, Paul gets on the people of Galatia for trying to do life in their own strength. It’s a really good kick in the pants for anyone who thinks that by pulling up your sleeves and digging in your feet, you can get the brave into your life. Take a read and see what we mean. Paul starts right off, “You stupid people of Galatia!” (3:1). Ouch, they must have really messed up to earn such harsh language. But look at what comes next:
Who put you under an evil spell? Wasn’t Christ Jesus’ crucifixion clearly described to you? I want to learn only one thing from you. Did you receive the Spirit by your own efforts to live according to a set of standards or by believing what you heard? Are you that stupid? Did you begin in a spiritual way only to end up doing things in a human way? (Gal. 3:1–3)
Did you catch that? You (and us), like the “stupid” Galatians, were saved by the Spirit of God and by his Spirit only. It wasn’t any amazing feat accomplished by you; all you had to do was believe. He did all the rest. So why have you been trying, through your own brute strength, to fight the fear in your life when the same way you were saved is the same way you will find your brave?
The Brave Live by Faith
The Brave aren’t brave because of who they are but because of who God is. And the brave you want in your life isn’t out of your reach as long as you are reaching for the Holy Spirit who lives inside of you. In Galatians 5:22 Paul goes on to talk about what the Spirit of God in you does for you when he lists the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is the stuff that comes into your life because of God living in you. It’s the stuff that his Spirit supplies to you, allows in you, and gifts you with. It is the evidence of the life of God in you, and it is all you need to conquer the fear, pain, and suffering that threaten your life. Whenever you need to find the courage to go on, to believe, to stand, to rest, to know—whenever you are faced with trials, with pain, with suffering—if you can respond to those times in peace and patience with a dash of self-control, then you have lived life as the bravest of the Brave. And that is exactly what you can get, not from your own hard work but from the Spirit inside of you.
Galatians 5 lists these nine qualities as the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (vv. 22–23, emphasis added). Did you see that? Peace in moments of terror, doubt, worry, fear, or danger comes from the Spirit, not your own strength. Patience when things wear on you, threaten you, or tug at you comes from the Spirit, not from your own hard work. And self-control when you want to give up, give in, or do what you shouldn’t do comes from the Spirit, not you! When you live by the Spirit, you have all you need to become one of the Brave.
The brave in your life doesn’t come from you; it comes from God in you. In the pursuit of brave, these words can be your guide: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 4:6 ESV). It isn’t through you that you overcome the hard parts of your life. Maybe you thought it was; maybe you’ve tried your hardest and still you’ve failed. Thank God! That means that his Word is true. The Brave aren’t made by people but by God. So if you want to consistently respond to the hard parts of life with peace, patience, and self-control, stop looking to yourself and start letting God be all that he wants to be for you.
Hopefully you get the idea by now, but how exactly does this happen? How do you do nothing while God does everything? You do it by turning your life and your trials over to him. You do that by making yourself small and him enormous. You do that by making life not all about you but all about him. You do that by living by faith and not by sight. The Brave know the source of their strength, so they call on that source over anything else, and they do that in four ways. Let’s dig into those ways now.
The Brave Pray
In your life there are a lot of impossible things to be overcome: impossible assignments, impossible pain, impossible change. Impossible stuff is frightening and can make you throw your hands up in the air and give up. But in the words of E. M. Bounds, “Faith does the impossible because it brings God to undertake for us, and nothing is impossible with God.”[8] The Brave are not brave because of what they do or who they are but because of who God is and what he does. Because of that, “impossible” holds little meaning to them.
On this earth there will always be immovable obstacles and forces that threaten to crush you. But the Brave have hope, because the Brave have access to the Creator of all through the discipline of prayer. Have you heard the expression “prayer moves mountains”? It comes from the words of Jesus in Mark 11:23, where he told his followers that if they believe, then they can pray for a mountain to “be uprooted and thrown into the sea,” and it will be done for them. These are some powerful words, and they’re words that most of us don’t really believe, if we are honest with ourselves. But maybe that’s because we don’t really understand the concept. A more accurate and believable way to say this, rather than “prayer moves mountains,” is that God moves mountains, and prayer moves God. When Jesus says it will be done for them, he is saying that it isn’t you or your prayer that moves the mountain but God who does the heavy lifting. Prayer lets God loose on your troubles and gives your heart rest from the fear, doubt, and worries of life.
