Courageous Faith - Faith Is Courage In Motion Part 1, Pastor Joël Malm

Courageous Faith Week 1 – Standing Strong

Key Point: Life doesn’t get easier. We have to get stronger.

Ephesians 6:10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

God’s infinite power is revealed most clearly in our finite weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:8-10 Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Strength is built incrementally.

Romans 5:2-5 …and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Proverbs 24:10 If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.

“Souls are like wax waiting for a seal. By themselves they have no special identity. Their destiny is to be softened and prepared in this life, by God's will, to receive, at their death, the seal of their own degree of likeness to God in Christ…”

“Therefore if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire as if your true identity were to be hard wax, the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you. You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment.”

• Thomas Merton