Courage

Hi, this is Roy Jones with ManTalk Radio Podcast. Our mission is to break down the walls of race and denomination. Your chosen Truth Radio Broadcast will be starting in just a few seconds.

Thank you. Start while trying to find the good way when life feels more like a losing battle than something worth dying for. Grab your gear and come on a quest with your band of brothers who will serve as the guides in what we call the Masculine Journey. The Masculine Journey starts here now. Welcome to Masculine Journey. We're glad that you're with us this week. It's very courageous of you to be with us this week and every week. You know, you never know where we're going to go, do they Andy?

No, never. Never know where we're going to go, so how can they know where we're going to go? We're supposed to be charting the course, but I'm not sure. Well, we do have a course, but we follow the wild goose. We do. And when you follow the wild goose, you kind of go where the wild goose goes.

You have courage to do so. Yeah, we're not on a wild goose chase. Well, we are on a wild goose chase, actually.

Yeah, we are. Anyway, if you're not sure what that means, it's an old Irish saying, chasing the wild goose, which means falling after the Holy Spirit. That's really where that came from before they made it a real negative thing. You know, but that tends to be anything that's positive with God, the world makes into a negative thing sometimes along the way. But that's not our topic for today, is it, Andy?

What is our topic for today? Well, it kind of is, you know, whenever you talk about being led by the Holy Spirit, when God – whenever the children of Israel and Moses died and they were coming into the Promised Land, Joshua took over. And we know, probably heard in Joshua 1, God really – I mean, he really comes after Joshua of encouraging him and tells him to stand up and be strong and have courage. But he doesn't tell him to do it by himself.

He says he'll be with him during all this. I mean, he tells him three times, verse – be strong and courageous, for you shall give this people possession of the land, which I swore to their fathers to give them, only be strong and very courageous. Be careful to do according to all law, which Moses my servant commanded you.

Then he goes on to verse 9 and – where is verse 9? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified nor dismayed. And as men, we know fear came into our lives or it came in through the fall. And God has been fighting that fear in all of our lives all through. And I think courage is a reflection of a heart that's not been restored.

There's not a lot of trust there. We don't know that we can follow and trust God into taking anything that we want from life and get – that we receive through our heart has to be fought for and we have to have courage to do it. Also, like I've been thinking about the idea – this idea of encourage. Well, that – courage is contagious. And I think as men sometimes – I mean, as much as I've walked into courage, I still have a long way to go.

I still have plenty of fears, things that I will not engage in. But whenever I get encouragement from my brothers, when I'm able to encourage somebody else, that is saying I'm taking my courage and putting it into you. I'm putting my confidence in you through my affirmation of words to let you know that you got what it takes with God. Yeah, I believe in you. You got this kind of thing. There are a couple of quotes over the last couple of weeks that's kind of surfaced a few times.

There's one that I didn't know who did it until someone sent it to me the other day. Zig Ziglar is the one that actually said it first, I believe, but it says, Fear is the dark room where negatives are developed. And so I want you to really think about that for a minute, because when you live in your fear, all those negative things surface and it gives them life. It gives them hope.

Whatever we focus on, we feed. And so we can either focus on our fears, which we can't really do anything about except give to God, or we can focus on courage. Right.

And walk with him. And then the other quote that I had, which I thought was good, I sent it to Andy the other day. It's from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It says, Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. That's it. Right. And I think those are the important things to think about that as you're facing fear is if I feed the fear, you know where that's going to go. Right. And so what is more important to me than the fear? Right. And walking in it. And that was that whole thing of, okay, I want something out of life.

God puts these desires in me, but if I'm fearful to not go after him and not believe that he's going to be there with me to accomplish or obtain these things, of stepping into relationships and not fearing or running from those, there's so many things we can be fearful in this life. Right. Absolutely. Are you ready for our first clip? Sure.

Go for it. Okay. So this is from The Wizard of Oz, and this happens to be my clip. And no, I didn't pick it to go first. I know there's lots of weeks that I do. I'm so conditioned to it. I chose you because, you know, it only makes sense.

Yeah, it only makes sense that mine goes first. Yeah. So this is from The Wizard of Oz. But I want you to listen.

It's three different clips through the movie. But if you've listened to The Mask on Journey Long, you realize that we talk about this thing called agreements. And once you make an agreement, it gives the enemy access to your life. Right.

It gives him a way to come in and mess around with you. And so what we hear at the beginning of this clip is they're off to see the wizard. You know, they're on the Elbrick Road. You guys have hopefully probably seen the movie.

