Courage - Summer in the Psalms - Sermons - Josh Navey - 6.28.26

**Josh Navey** (0:05)
Morning, is that Josh?
All right, what's up, Storyline? My name is Josh, and I'm one of the pastors here. And it is my joy to get to be with you today as we continue our summer in the Psalms. If you're here because your kid was here at kids camp, I just want to say we're honored that you would spend your Sunday morning with us. I also want to say if you heard Lake Story, we don't make the habit of picking kids up in vans, all right? And we made sure there was no candy involved, all right? But seriously, I love that story because it shows the generosity of who we are as a church family and trying to get as many people to hear the love of Jesus as possible. As we're moving forward in our Psalms series, we're thinking about our feelings. We're talking about our emotions and how every part of life is to be lived corum deo, or before the face of God. In the presence of God, we bring everything in our life. We've gone through delight and lament. We've hit joy and love. And today we're gonna be in Psalm 112, and we're gonna be talking about courage. If you're not familiar with your Bible, there's one in front of you in the seat back there, and you can kinda just let it fall open to the middle, and that'll be the Book of Psalms. We'd love for you to turn with us and to read along with us in Psalm 112
Most likely the same author wrote Psalm 111 and Psalm 112 The reason that we know this is they're kinda uniquely tied together by being alphabet acronyms. You can't quite see it in the English translation, but in the Hebrew, every line begins with the next letter of the alphabet in both of these Psalms. A very artistic psalm and a prayer to God. Psalm 111 focuses more on the praises of the righteous person. So what comes out of the mouth of someone who loves and follows God? Psalm 112, as the sister psalm, is more about the life lived of the righteous person. So Psalm 111, more about what the righteous person says. Psalm 112, more about how that practically plays out in the way that you live your life. So we're gonna read through Psalm 112, and then we're gonna take a few minutes and walk through it together. But let's look here at the author's explanation of a righteous life and how courage is hiding in plain sight here for us in these 10 verses. Look at me in verse one. Hallelujah. This is kind of a carryover from Psalm 111 at this point. More praise. Hallelujah. Happy is the person who fears the Lord. Taking great delight in his commands. His descendants will be powerful in the land. The generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in his house and his righteousness endures forever. Light shines in the darkness for the upright. He is gracious, compassionate and righteous. Good will come to the one who lends generously and conducts his business fairly. He will never be shaken. The righteous one will be remembered forever. He won't fear bad news. His heart is confident, trusting in the Lord. His heart is assured he will not fear. In the end, he will look in triumph on his foes. He distributes freely to the poor. His righteousness endures forever. His horn will be exalted in honor. The wicked one will see it and be angry. He will gnash his teeth in despair, because the desire of the wicked leads to ruin. In these few verses, we're going to see three marks of a courageous life. The three I'm going to share with you up front, and then we'll spend the rest of our time working through them. So if you're taking notes, write all three of them down, but leave a little space in between each one as we work through it. The righteous life fears the Lord. The righteous life faces the darkness. And then finally, we're going to see here in Psalm 112, how the righteous, the courageous life follows in faith. First is fear the Lord. The first mark of a courageous life shows up here in verse one, where the author says, Hallelujah, happy is the person who fears the Lord. Now, some of you in this room, you've heard a sermon on courage and you've already pulled out your phone and started scrolling because you're like, this one's not for me. And I want to bring you back in for a second, because even though you think I'm scared of everything and I kind of like it like that, I like putting the brakes whenever anybody's pulling funny ideas. I want you to know courage doesn't mean that you're never going to be afraid. The question is, how can we move past our fear so it doesn't control us? Every single person in this room can live a life of courage. And it begins by replacing what you are afraid of with the fear of the Lord. We're not looking to eliminate fear, we're looking to replace it. And one of the reasons I think this is so important, especially for my Storyline family in here, is because I know some of you are living a dulled down, kind of feeble Christianity. You live in a life that doesn't have joy, it doesn't have power, it doesn't have passion or purpose. And I want to guarantee you, if that's true, you're also living a life without courage. You've been so defeated by your fears that you aren't living the good life in Jesus, you're living the scared life without Him. We talk about discipleship under Jesus in this way, learning that the good life is in Jesus. Well, a life without courage is a life without Jesus. Now, again, you might be saying, Josh, that's a little harsh, but I get it. We should have courage, that's a good thing to have in life, but how can I get to be courageous? Can I even get it? Is it just something that you're born with? And I want you to know, by the grace of God, I believe every one of us can grow in our courage. And let's start by thinking about the definition of courage, making sure we're all on the same page there. Courage is pushing through fear by the power of a greater love. This is what courage is in the life of a disciple and a life of anyone, pushing through fear by the power of a greater love. Courage isn't talking yourself out of fears. Like you just have to tell yourself, don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Courage isn't about becoming so calloused in life or so hardened that you just don't have fears anymore. In fact, I think courage requires fear. If there's no fear, then there's no courage. Some of the people that come to your mind most when you think about courage are people that experienced a great amount of fear. Someone like a William Wallace fighting for freedom, right? There's a lot to be afraid of there. Or somebody like the New York City Police Department or Fire Department on 9-11. That was an example of courage. And there's a lot to be feared in that situation. This would be a way that you could think about it. It does not require courage to take a Sunday afternoon nap, right? Unless you were supposed to be doing chores, I have found. And then, much courage to you, my brother.