Have you ever heard any of these statements?: “Religion is for weak people” or “God is a crutch for spineless wimps” or “Christianity is for cowards.”Whenever I hear that I laugh. The absurdity of that statement. It is ludicrous. It is a statement of ignorance. The fact is it takes enormous courage to just become a Christian. In the first place you have to own up to your sin. “God, You’re right, I’m wrong.” In the second place, you have to repent. That takes courage. “God, I’m going to go Your way not mine.” And in the third place, you have to commit your life totally to Christ and say “I’m going to follow You from here on out.” That takes courage. Then it takes courage just to follow Christ when it’s unpopular, to follow Christ when it’s inconvenient, to follow Christ when you don’t understand it. It takes courage to obey Christ when it doesn’t make sense and everybody’s going the other way. It takes courage to be ethical in the market place. It takes courage to have honesty even when it costs you personally. It takes courage to minister. It takes courage to share your faith with an unbeliever. It takes courage to tithe. It takes courage to remain sexually pure in this sex obsessed society. It takes courage to own up to your sin and stand up for what’s right and to speak up for Jesus Christ. And anybody who does that has more courage in their pinkie than a critic has in his entire body. Agnostics don’t even have enough courage to make up their minds. “Maybe there is a God, maybe not.” Get some spine! What a jellyfish statement! If you don’t know you’d better figure it out because eternal implications are in the balance.
[callout]The fact is, most people are moral cowards. [/callout] “What’s right for you may not be right for me…. I might think it’s wrong but I don’t want to judge you.” That’s moral cowardice. It takes no courage to blend in with culture. Cowards follow the crowds. The Courageous follow Christ. When I hear people say it takes no courage to be a spiritual person, to follow Christ, I want to say, “Let me just take you on a trip around the world.” The media doesn’t talk about this. But the fact is, even today, millions of people will be tortured, imprisoned, even lose their lives because they name the name of Christ and they stand up for their faith. That takes courage. In countries like China and in Muslim countries it’s a capital crime to be a Christian yet people continue to stand up. Then you take the Bible and you look at the statements of Jesus Christ and they are the most challenging statements you will ever see. Statements like, “Give your life away in order to find it.”. Like, “When the enemy hurts you, you pray for him and do good for him.”, “Turn the other cheek and go the second mile.” Is that easy? Jesus says things like, “Take up your cross and follow Me.” In those days nobody was going to take up a cross unless the Romans were going to nail them to it. It was a death sentence to be a Christian. Cowards do not last in the Christian life. They wimp out.
Do you have enough courage to step across the line? Do you have enough courage to publicly profess your faith in Christ first by being baptized and then standing up in your office, taking a Bible, laying it on your desk and letting people know where you stand and when you see something wrong you say it’s not right. You don’t say it in judgment, you say it in love but you tell the truth. Do you have the courage to do that?
Jesus said this, “If anyone is ashamed of Me and My words, the Son of man will be ashamed of him when He comes in His glory.” When Jesus comes back, is He going to be ashamed of your cowardice, that you knew the right thing but you didn’t speak up, you knew Christ but you didn’t tell anybody? Who’s going to be in heaven because of you?