If I'm ruining it for you, it's been around for lots of years, man. Come on, really. But they're on their way to see the wizard, and they come across a cowardly lion. At this point, they don't know he's a cowardly lion.

He's not accepted that title. He does in this clip. But what you have is you have him kind of picking on, posing, acting like he's more than he is to the Tin Man and the Scarecrow, and eventually goes after Toto, which Dorothy doesn't handle very well. And she smacks him in the nose. And so that's the first part of the clip. And so he makes this agreement that I'm a coward. And you're going to hear him say that. And then he does this little song in which he lives in this agreement that, hey, I'm the cowardly lion.

And then eventually he runs into the wizard, which helps break him of that. And so let's listen to this, and we'll come back and talk about it. Put him up. Put him up. Which one of you are first? I'll fight you both together if you want. I'll fight you with one poor tie behind the back. I'll fight you standing on one foot.

I'll fight you with my eyes closed. Shame on you. What did you do that for? I didn't buy them. No, but you tried to. It's bad enough picking on a straw man, but when you go around picking on poor little dogs. Well, you didn't have to go and hit me, did you?

Is my nose bleeding? Well, of course not. My goodness, what a fuss you're making. Well, imagine when you go around picking on things weaker than you are. Why, you're nothing but a great big coward.

You're right. I am a coward. Courage. What makes a king out of a slave? Courage.

What makes the flag on the mass to wave? Courage. What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist or the dusky dusk? What makes the musk rat guard his musk? Courage. What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage.

What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage. What makes the hot and tart so hot?

What puts the ape in apricots? What do they got that I ain't got? Courage. You could say that again. As for you, my fine friend, you're a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom. Back where I come from, there we have men who are called heroes.

Once a year they take their fortitude out of mothballs and parade it down the main street of the city. And they have no more courage than you have. But they have one thing that you haven't got. And so what the wizard is going on to tell him is a medal. And so what the wizard does is he gives him a medal when actually the best thing he gave him was a little bit of wisdom there to say, hey, understand your courage. But he's right.

The wizard's absolutely right. What he's missing here is God. He's missing God to lead him in it. You know, and you've heard me talk about this on the air, but where this really took my heart was I don't have a lot of courage. Naturally, I doubt myself a lot. There's a lot of times that I don't like conflict. I mean, I'll be quick to fight sometimes, but at the core I don't really like conflict a whole lot. If I don't have to have it, I'm okay. And there comes a point that I'm going to fight.

It's going to happen. But really what's helped me with it and with this courage, it hasn't been the fighting thing. It's been stepping into difficult situations. Having conversations with family or friends or people you don't really want to have. To me, those are the hard courage things to step into. I don't really like those situations. And some people do well in those. I can do them.

I don't like them. And you've heard me talk about on here when God helped me with that when I had to tell my mom about molestation stuff as a kid and I didn't want to do it. And God told me very clearly, you own obedience. I own the outcome. That's really helped me be courageous in those things because when I know it's clearly God telling me, I'm like, look, I don't own the outcome anyway, God. You do.

I just got to go do what you asked me to do. And it's a lot easier for me to have courage because at the end of the day I don't own any of that. I think a lot of times I don't want to step in or men don't want to step in because they feel like they own the outcome.

I own where that's going to land and I don't know where it's going to land and that scares me. Because there's no certainty to it. We don't have to be courageous on things we're certain on. It's only the uncertainty that makes you have to be courageous. But when God owns the certainty of how that situation works out, for me anyway, it becomes a lot easier to be courageous.

Because I'm just doing what he's asked me to do. Everything else is up to him anyway. That's the exact point that Joshua 1 was making. God, I mean, could Joshua really have a vision for taking the land and going in and defeating all the cities and taking the land? He had no concept.

Only God knew what was there. But he obeyed him and then they saw the fruit of that. And is there anything that can build up your courage more than your father saying you can do it? I mean, he was hiding when God came and called him courageous. But he convinced him and ultimately he was.

Yeah, more to that story. As times, even when God says I own the outcome, there's times when I go, well, what if they get mad? Or what if they don't ever talk to me again? Or what if, what if, what if, right?

Which is all from the enemy anyway, right? And what God just really said is maybe I need them mad. Maybe I need them at that place so I can reach them. I know what I'm doing here. I just need you to go do what I ask you to do, right? And again, that became very freeing for me because at the end of the day, yeah, I may have some relationships that are rocky and I don't know for how long. But if God's leading me in it, he knows for how long and it's going to come around when it should come around if it does come back around. And maybe that's a relationship that didn't need to be there long term, that I thought I needed and he know I didn't.

