Be Valiant

"When Christ calls a man, He bids him to come and die. The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world." – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. When we as men are young, we have an eagerness to prove ourselves. The sense of wonder, the hunger for an adventure, whether said adventure is in the wild or on a sports team, we hunger to be the best. We hunger to be dangerous. John Eldridge does an amazing job speaking about this in his book, Wild at Heart, he reveals the truth of every boy’s hunger for a battle to fight, a dragon to slay, and a beauty to rescue. Furthermore, he explains that this hunger is not just in the heart of young boys but also is in the heart of men and often lies docile. The reason the hunger is tamed, or rather locked away, is found in the influence of society and culture. Young boys don’t have the same fear adults do, often acting on impulse rather than understanding. As they become older, they are taught to fear things to keep them safe, often forsaking paths they are supposed to take because they appear too treacherous, and seek a safer path that may lead them far from their destination. My youngest brother, Miles, who is five years old, soon to be six, is a prime example of this reality. When he was a little over a year old to two years old, I would place his chest in the palm of my hand and lift him from the ground and to the ceiling high as I could over my head and then lower him back to the ground only to repeat said action. The little guy loved it, he would laugh and giggle the whole time. But then something changed, at three years old he fell from a somewhat high place and was taught about the dangers of falling. This is not a bad lesson to learn on its own as it keeps children from being seriously injured or worse. However, he was not taught to remember the times he didn’t fall, he was never taught to trust in what he knew already: his big brother, Bobo (the name my siblings have for me), had never dropped him. Because he was not taught to remember this, next time I came over and went to lift him off the ground as I had before, he panicked, and I nearly dropped him. That experience of Miles caused him to lose trust in me, even though I had not been the one to show him that he could not keep the faith he had had since before he could talk. For two more years I had to fight to get that trust back from him. Two years of effort for a faith that was so freely given the first time, it was heart breaking when it was taken away. What if I were to tell you that there is something in your life that you are deathly afraid of that you used to love? Furthermore, because of that fear, you won’t even trust someone who has never let you down when you are faced with it, and that fear owns you and hurts relationships. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a devout theologian who had stood toe to toe with the Nazi regime and even took part in trying to rid the world of Hitler with an assassination attempt that failed and lead to Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment and execution. During that time, he wrote The Cost of Discipleship, so that his church members and everyone else who read it would understand why he felt it necessary to stand. In the excerpt from The Cost of Discipleship quoted at the beginning of this piece, we an see two things about the character of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: he loved/pursued God with purpose and he was a man that understood the importance of being valiant despite what anyone or anything told him. Bonhoeffer knew that there was a risk to pursuing God, and if one were to pursue with everything they had, it would lead to certain death as that is what is expected. This death does not just mean your life, it could mean a career, a relationship, it could even mean the death of your reputation. The world we live in abhors the ways of the Lord and often works against His Word to fill a need for convenience or comfort. Just as it was convenient for the Nazi Regime to treat Jews like animals so that they could slaughter them or anyone who helped them as a butcher would slaughter cattle, we face similar destruction in today’s age. The victims are not a people of a certain belief system or genealogy, but they are innocent; so innocent in fact that they never even get the chance to act in a criminal fashion. The convenience I speak of is self and complacency, the victims are the unborn who are murdered in the womb. There is a question we must all ask ourselves when faced with this reality, are we going to become complacent ourselves or are we going to be valiant and stand for what is right? Speaking against this cultural abomination within our society is asking for certain death. You will be ridiculed, outcast, called a bigot, sexist, and uneducated. All this hate and judgment is fueled by an ideology of tolerance; just as the Nazi Regime had silenced the Church against speaking out, so has the culture of abortion. However, the culture is not the one who holds the muzzle, but it is the Church themselves, we are just too afraid to admit it to ourselves, because if we admit it then we must do something about it. Isaiah 1:16-17 ESV “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before My eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppressions, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widows cause.” Now that you have read it, what are you going to do about it? Every Christ follower is called to stand for truth, it is time for us as men of God to stop waiting for someone else to stand, it is time for us to make the stand. Someone has to, why not you? Why not us? Maybe there is some other injustice you see, some other widow that needs to be plead for, some other fatherless child that needs justice. I am not going to lie to you, the path will not be safe, there will be a lot of anger, hate, and oppression. Are you going to be valiant or is the fear going to take root? Are you willing to risk the danger in order to be dangerous? Where will you stand?

**Originally posted on 1/7/2021 to our old page; uploaded again now for rebranding purposes.