Fear Not: Courage for the Journey (Joshua 1:1–9) - Sermon 7th December 2025

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Bible reading this morning is from Joshua chapter 1, verse 1 to 9.

Joshua 1:1–9

After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua,

son of Nun, Moses' aid, Moses, my servant is dead.

Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into

the land I'm about to give them, to the Israelites.

I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.

Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon and from the great river,

the Euphrates, all the Hittite country, to the Mediterranean Sea in the west.

No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life.

As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you.

Be strong and courageous, because I will lead these people to inherit the land

I swore to their ancestors to give to them.

Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you.

Do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.

Keep this book of law always on your lips. Meditate on it day and night,

so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.

Then you'll be prosperous and successful.

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged.

For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

I visit Canberra quite a number of times for various reasons,

and my wife is actually in Canberra this morning. The fact that she's not here

is not because I'm preaching.

Oh, it might be. But she's down at a granddaughter's concert,

a dance concert, which she loves. And my granddaughter loves.

But me, not quite.

But never mind. Back to Canberra. One of the things I used to love doing in

Canberra was visiting the War Memorial.

And one of my favourite parts of the War Memorial was the Victoria Cross Gallery.

Very moving, if you've ever been there.

It's really a display of all those who have won the Victoria Cross,

which is, of course, the ultimate medal for valour and courage.

And I want to look this morning at the whole issue of courage,

and that's what I want to talk about.

Courage. That word was mentioned so often in the reading that Jordan brought to us, the word courage.

You see, we need courage because the world can throw a lot at us.

You and I have lived long enough to know that following Jesus is no walk in

the park. It's hard stuff.

And for those of you who are younger in the walk with Jesus,

thinking that it's going to get easier, it gets older, no, sorry,

it doesn't always get easier.

Because the world throws a lot at

us. Little wonder that the most common command in the Bible is fear not.

And from that, we grasp three things. One is that fear is common.

If you're ever afraid, we'll join the club. Fear is common.

Second, that God must understand the fact that we are fearful.

And there's an implication that help is available in those times of fear.

So it's in that context that I want to explore what courage is and how we can experience it.

And I'm giving you a potted one-sentence definition of courage.

Courage is having the strength and the will to do what needs to be done.

Having the strength and the will to do what needs to be done.

Noah showed courage when he built an ark in the middle of the desert.

Moses showed courage when he confronted Pharaoh.

David showed courage when he confronted Goliath.

In more recent times, we see examples of courage. You may not have heard of

a little black girl called Ruby Bridges.

Ruby Bridges was brought up in the southern part of the United States in the 1950s.

Then the Supreme Court said, you've got to integrate the schools.

In other words, blacks can join whites in schools.

Ruby Bridges was the first one to actually do that.

And she came to an integrated school day after day in the face of hostile whites

who swore and spit at her and who many of them were devout churchgoers.

Ponder that sometime. But anyway, little Ruby Bridges used to come every day

to school to show courage.

Other children in sub-Sahara Africa ever thought how much courage they have

to have To go to school wondering if this is the day that terrorists are going

to abduct them? That's courage.

But courage takes less public expressions. The husband who cares for his wife has dementia.

The mother who advocates for her disabled child.

The woman in the aged care centre who queues for lunch, not knowing if this

is the day that her incontinence will display itself.

Or the man going for job interview after job interview, wondering at the futility

of it all but keeping on going. Courage.

All those things show courage. So courage is not muscle flexing,

not confined to weapon-wielding soldiers, not confined to first responders in

emergency situations, though they do show courage.

But courage has many quieter, more subtle, more mundane forms.

Now, I've mentioned the existence of fear. It is a big mistake to think that

courage is absence of fear.

In fact, if there's no fear, there's no courage.

Courage is meaningless if there's no threat.

You see, courage is facing the existing fear and resolving not to let it stop

doing what needs to be done.

For example, it's a strange example here, but it doesn't take courage for me to be preaching here.

Maybe I should be fearful, but I'm not.

I'm not. I preach lots of sermons, and you seem friendly.

There's no stones or rotten fruit in your possession.

I'm not afraid to preach here. Might be nervous, but I'm not afraid.

Interestingly, my father, who served in the Second World War and was a prisoner

of war at that time, showed great courage in war.

But when he had to make a speech at my sister's wedding, oh,

how many whiskeys did he have to imbibe before he could actually get up and

have the courage to speak?

So some people can show courage in one respect and others in another respect.

In a much younger time, my then

employer, Qantas Airways, sent me to an outward-bound leadership course.

They reckoned it would make a man out of me. Well, it didn't, but anyway.

They sent me on an outward-bound leadership course. And you see,

in that course, there were a few things, challenges we had.

I was asked to give a talk in the evening to the rest of the group.

That didn't have much courage from there. I didn't show courage because I did

a bit of that in the school debating team.

Then a long-distance run we had to go on. Yeah, piece of cake.

