Brothers, if we walk in sinful fear, we will miss out on the joy of faithfully fighting alongside God in the battle. But trusting Him leads to fearlessness, and fearlessness leads us to the blessing of following him into the fight again and again. It is a blessing to be faithful day after day, from one war to the next.

When I was a young man, there was no shortage of action films drawn from fictionalized versions of history. One such film was Troy, in which Brad Pitt portrays the legendary Achilles, who is not a big fan of the king that he serves (Agamemnon). Agamemnon uses Achilles to settle wars by way of one-on-one combat. In one such scene, Achilles walks away from the tyrant king to fight Boagrius. Achilles remarks: “Imagine a king that fights his own battles. Wouldn’t that be a sight?”

Well, in the Lord, we have a King who fights for His men (Deuteronomy 3:21). And that fact should produce fearlessness in our hearts. In Deuteronomy 3:1-22, God bookends the passage with a divine command: Do not fear. It’s not a suggestion. It’s not pious advice. It’s not a recommendation. It is a command. And for Israel, knowing and believing the Lord who fights the battle produced within them an unwavering courage—a godly fearlessness.

Brothers, we must not fear man. We must not fear our circumstances. We must not fear anything except the Lord. This is Christian piety: the fear of God in practice. And there are blessings that we miss if we fear other things instead. One blessing is the faithfulness of fighting for the Lord.

After defeating King Sihon, Israel turned to take on King Og. The Amorite people went down, but there was still one to go. They were completely faithful as they committed all of Sihon’s people to total destruction before the Lord, and in Deuteronomy 3:1, they had to do it all over again. There are three lessons for us to take away as we walk in fearlessness.

First, faithfulness does not grant us time off from faithfulness. Faithfulness to God required Israel to destroy one enemy and immediately obey again. When it comes to being obedient to the Lord, there are no days off. We don’t get to be satisfied with our obedience from today and yesterday and allow ourselves to have a little bit of disobedience tomorrow. The reward for being faithful today is that we get to wake up tomorrow by God’s grace, in God’s world, as God’s people and continue to serve Him as those who have been bought and paid for by the blood of Jesus. This generation of Israel here is a model for us in Christian tenacity.

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