Prayer not only lets God loose on your troubles but also lets your troubles loose from your life. When life is all about you, your ability, your struggle, and your strength, it can get very difficult and exhausting. Trying to manage your life yourself is like trying to balance twenty-five spinning plates on sticks—dizzying if not impossible. When you think you are all alone in this life and you have to do it all by your strength, that’s when your emotions take a downhill turn. But that’s not the way of the Brave. The Brave turn all their anxiety over to God, through prayer, because they know that he not only cares for them but also can handle the impossible (see 1 Pet. 5:7).
The process of moving from fear to bravery through prayer involves what you know about God’s goodness and ability, your sinfulness and inability, and prayer’s purposes and necessity. The purpose of prayer is to get ahold of God, not his answer. The necessity of prayer is not only for your life but also for the lives of those around you. Prayer brings you to admit your inability and to call on his ability, and in doing that it changes you and your problems. Prayer that stays strong and determined in the face of fear and pain is prayer that reminds you of what God has given you. This part of prayer says thank you—and it says thank you for everything, not just the good but the bad as well. The words “thank you” confirm that God is good and that so is what he has let into your life. It brings your mind into alignment with truth instead of doubt and darkness. “Thank” and “you” are two powerful words in the life of prayer.
The Brave thank God for everything (see 1 Thess. 5:18). They are able to do that because of what they know about God. But what they know about God is further reinforced through the prayer of praise. Telling God how amazing he is only reminds your heart of the same. It’s like shining an enormous light on the darkness of your life—it changes everything in its light. As things around you become more clear, so does your sinfulness. The more you see God’s holiness, the more you see your messiness. The Brave don’t let their mess become their downfall, though, but through prayer and confession they let their mess go. They know that if they confess their sins, he is faithful and just to forgive them their sins, and not only that, but to cleanse them of all unrighteousness (see 1 John 1:9). So the Brave confess and in confessing not only get forgiveness but also get a more honest perspective on their lives. Living as if your life isn’t a mess, or as if your mess either isn’t any fault of your own or isn’t far better than what you deserve for how rotten you’ve been, is living a total lie. That lie is what feeds your doubt, your fear, and your worry. But an honest assessment of your failure and God’s glory restores peace and hope, because it takes you off the throne of life and puts him back on.
Prayer thanks, praises, and confesses, and then prayer pleads. But the truth is that truly effective prayer doesn’t plead just for itself. If the believer is consumed with the goodness of God, eventually their most urgent prayer won’t be for self but will be for others. That’s where real change takes place—where you go from scared to brave, from doubt to belief. A prayer that is focused entirely on you is a selfish prayer, and there is no trace of selfishness in the life of Christ. If Christ is living in you, then your prayer will naturally become less about you and more about others. This prayer is the prayer of intercession, and nowhere is it seen more beautifully rewarded than in the life of Job. In a weird twist of irony, Job spent most of the time he was suffering pleading with God to die, to be taken away from his pain, to never have been born, but it wasn’t until he stopped that line of pleading and instead prayed for the lives of his friends that he was set free. Take a look at Job 42:10: “After Job prayed for his friends, the Lord restored Job’s prosperity and gave him twice as much as he had before.” The prayer of intercession draws us out of our little drama and into the story of God’s work here on earth. It takes us away from what troubles us and puts us into a far more active and glorifying role of serving God and others.
The Brave change the subject from self to God and others. When that happens, strength is restored and purpose is found. Wallowing in your own fear and pain produces nothing but more of its kind. But refusing to accuse God and instead deciding to fight for others releases you from the stranglehold on your problems. The Brave are less occupied with what ails them and more occupied with what can be done for others. In this subtle gift of selflessness, freedom is found, and that freedom generates bravery in your life. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul pens these words: “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (1 Cor. 10:24 ESV).
Change the subject. To find the brave in your life, change the subject from you to the Father, from you to others. When you get your eyes off of your problem, it becomes much, much smaller.
The Brave Study
The Brave are not winging it. They aren’t making life up on the fly, but they have a source for knowledge and hope, and that is the Bible. The Brave study God’s Word in order to know the God they love and to understand his ways and his thoughts so those will inform their choices. A little bit of Bible study with a little bit of prayer mixed in will mean death to your spiritual life. A lot of Bible study with a little bit of prayer makes for a sickly life. A lot of prayer with a little bit of Bible study gives you a healthier but inconsistent life. But a lot of Bible study with a lot of prayer makes for a brave life, filled with tremendous health and power. Prayer and Bible study go hand in hand in the life of the Brave.