And so I just got to lean into him and say, okay, this is you. That's the important part too. You can also get caught up in the feeling like you could always, you should always be stepping into everything.

And that's not the case. I think that was a part in the clip about wisdom. You definitely have to have some wisdom. It's not, he doesn't call you to step into everything to have courage in everything, but you don't take everything on at a particular time.

There's timing involved and that kind of thing. That's another thing that I struggled with is stepping into courage. You get a little confidence in it and then you do like the Israelites do. You went off and did your own thing without asking, should we go to battle?

So that's another something to watch out for. Well, you can go back and look at the story you've shared on here many times about David. David had courage, but he didn't do it without asking God when and where and how.

Yes, we're called to have courage, but we can't miss the peace of asking God in the midst of it. Go to masculinejourney.org. We do have a boot camp coming up the weekend before Thanksgiving in November, masculinejourney.org. What we have at our boot camp is something that makes you stronger and gives you the strength to go on your regular walk with God.

It's something that will make you be bigger than you were when you got there. What brings you here this weekend? So I met Robby and he invited me to come to the boot camp and there was just so many doors that were closed before I was able to come here, but God allowed these things to happen. And I said, you know, God, I'm going to I'm going to ultimately acknowledge what's going on for all these doors to be open for me to come to this camp.

I just want to see you. So throughout that time, since I've been here, you know, just the illumination of God speaking to me through my heart, through my mind, through my soul is just it's went to a whole nother level since I've been here at the boot camp. The covenant of silence after the talks and being able to go out and just submit myself to being able to hear from God and what we've been working on. And it's just been transparent in my life, the level of the sanctification process, the discipleship process. And coming here, I feel like this is exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Register today at masculinejourney.org. This is our resolution, our answer to the call. We will love our wives and children. We refuse to let them fall. We will reignite the passion that we bury deep inside. May the watchers become warriors, let the men of God arise. We will make them be courageous and we'll take them back.

Andy, that was your bump. So that's Casting Crowns and they did it for the movie Courageous and it's a movie about men, I think police. Firemen.

Firemen, okay. They were stepping into being that leader in their family and they had kind of abandoned their role in that place. And this whole courage thing, it's a variety of things. It's stepping into culture. It's stepping into our job and being a leader there. Families, obviously. Ministry.

There's just so many places. But in this movie, they're really talking about stepping in here, be the husbands and the fathers that we were intended to be. One of the parts I liked about it was where it talked about instead of being watchers, we become warriors and I think that's what we do a lot is become watchers.

We turn into that passive man that Adam was when it got him in so much trouble. Thank you. Jim, you actually have the next clip, so you want to tell us a little bit about it? This clip was almost the opposite. I was going to use the word antithesis, but we're trying to not use those words.

You're trying to dumb it down for me is what you're saying. Thank you, Jim. I appreciate that. It was almost the antithesis of what I wanted to talk about because I think sometimes we make it, oh, you've got to be a man to be in a fight.

And where I ended up going was probably one of the roughest movies to watch for Men in a Fight. I mean, there's a few others that are comparable, but you'll hear very early in this clip the word broken arrow said multiple times. And this men's group here uses that and sends it out and the response is almost as overwhelming sometimes as this. But if there's a prayer need that's really an emergency, we'll open that up with broken arrow. This is in Vietnam. This is a large unit that's been overrun by a lot of Vietcong and they have to call in the broken arrow. And we're going to talk about it after we get to the end. So do you want to define what a broken arrow is? Well, it is.

Or do you do it in here? They do it almost immediately, so we got it. All right, here we go. Broken arrow, broken arrow. Confirmed broken arrow. Broken arrow. That means that an American has been overrun, causing every combat aircraft for support.

There's no hiding it now. We have placed up every thousand feet from 35,000. Get up, sir. Zero three one five degrees. And you keep them coming in.

You're doing well, son. The weird sound and the largest explosions at the end were when the radio operator called in the strike too close and they watched their men being burned to death because this was a napalm. And that reminded me of something that it's been around for over a thousand years. It's when men first go into combat. And the colonel is cool, calm, collected. He's, well, it's Mel Gibson, we'd all want to follow him into combat. But the radio operator, while he's experienced, this is him seeing the elephant.

It's an old expression for really being put into the place. And all of us are sooner or later, different situations. It's not just combat, but we're put in a place where we're overwhelmed.

