For years, I never prayed that prayer. For years, I just worried about a few others and myself. For years, I was into the navel gazing thing, singing Kum Ba Ya, sitting around a campfire, saying, “We’re the white hats. They are the black hats. We are the in crowd. They are the out crowd. We are heaven bound. They are hell bound. They are so bad.” I did that for a long time until, one day, I bowed the knee to Christ. As I bowed the knee to him, I said, “Lord, make me a fisherman.” I didn’t know a lot of the Bible. I didn’t know what to say. I just said, “God, make me a fisherman.”
The next day, I had a conversation with a guy who said this to me, “Ed Young Pastor, something is different about you.” I thought, “Wow, this is it. I can cast now. I can fish now. I stumbled. I fumbled. I had the backlash. I thought I got hung up. I could barely even share the gospel, the good news. But several hours later, this young man asked Christ to come into his life. From that moment on, I’m telling you, nothing is like it. We can talk about discipleship and we can talk about in-depth teaching, and that is great. We all need that. But that is a pipe dream unless people are not getting saved and getting caught for the glory of God. You don’t have to worry about discipleship if you are not really into fishing.
There is a final dimension of courage. It is called relational courage. We are going back to our man Daniel. Daniel 6:1-3. Relational courage. The Bible says “It pleased Darius to appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom, with three administrators over them, one of whom was Daniel…the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom.” Again, Daniel was the man. But Daniel is going to exemplify some relational courage because he had a tight relationship with Darius, but even though the relationship was tight, he stood.
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