Didn't have to show any courage. But when it came to abseiling down a cliff,

that I needed courage for because I was scared witless.

I wasn't scared of the other things. So I didn't need to show courage.

You only show courage when there's fear.

Courage is not fearlessness.

Courage is acknowledging the fear, acknowledging the threat,

and yet doing what has to be done.

You see, when I exhibit courage, I'm not so much expressing heroism as expressing helplessness.

When Joshua was faced with the task of crossing the River Jordan,

entering the promised land, God didn't say to him, look, there's a whole lot

of big hairy Canaanites over there, but I'm going to get rid of them for you. No, sorry.

The threat was there. And so Joshua had to have courage because it was a threat.

If there's no threat, there's no courage. There's no need for courage.

So God was not going to remove the threat, but was rather going to give him courage.

And that's a little paradigm for what happens in our lives, is it not?

How many times in your life does God remove the threat. Sometimes he does.

Praise God he does. But other times, sorry mate, the threat stays, but I will be with you.

You see, Joshua's courage came from the fact that he trusted God would empower

and sustain him to do what needed to be done.

It was not a matter of heightened testosterone or psyching himself up to be extra heroic.

No, no, no, nothing like that.

It was rather the realisation that whatever threat there is there,

whatever challenge faces me, my God is greater than that threat.

Philippians 4.13, marvellous, marvellous text to hang on to.

Some translation says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

No, no, that's not a good translation.

It really means I can face all circumstances through Christ who strengthens me.

And you can, and you do, when you show courage.

So God will not always get rid of a threat, but He says, I will be with you,

and therefore we have courage.

We see that in Isaiah 43, verses 1 to 3, a very familiar passage.

Isaiah 43:1–3

When you pass through the deep waters, when you pass through the fire, I will be with you.

Notice it doesn't say if you pass through. It says when.

So you can expect some fire and deep waters.

But the one who knows us by name, Isaiah 43, says, will be with us.

Fear not. Not because there's no threat. There's no deep water. There's no fire.

No, no, no, no, no. Fear not, because when you go through it,

not around it, not above it, when you go through it, I'll be with you. That's courage.

But there's more to courage than trusting God. As is often the case,

God chooses to work through his people.

And you and I are repeatedly exhorted to encourage one another.

And look at that word. When you are told to encourage one another,

What we really mean is you are giving courage to one another.

You are helping people have the strength and the will to do what needs to be

done, whether it's a minor thing or a major thing.

So when you're encouraged, that's what you are doing. Not just saying nice,

pretty things, but you are actually offering courage.

We are told to meet together in Hebrews chapter 10, I think it's verses 24, 25.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

We're to encourage one another as we meet.

You see, we don't just come to church to hear or sing music.

We do that, and it's good to do it.

We don't just come to church to hear a good sermon.

Maybe you'll get one next week or the week after.

Oh, no, I'm preaching next week too. Sorry. Chris is doing his stuff in a couple

of weeks, so that should be all right.

But seriously, you don't come to church just to hear or sing music,

just to listen to a sermon, just to munch on morning tea. All those things are good.

But one of the underlying reasons why we come together is to give one another

courage to face whatever threats we are facing, whether they be minor, whether they be major.

And so that should inform our conversations with one another.

Because, you see, we, like any church, are a community of the brokenhearted.

And if you feel that's taking it a bit too far, I've ministered in about all

15, 16 churches or so on, including this one.

We're all communities of the brokenhearted. Not that you're broken hearted all the time.

Not that you're going around looking like miserable sad sacks.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

All I'm saying is that people here, as in any church, are nursing wounds,

nursing dashed dreams, nursing failed expectations.

We are all having to deal with all this.

Not all at once. And not everyone is dealing with every issue. No.

All I'm saying is, we need encouragement.

It's been said that it takes 10 encouraging words to compensate for one discouraging

word. And I can testify to that.

I've heard massive amounts of encouraging words given to me over the years.

But I can also remember the discouraging ones.

Sometimes they're given by the same person too, which makes it interesting. But, but, yeah.

Don't ration out your encouragement to one another. People need encouragement.

They might be smiling and happy at church and all that sort of thing.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Often beneath the surface,

there's stuff happening.

And it's good for us to offer encouraging words.

There was an apocryphal story about the archangel Michael having some dialogue with Lucifer the devil.

And Michael said, get out, Lucifer.

You've lost all your weapons against humanity.

Lucifer said, please, Michael, can I just retain one weapon?

And Michael said, oh, okay.

What do you want to retain in order to attack humanity?

What weapon? And Lucifer was reputed to have said, discouragement.

It is one of the most powerful weapons of the evil one against the people of God.

I'm a melancholic sort of person who can be easily discouraged.

So I need to dose myself up with courage, not to look at myself in the mirror

and say, what a brave guy you are, David. Oh, that's rubbish, silly rubbish.

But rather to say, God, I need your help to have the strength and the will to do what needs to be done.

And I need the help of others.

