Have Courage!
Every scroll through your phone is a promise. Lose the weight fast. The one habit that fixes your mornings. Eat this an hour before bed and sleep like a child. We do not believe most of it… but we keep reading, because it might work. That is the sentence we live by.
The Bible hands you sentences nobody would say. Job, with his children already in the ground… says he will hope in God even if God kills him (Job 13:15). Stephen, with the first stones already landing… prays for the men throwing them (Acts 7:60).
Then the strangest sentence of all. A man sits in a Roman cell near the end of his life, uncertain whether he will live to see morning. His friends have scattered… one by one. And he writes to a young pastor named Timothy: “At my first defense, no one stood by me, but everyone deserted me… But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me” (2 Timothy 4:16-17).
Everyone left… and he is not complaining. He sounds like a man who has company. Paul did not learn to talk like that in a Roman cell. He learned it ten years earlier… in a Roman barracks in Jerusalem… on one of the worst nights of his life.
The resurrection is not only a doctrine you hold… it is a risen Jesus who stands beside you.
The next day, the Roman commander stands Paul before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. Paul looks the council in the eye and says, “Brothers, I have lived my life before God in all good conscience to this day” (Acts 23:1). One sentence in… and the high priest orders a man to strike him on the mouth.
Paul fires back and calls the high priest a whitewashed wall… he was right about the man. Then someone objects that he has just insulted God’s own high priest, and Paul answers, “I did not know, brothers, that he was the high priest… for it is written, You must not speak evil of a ruler of your people” (Acts 23:5). Right about the man… wrong to say it out loud. That is what a good conscience does on a bad morning… not a man who is never wrong… a man who says so the minute the Word shows him.
Paul sees the council splitting into two rival parties, and he calls out the real issue:
“…I am being judged because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead!” (Acts 23:6)
He is not being clever. The resurrection was the actual charge. A Roman governor named Festus said it plainly later: the whole dispute came down to a dead man Paul claimed to be alive (Acts 25:19). Was Jesus dead, or was he alive? That was always the question.
The Pharisees on that council had held the doctrine of the resurrection their whole lives… and a live Jesus had walked their own city, in their lifetime, and they never went to look. You can believe God raises the dead… and still not know the Jesus he raised.
Everyone reading this believes Jesus rose. The question is not whether you believe it. The question is where you look first. When the bill comes, when the scan comes back, when your child stops calling, where do you go? Most of us go to what works, a plan, a habit, the one trick that fixes it, and then we pray, short, on the way out the door.
C. S. Lewis wrote, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important” (God in the Dock, “Christian Apologetics,” 1945). You can believe in the resurrection your whole life… like those Pharisees… and still stand before the risen Jesus a stranger.
The council’s confusion turns to violence, and soldiers pull Paul out before the two parties tear him apart. That night, alone in a Roman barracks, after two mobs in two days:
The following night, the Lord stood by him and said, “Have courage! For as you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so it is necessary for you to testify in Rome.” (Acts 23:11)
Hear it the way Paul heard it. Two days… two mobs… one wanted him dead on the steps, the other nearly tore him apart. And a voice he had heard before… on the Damascus road at noon… speaks again. Have courage.
Luke uses the same word here that he uses for the two men who stood by the women at the empty tomb (Luke 24:4). This is not a feeling Paul worked up in the dark. It is a Person who came and stood.
Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not tell Paul to find his nerve… he gives him a reason: you have testified about me, so it is necessary that you testify again. Courage is not something you work up at two in the morning. Courage is Someone who comes and stands beside you.
Some of you are already thinking it. Pastor, he stood beside Paul. I sat in a hospital room at two in the morning, and nobody stood anywhere.
That is fair. You did not see what Paul saw… and this passage does not promise that you will. But years later, alone in a different cell, Paul wrote the sentence that opened this letter: everyone deserted me, but the Lord stood with me. He does not describe a light or a voice that night… he tells you what the Lord did. Strengthened him to stay in it… given, not worked up.
So what does it mean that he stands beside you?
He stands beside you in his Word. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word… we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). The voice in the barracks is the voice on the page in your lap.
He stands beside you by his Spirit, the Counselor the risen Christ promised to send (John 16:7). The Spirit was already in that hospital room when you sat down. He was not waiting for you to feel him.
He stands beside you in his people. Sometimes the Lord standing beside you has a name and a casserole. If nobody from this church walked into that room… that is ours to answer for… not his.
This week, do not wait for a breakthrough. Open the page… that is him, the same Christ who forgave a man with nothing to offer (Matthew 9:2), before he cleaned up, not after. Trust the Spirit already in you… that is him too, purchased and sent by the crucified and risen Christ, not earned by anything you did. Let his people in… that is him. He did not save you in spite of what was done to him… he saved you through it, once, for good, and he sends his people to stand where he stood.
The resurrection is not only a doctrine you hold… it is a risen Jesus who stands beside you.
Men once carried a paralyzed man to Jesus on a stretcher. He could not fix one thing about himself. And the first thing Jesus said was, “Have courage, son, your sins are forgiven” (Matthew 9:2). That is where courage starts. Not with your nerve. With his forgiveness.
He is not asking you to be brave first. He is asking you to come and be forgiven… not after you get yourself together, the way the man on the stretcher never did… but now, trusting him: Jesus died for my sins, and he is alive. And if you already know him and have simply forgotten who stands beside you… he has not moved.
Source: the sermon “Have Courage!” (Acts 22:30-23:11) preached at Red River Baptist Church on September 20, 2026.