And we either recover from that or that is a problem we have the rest of our lives. And I am a big guy. Once upon a time I was strong, but now I'm getting old and the muscles don't work like they did. But I was a extreme pacifist. And in junior high school, you didn't want to be a pacifist. But I did not like to get in fights. And I learned pretty early that as the big guy, you're either the big bully who beat up the little guy, or you're the big guy that got beat up by the little guy.

Which is even worse, because that sends everybody after you. And it came down to the point of my elephant was being put in a position, and I've had some rough times, but I always thought I was a good guy. And when I was a police officer in Charleston at mid-20s and probably as tough as I've been in my life, I struggled with using lethal force, which could be part of the job. And I was thinking, I really can't do that, I don't think. I'm this good guy.

I grew up in the church. I don't want to kill. Until I was put in a situation to do that. And I was ready to shoot an unarmed kid in the back because of what, a series of circumstances I won't share, unless you really want to know, then you can send the email to me on there. But this was a breaking point for me, and it was where I realized I'm not the good guy I thought I was. I'm capable of extreme evil.

And that is where I had to start turning to God for guidance. Yeah, I was just going to jump in that, you know, that broken arrow idea is you're calling in munitions on your own position. In other words, the enemy has overrun you, and so the idea is to kill the enemy, and the only chance they actually had was every available aircraft coming in on that position at that particular moment. Which is a phenomenal thing, and I think duplicated in our prayer requests, because you're talking about an airstrike. So if you've got every available guy that gets that text and it says broken arrow, and if you're in this group, you can just count on the fact that you see that, and you know that the enemy has overrun this guy's position, and so you're going to call in munitions on that position.

And it's just like that airstrike, just like what you're describing with the elephant, and I think it's an absolutely beautiful spiritual truth that manifests in the whole idea. Your strength, your bravery comes through recognizing it isn't yours, and that was my ultimate point, and Andy made it well, too. When you realize you have to rely on God when you have your broken arrow, or even day-to-day, the outcome is His, as you put beautifully, and if you take nothing else out of this, that's the thing to learn. One of the most difficult things God's asked me to do yet was talk to a crying gay man at an elevator who was all alone. And I said, well, I didn't say no, I just started walking off, and God said, go back and talk to him. What ended up not being a big deal, and I don't know what the outcome was for him, but he was being bullied, and I was sent by God to talk to him. I told him, no, you don't deserve that, but we often get what we don't deserve, and you have to deal with it as best you can. I said, not much of a conversation, but the obedience was the important part. Yeah, and you had lived through that, right?

I mean, honestly, right? Yeah, not quite the same thing. Well, no, no, no, I didn't mean the full thing, but you lived through being bullied is what I meant on that.

God puts us in situations where He can take what we perceive to be a weakness and turn it into an opportunity to show His love and show strength to another. That movie was We Were Soldiers. I don't know if you said that when we were talking about that.

I did not. It's a very, very tough movie to watch. Honestly, it's one of the movies that I had to force myself not to close my eyes because it's so brutal, and the only reason, and this sounds really weird, but if I can't sit there and watch it, how can I understand at any level what people went through? If I can't even bring myself to watch it, I have no concept already, but at least I could do is watch a representation of what they had to see live.

That's the least I can do, and if it makes me squeamish, it makes my stomach hurt, it makes all those things. For me, it's important to do that because it makes the respect even more, and the gratefulness that I didn't have to live through it. Yeah, and some of the hardest things to watch in there, too, is not only the battle scenes, but also when you'd have the guys killed and they would come back and tell the family.

That tore me up. Just the wives finding out, that was just brutal, but it is a good film and a true story. And you get to see the strength of leadership in Mel Gibson and in the person that plays Mel Gibson's wife. When she says, no, I'm going to be the one to go tell the families what happened, oh man, yeah, very much courage. And in this movie, Faith, they were both from a faith background, and so that courage came from up above.

Yeah, so we're going to be wrapping up this on the regular show. Andy, anything else you want to leave them with on courage before we wrap up the show? This isn't the most positive message, but God is serious about being courageous and following him and trusting him. Revelation 21, 8, it has a list of sins that's going to get you in a bad place, and being a coward is one of those. He wants people to dare to trust him and to believe him and to follow him and to not pull back when that feels like the right thing to do. He wants us to step into things. So lean into God, say God, I don't know what scares me here, but how can I walk through this with you? Give me the next step.

I may not be five steps down the road yet, but give me the next step. Right, because God's not calling you a coward, that's the enemy. Right, and he's wanting you to live in that and to accept that as a label. God calls you something deeper, more true, and lean into him and walk with him through it. Go love somebody well this week. Go to masculinejourney.org. We'll talk with you next time.