But verbal encouragement is not just a matter of uttering pious cliches and

favorite Bible texts, although Bible texts are helpful—.

But it stems from deep and active listening. You can't encourage one another

just superficially. Got to get to know people.

Got to get to develop authentic relationships. It's not mere niceness.

It's on a speech that's not centered on ourselves, but on others.

And that's why it's so hard to do, because we are, by nature, fairly self-centered.

We like to think that we're the center of the universe, but an encourager shifts that mindset.

An encourager says, no, let's focus on this other person who needs the courage.

But of course, words are not all sufficient.

We encourage one another by praying for one another, and very importantly,

letting them know we are praying.

I was in the church once. I was minister there for about seven or eight years,

and good times and not so good times, as is usual.

And one lady at my farewell service came up to me and said, you know,

David, I prayed for you every day you were here.

And I thanked her for that. But afterwards, I thought, blimey,

why didn't you tell me while I was still here?

I needed encouragement. And you don't have to have people ringing you up every

day at six o'clock in the morning saying, hello, I'm going to encourage you today.

No, you don't need anything like that. but just occasionally to let people know

you are praying for them.

It's not enough to just pray for someone.

Tell them you're praying for it. And start thinking about, hey,

how are the answers coming to these prayers that we've prayed?

And please, don't just simply say, I'll pray for you and not do it.

This is why Jen and I, in ministering in many, many churches,

have engaged in what we call prayer ministry.

I'm not saying we should do it here. I'm not in any way imposing that.

But rather, I'm simply saying...

If you're talking with someone and encouraging them and you want to pray with

them, if it's appropriate, and

it's not always appropriate, but if it's appropriate, pray on the spot.

It doesn't need to be terribly demonstrative or anything, but there are places

and little corners of the church here where people can just sit alongside one another and pray.

Instead of saying, oh, I'll remember you in my prayers on Thursday morning,

pray then and there. Strike while the iron's hot.

So that's encouragement. And then we give courage by being of whatever practical help we can.

In James 2, verses 14 to 17, but there's many other passages in James much the

James 2:14–17

same, James is saying, don't just talk about your faith, do something about it.

Don't just say, oh, keep warm, be well fed, do something about it,

if it's appropriate, and if you can.

You see, hoping someone will be encouraged by our words may not be enough.

We may have to back up our words with actions. Someone, for example,

might be going to hospital for some medical tests.

And you can say to them quite rightly, oh, look, I hope things go well and I

will be praying for you. Good, good, good. That's all fine.

But they might need a lift to and from hospitals.

In other words, sometimes, yes, words are important, prayers are important,

but action is also needed.

Part of active encouragement also is mere presence. How discouraging it would

be to a preacher, to music leaders here, if no one turned up.

Sometimes the best sort of encouragement is turning up, being there, being present.

Because, you see, time is valuable for many of us and giving someone some of

their time can give them courage. They matter and we care.

So just showing up at Christian gatherings, I know we can't show up at every

gathering, of course not, but just showing up at Christian gatherings is itself an encouragement.

It's an encouragement to anyone who is up the front here in church leadership

to see other people here.

It's encouraging simply that you are here rather than sort of having a sleep in.

Or something. It's encouraging. Our world can be a wonderful place,

which it is, and a very scary place, which it is.

And our journey to Christian maturity can be a very, very long, winding road.

So we need courage to persevere.

As the old saying goes, Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint.

And I need courage. You need courage to get through.

I have so many threats. You have so many threats that are either overt or more

secret and more subtle in your life now.

You need courage to have the strength and the will to face them,

and you're not going to get them by looking in the mirror and psyching yourself up to feel brave.

I'm not brave most of the time. My default is cowardice.

So I need help, external help. I don't find it simply within myself.

So I need a deep trust in a trustworthy God who is greater than my circumstances

and greater than whatever threat faces me.

I need the encouragement of other people because there is so much discouragement out there.

So I need encouragement and so do you.

If you need, have the strength and the will to do what needs to be done.

So the key, the starting point for getting courage is to realize you haven't got any.

To realize that it's not something that's a matter of personality or temperament,

but it's something that comes to you from a God who has promised to be with

you always and from his people,

who are to be incarnate encouragers.

Because in the end, courage is not a matter of heroics.

You're not a hero. I'm not a hero.

I'm not going to end up in the Victoria Cross Gallery in the Australian War Memorial.

But we need courage, and we find it, not through heroics, but by helplessness.

Let me just pray about that.

Just want you to just quietly reflect on...

Own life at the moment, the threats you may be facing, the challenges you may be facing.

No one else might know about it, but you know your God does.

And it's good for you to pray to your God to say, I don't like that threat.

I don't want to have to face that threat. Please remove it. Our God is well able to do that.

But then again, as you pray that prayer, pray another the prayer.

Lord, the threat is still there, but I know that he who is in me is greater

than any threat I can ever face.

And so, out of your sometimes fearful, timid, confused heart,

cry out to God for the courage that only He and His people can bring.

Amen.