"Wanted: Moral Courage"

The Honorable George Thomas, Speaker of the House of Commons, The British Parliament, said in 1976 at a college commencement address:  “There is no limit to the potential of the dedicated life.  No formula can measure the depths that the world owes men committed in their faith, for it is committed men and women who shape history.  The world owes nothing to the moral neutrals.  It owes everything to people who have deep convictions and moral courage born of their faith.”

At present many who hold certain religious and moral convictions see themselves swimming against a seeming tide of moral looseness, sufficient to cause them to feel like the prophet Elijah of ancient Israel.  After doing protracted battle with God’s enemies he cried, “It is enough!  Now, Lord, take my life, for I am no better than my fathers” (Old Testament, I Kings 19:4b)!  He thought himself the only faithful servant of God remaining.

How different are we?  We need the same assurance God gave to Elijah, “Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal” (I Kings 19:18)—that is, they had not served other gods and whose lives therefore were unblemished by the moral pollution of the day.

Followers of God today commit the same error as Elijah:  underestimating their own strength and overestimating that of the enemy.  It is time for God’s people to realize the victory is God’s and their task is simply to be faithful to the truth as they now know it, as was Queen Esther of Old Testament Israel.

When she was confronted with the possibility of the total annihilation of her people, the Jews, Queen Esther was given this challenge by her uncle, Mordecai:  “Do not think in your heart that you will escape in the king’s palace any more than all the other Jews.  For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish.  Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this” (Esther 4:13, 14)?

Queen Esther was faithful and spoke out for the truth of God as she understood it.  This led to the downfall of the enemies of God and Israel.  It’s no less true for God’s people today, be firm for the truth as you see and understand it and in due time God will bring the deliverance.

Remember, the world “owes everything to people who have deep convictions and moral courage born of their faith.”