When God tells you in Ephesians 6 to put on the armor of God, he includes the sword of the Spirit, meaning the Word of God (see v. 17). This weapon is used to cut through the lies of this world and to get us to the truth. Hebrews 4:12–13 talks about God’s Word like this:
God’s word is living and active. It is sharper than any two-edged sword and cuts as deep as the place where soul and spirit meet, the place where joints and marrow meet. God’s word judges a person’s thoughts and intentions. No creature can hide from God. Everything is uncovered and exposed for him to see. We must answer to him.
God’s Word is the weapon of choice in the fight for brave in your life. You have to search for truth, find it, and consume it whole in order for it to sink into your soul and to feed the brave in your life.
Every fear that threatens to hurt you, every doubt that tears you away from belief, all of it can find answers in God’s Word. If you avoid looking into it out of the fear of not finding what you need, you’re feeding the lie that life is too much for you and even God to handle. This way of thinking keeps you in darkness, but opening up the pages of your Bible and letting the Holy Spirit teach you about the Father turns on the lights and reveals places you’ve been tripping over again and again.
The Bible has all you need to heal all your sinful choices and even consequences. When you have an unwanted feeling in your life, a trial, or a problem, it is guaranteed that God’s Word, and not a fortune cookie or palm reader, can soothe it. The Brave don’t search God’s thoughts and man’s, but God’s alone. Even books like this one cannot be your guide but should serve to point you to the only real source of truth, the living and active Word of God.
If you think God’s Word has failed you in the past, maybe it’s time to consider that it wasn’t God’s Word that failed but the mixing of his Word with the word, or the thoughts, of people. First Corinthians 1:20–21 says, “Where is the wise person? Where is the scholar? Where is the persuasive speaker of our time? Hasn’t God turned the wisdom of the world into nonsense? The world with its wisdom was unable to recognize God in terms of his own wisdom.” The Brave find hope in God’s Word alone, and when they are given advice or something to cling to from anyone or anything other than God’s Word, they run it all by the Word to see if it is consistent.
For many, bravery is fleeting or hard to come by, because they follow the ideas of people who don’t base their wisdom on God’s wisdom. They attempt to rise above their difficulties instead of finding God in them. They determine that the battle of life is fought on earth and not in heaven. And they trust their present and their future to the intellect and experiences of other people rather than the truth of God.
If you want brave to become a part of your life, you have to find out what God has said in his Word. Search it, scour it, read it from cover to cover. Ponder it, run through it, rest on it, sleep with it, memorize it, drill it, search it, and know that the more of it you get into you, the more brave you will have.
The Brave Practice Self-Control
Self-control that doesn’t come from the Spirit of God living in you is temporary, fleeting, and offers a form of courage founded in human strength and conviction. But the self-control the Bible speaks of is a gift from God, and therefore it isn’t found in the strength of people. Second Timothy 1:7 confirms that “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (ESV). And in Galatians 5:23, self-control is listed as a fruit that grows from the Spirit. While self-control involves your will, more importantly, it involves the will of the Spirit living in you. That means that up until now, you may have had very little self-control. You might have had a hard time not freaking out when danger comes your way or not breaking down when heartache threatens to tear you up. When bad things happen to you or around you, you might not have a good track record of calm self-control, but that doesn’t mean that with a little knowledge added to your life you can’t get all the self-control you need.
How easy it is to think that self-control is all about “self.” It’s in the word, after all! That’s really not all it’s about, though. Certainly self-control requires something of you, but it might not require as much as you think. The key to self-control is faith. You have to have faith that God has the ability to give you the self-control he promises. All the virtues that make up the fruit of the Spirit grow not out of your own goodness but out of the goodness of the Holy Spirit himself, who takes up residence in you at the time when you accept Christ as your Savior. In order to access the fruit, including self-control, you simply have to call on God himself for the outpouring of his Spirit on your life.
