Boldness instead of safety

Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.
- Acts 4:29

This Sunday, we looked at how the early church – when faced with persecution – prayed for boldness rather than safety. They wanted to stand up for God and reach out to their neighbors. And, by God’s grace, they did.

When we pray for boldness or patience or love, we sometimes imagine that God will give us these virtues via a virtual download. But that rarely happens.

God forms us and shapes us and makes us bold-patient-loving in the midst of our day-to-day lives. He specializes in on-the-job training. He gives us our virtues in the arena’s where we’re going to need them.

In the passage that we’re going to look at this week, God isn’t going to answer this prayer request by spiriting them away to a cloud city to teach them boldness. He will answer their prayer for boldness by giving them boldness in the street and in the court and in jail.

He does the same with us. He sends us into tough situations so we can learn to show love. He allows us to remain in trying circumstances so we can learn to demonstrate patience. He leads us into scary situations so we can become bold. And in all this, he is with us to form us and shape us into the people who can demonstrate his great faithfulness to the world.

Take a few moments today to do a self-inventory: what virtues have you been asking God to give to you? How are you expecting those to be given to you? Where have you been disappointed because you God hasn’t just downloaded those virtues into you? What has he been doing (or not doing) instead?

 

Leave a Comment

Comments for this post have been disabled.