100th Posting! To God be the Glory!

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”          C. S. Lewis

“When I am afraid, I will put my trust in Thee.  In God, whose word I praise,
In God I have put my trust; I shall not be afraid. What can mere man do to me?”
Psalm 56:3,4

This is my 100^th Blog posting!! I thank the Lord that He has given me the opportunity to tell the wonderful stories of courageous women who have lived and served Him down through the ages.

Courage comes in many forms. Many of our stories are about women who have shown incredible physical bravery. Think of what it must have been like for the following women:

“…Jael, Heber’s wife, took a tent peg and seized a hammer in her hand, and went secretly to him and drove the peg into his temple, and it went through into the ground….So he died.” (Judges 4:21)

Jael was able to be so courageous because she feared God rather than man. There was a line that she would not cross. Her life was in danger, but she chose to do what was right. The Scriptures tell us that she was blessed for what she did. Deborah made a song of that great victory over God’s enemies and proclaimed, “Most blessed of women is Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite.’ (Judges 5:24).

Another uncompromising woman was Rahab. She was putting her own life in danger in order to disobey her king and follow God, but she was willing to follow the voice of her convictions. She preferred to follow God’s will and word rather then follow the dictates of her culture. She was willing to risk her own safety for that of the spies. By faith she renounced all for God. You can read all of her story in the book of Joshua, chapter 2.

Many other historical women demonstrated that they would rather die than go against their convictions. You can read their stories on this Blog – Anne Askew, Esther Ann Kim, Lady Jane Gray, Perpetua and Felicity, the Solway Martyrs, and Sophie Scholl all went to their deaths rather than give in to the evils of the culture around them.

Some women, though not facing death, have had to bravely rise above their circumstances and put others before themselves. This type of unselfishness requires real spiritual courage. Consider these stories of women who followed God:

Hannah (see I Samuel, chapters 1 & 2) was living on a different spiritual plain than most women. She had put God first in her life. She truly desired to serve Him and was obedient to her calling as a wife. She rose above her situation and proved that she could handle whatever God would send her way. She was never disrespectful to her husband nor did she ever seek vengeance on the other wife. We must admire the courage of Hannah. An immature or less pious woman would have likely turned into a nag. Sympathetic people would find it hard to blame Hannah if she turned on Peninnah (the “other woman”) and made her life as miserable as she could. How many women would find fault with her if she had retorted angrily to her husband Elkanah’s less than thoughtful or considerate remarks about her childlessness. But she never did. She only turned to God.

This kind of courage is different than the physical courage required to face down an enemy knowing your life may be required of you. It also takes a lot of courage to live day by day with opposition from any source. When everyone else seems to be successful in their wrongdoing, it takes real courage of conviction and firm faith to trust in God and wait on Him.

Some women have been courageous enough to stand against social custom in order to defend what is right. One of the best examples of this was Argula von Grumbach. She lived in the early sixteenth century. She had the privilege and the blessing of God to be able to read Martin Luther’s writings and convert to Protestantism. She read and studied the Bible and was well able to defend its teachings, even against the University Professors in Ingolstadt. She did not let the fact that she was a woman stop her from writing to the authorities in defense of a wrongly accused young man.

Bavarian authorities had forbidden reception of Lutheran ideas at the time, and the city of Ingolstadt enforced that mandate. In 1523, Arsacius Seehofer, a young teacher and former student at the University of Ingolstadt, was arrested for Protestant views and forced to recant. The incident would have occurred quietly, but Argula, outraged over it, wrote what was to become her most successful writing, a letter to the faculty of the university objecting to Seehofer’s arrest and exile. The letter urged the university to follow Scripture, not Roman traditions. It also said she had decided to speak out even though she was a woman because no one else would.

In our day, many women still feel that they are treated unfairly simply because they are female. Imagine what it must have been like for Argula in the early sixteenth century!! No women writers in our country are treated the way that she was. Theologians wanted her punished, and her husband lost his position at Dietfurt over the controversy. Argula was also called by many offensive epithets by her critics, especially through the sermons of Professor Hauer who called her things like “shameless whore” and a “female desperado.”

But this persecution did not stop this dauntless woman. Argula wrote poems in response to the slander of her character, such as when a poem apparently written by someone from Ingoldstadt which attacked her and accused her of being a neglectful wife and mother.
An other, more honest man, wrote of her that she “knows more of the divine Word than all of the red hats (canon lawyers and cardinals) ever saw or could conceive of” and compared her to other heroic women in the Bible.

There are women in our day who are also courageously taking a stand for righteousness. A praiseworthy woman, who just recently passed away, was Mildred Jefferson. Mildred was a black woman who had to fight for right on many fronts. She was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard medical school. Pro-life people will remember her though as a champion for the unborn. She was an activist, though a gentle one, winning the respect of all who knew her.

These women are just a sampling of the many women who have shown physical, moral, and spiritual courage. I started this Blog with the intention of telling their stories so that woman in our day could take courage in spite of the evil of our times. We do not live in a society that honors God. We live in a God-hating, death-loving, selfish society. In contrast to this, women of courage love the Lord, life, and others before themselves.

My prayer is that these stories are an encouragement to women, and that we will all be able to stand firm in the face of many dangers to ourselves, to serve God in whatever calling He has given us. May we even be able to change our own corners of the world for the better.
To God alone be the glory.
And keep looking for more stories!!!