First of all, self-control has to be your desire. You have to agree with God that what you are lacking in the area of courage, confidence, hope, and calm self-control is what you need, and then you have to simply ask him for it. Remember, Jesus said, “If you live in me and what I say lives in you, then ask for anything you want, and it will be yours” (John 15:7). Sound preposterous? Really, what is he, a sugar daddy who gives you whatever you ask for? Perhaps, but with one requirement on that: what you ask has to be consistent with holiness. It has to be for your best, not for your pleasure alone. James 4:3 says the lack of real and sustainable change in your life is because of this: “When you pray for things, you don’t get them because you want them for the wrong reason—for your own pleasure.” There are a lot of things that don’t make their way into your life because of the reasons you want them. But when you pray for obedience or wisdom, the things within God’s perfect will for your life, you can be sure that Jesus’s words ring true: you will get whatever you ask for, because it’s exactly what he’s written that he will give you. See the correlation? Pray for what God has already promised you—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23)—and it will be yours.
Self-control is God’s gift to you, just waiting to be taken, opened up, and put on. It is already yours; you just need to take it. The brave in your life will be fed, sustained, and kept forever through the self-control that God gives to you through his Holy Spirit. In the words of Paul, “practice self-control, and keep your minds clear so that you can pray” (1 Pet. 4:7). Brave will be a part of your life once you accept the self-control given you from the hands of God.
The Brave Sing
Martin Luther said that “music drives away the devil.” Singing has a powerful effect not only on the singer but also on the hearers, and singing songs that worship the Father makes all that is unholy scurry away. In the face of terror, danger, fear, or emotional turmoil, nothing soothes as well as singing of God’s goodness. After being attacked by angry men, while officials looked on and then joined in, Paul and Silas were thrown into a damp, dirty, rat-infested jail cell and chained up in a bloody heap, not knowing what fate would await them at daybreak. Their condition was horrible, their pain unbearable, and their response incredible. Instead of crying in agony or plotting their resistance, they did the unthinkable: they sang songs. Just take a look at the scene in Acts 16:25–26:
Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of praise to God. The other prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly, a violent earthquake shook the foundations of the jail. All the doors immediately flew open, and all the prisoners’ chains came loose.
Did you see that? The danger and pain of being held, chained up, in a first-century prison were overcome not by attorneys or secret late-night breakouts by brave resistance fighters but by singing—by worshiping the God who allowed it all to happen.
This is evidence that in the fight for their lives, the Brave sing. Music has a powerful effect on the human soul, it is true, but when the songs declare the power and the glory of God, when they praise and worship our Creator, the effect is spiritually life changing. There are times in life when the enemy attacks, when the flesh is weak, and when nature takes control, and nothing else can overcome these as well as worship—the act of praising God with song. In fact, in Scripture there are even times, such as when Paul and Silas were in prison, when God literally moves into action upon hearing the songs of his people. In 2 Chronicles 20:21–22, the battle is raging between God’s people and his enemies. In just another great example of how God uses music to fight battles, we read this:
After he [Jehoshaphat] had advised the people, he appointed people to sing to the Lord and praise him for the beauty of his holiness. As they went in front of the troops, they sang, “Thank the Lord because his mercy endures forever!” As they started to sing praises, the Lord set ambushes against the Ammonites, Moabites, and the people of Mount Seir who had come into Judah. They were defeated.
Worship music squeezes out of us the toxic things that aren’t from God, like fear, worry, and doubt. They are all removed on the wings of worship. The Brave know that in times of severe testing and trial, worship is the only cure, because it communicates God’s presence to your soul and to the situation, and it warns the voices that can plague the fearful that God will not be abandoned or forgotten but is to be relied on and worshiped. And nothing makes the enemy more angry than a child of God who worships.
What makes the Brave different from the rest of the world is the God they worship. His power, his presence, and his Spirit inside them give them all the power and self-control they need to withstand any testing or trial. The Brave are really weak and scared people who refuse to let that be the end of the story but insist it is only the beginning. The Brave distinguish themselves best by their faith. They have a faith that is secure and will not be moved by the rising tide or the crumbling of mountains. The Brave don’t see through purely physical eyes but through spiritual eyes, recognizing that in everything in their lives the hand of God is active and gracious, compassionate and sure. They bank their lives on his goodness and grace, knowing that nothing can separate them from his love—not death or life, not angels or rulers, nothing in the present or in the future, not forces or powers in the world above or in the world below—nothing in all creation can separate them from God’s love (see Rom. 8:38–39). Of this they are sure, and so they can be a part of the brave few who stand when trials come, who smile when pain hits, who pray when doubt creeps in, and who worship when life threatens to destroy.
The Brave are the few who have the courage to believe and not doubt, even when their flesh screams otherwise, and because of that the Brave are blessed. They are given all they need for any situation they are in, living in peace and contentment with nothing but the Father above and his Spirit within.