The Heart of a Hero of Faith.

Consider how you live, what you think, the movements your heart makes when you’re not living in communion with your Creator.  How the fog of unreality rises around you, all the unnecessary drama which comes into play, all the peripheral issues which somehow get thrust right smack into the centre of your life.  When grace is not pulsing through our very being, we tend to live under a cloud of contempt— primarily for others, but equally for ourselves.  It’s an unholy and incredibly unhealthy place, one not fit for God’s Creatures to dwell in, one where Royalty {1 Pet. 2:9-10} should never be found.

In his novel Gates of Fire, author Steven Pressfield has Xiones, a squire and archer in the Spartan heavy infantry, speaking to the Persian king Xerxes after the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC {the ‘Hot Gates’} and saying:

Of what does the nature of kingship consist?  What are its qualities, in itself?  What, the qualities it inspires in those who attend it?

…I will tell his majesty what a king is.  {Pause}  A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field.  A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall.  A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear, nor purchase it with gold.  He earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake.  That which comprises the harshest burden a king lifts first and sets down last.  A king does not require service of those he leads, but provides it to them.

In the final moments, before the actual commencement of battle, when the lines of the Persians lay so close across from the defenders that their individual faces could be seen, Leonidas moved along the Spartan and Thespian fore-ranks, speaking with each platoon commander individually.  When he stopped beside Dionekes I was close enough to hear his words.

‘Do you hate them, Dionekes?,’ the king asked, in the tone of a comrade— unhurried, conversational— gesturing to those captains and officers of the Persians proximately visible across the no-man’s land.  Dionekes answered at once that he did not.  ‘I see faces of gentle and noble bearing.  More than a few I think whom one would welcome with a clap and a laugh to any table of friends.’

Leonidas clearly approved of my master’s answer.  His eyes seemed, however, darkened with sorrow.  ‘I am sorry for them,’ he avowed, indicating the valiant foemen who stood …across.  ‘What wouldn’t they give, the noblest among them, to stand here with us now.’

That is a king, your majesty.  A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free.  {Emphases mine}

Prophet, Priest, Warrior, King: at a single point in human history {which is His-Story} all of those roles are melded into one Man— the Lord Jesus Christ, the Master and Messiah in whose image we are being formed.  God is waiting right now, gentlemen, to bring these things to life and fruition within you and within me.  God has brought you to this place at this time in the History of the Ages for a purpose.  Your life is a masterpiece in progress {Eph. 2:10}, a masterpiece of strength and honor, conviction and courage, regardless of how you feel about that progress in the present.

There are no secrets to success in the Life of the Kingdom: All it takes is all you’ve got... surrendered and submitted to the sovereign will of your King.  Those who give all find it; those who don’t, don’t.  In the end, the Eternal End, it comes down to this.  Are you willing to humble yourself before your Lord, live as if ‘there is a God ...and I’m not Him!,’ and hang in there for the Long Haul?  Because that’s what it takes to be a Hero of Faith.

HJC	Ric Webb  |  Shepherd Heart’s Journey Community 9621 Tall Timber Blvd. |  Little Rock, AR 72204 t +1.501.455.0296 | hjcommunity.org
Heart’s Journey – where the Word and the Spirit are one.