Men of Courage by Larry Crabb

Author:Larry Crabb [Crabb, Larry; Hudson, Don; Andrews, Al]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780310336976
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2013-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Lighting our own fires is another way of describing what men do when they find themselves in a dark place. They scramble back to something they can manage, perhaps redefining the confusion into a more understandable and therefore controllable package. They depend on recipe theology, looking for an expert to supply a code that tells them what to do in order to guarantee a desired result.

They refuse to move into the darkness with only the confidence that God is with them.* The Isaiah passage, of course, applies to women every bit as much as to men. Any approach to life that doesn’t center in trust eventually produces misery.

Suppose my friend who was awakened by the noise of a slammed door had responded to his frantic concerns without humbling himself. Suppose he had never faced up to what was going on inside of him: the anger, the self-reproach, the terror filling his heart. Suppose he had kept his distance from all that he felt, and instead had decided to figure out what needed to be done and then had done it. He would have never been broken by his pride, never been undone by his insistence that he must always know what to do, never been repentant over his self-centered demand that the important things in his life must operate according to a plan under his control.

If Chad had never gone deep enough into his heart to be broken by his arrogance and humbled by his impotence, then whatever choice he would have made that Monday morning would have been a lighting of his own fire. Let me put it plainly: Whenever our highest agenda is to make our lives work, then no matter what we do, we are fire-lighters.

But when our highest agenda is to love Christ, to please him and represent him well to others, then whatever action we take will involve reliance and trust “in the name of the Lord.” If we really do love Christ, then of course our choices will be made within the boundaries clearly laid down in Scripture. We may wake our wives, but we will not yell at them. We may not wake our wives, but we will not later scorn them for sleeping through a family crisis. Waking or not waking our wives is a choice we are free to make. Taking out our frustrations on them is clearly forbidden. And when a godly man does what is wrong, when he walks outside of the light God has given, he owns his mistake, he accepts full blame, and he asks forgiveness.

Chad is a godly man. Listen to what it meant for him to move into darkness without lighting his own fire. He admitted to himself how impatient, self-reproachful, and irritable he felt. He consciously yielded himself to God as a weak man who did not know what to do, reminding himself that the chosen purpose of his entire life, including that moment Monday morning, was to love Christ and to honor him in all he did.

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