“This is partly why I am sending him to you . . . that he may give you courage.”

(Colossians 4:7)

Paul was finishing a letter to some friends. He had reached the last paragraph. There he mentions the name of the man who will serve as his messenger and bring the letter — a fellow named Tychicus. And then Paul adds significantly, and I think thoughtfully: “This is partly why I am sending him to you . . . that he may bring you courage.”

You have noticed, of course, that it always makes a difference who brings us any given message, any bit of news, anything. I can remember a boyhood friend of mine who could tell us the circus was coming to town and the excitement he conveyed would set my hair on end and send a thrill tingling through my body. But there was one crepe hanger in our crowd who could bring the same bit of news in such a way as to turn my stomach against all animal acts.

Winston Churchill could step up to the microphone and send out over the radio news of the most awful defeats and tragic losses suffered by the British Army in the last great war, and do it in such a way that instead of filling hearts with fear, or casting down spirits in despair, every Englishman within the sound of his voice was instantly eager and proud for the privilege of standing on his own particular street corner with nothing in his hands but a broomstick to beat off England’s enemies.

It makes a difference who brings us any news, any opportunities, any burden, any sorrow. For some people bring with them courage and some do not. Let’s face it. It’s not their fault if they don’t, but oh, it’s everlastingly to their credit and our gain if they do.

Now, Paul knew that Tychicus was one man who could carry courage and that is partly why he chose him to carry the important letter to Colossae, for however important any letter, any event, any circumstance may be, courage is even more important.

Do you remember the story of the people who lived in that little village near the great hospital where the horribly wounded airmen were sent? It was the hospital where men who had been in air crashes came for regaining their strength before the second and third stages of their operations in bone and skin grafting. These mutilated and scarred men would hobble about the village streets and look at themselves in the reflections in the storefront windows and shudder at the sight of themselves. To see a nose or an ear gone, or a face burned an angry red, would make anyone’s stomach do a flip. But the villagers would meet these boys with the marred features and the misshapen legs and arms, and never flinch a face muscle and never give so much as a glance at their twisted limbs. They would invite them into their houses for dinner. They would laugh with them and tell them funny stories. The villagers seemed to know instinctively, that though the boys’ new faces and limbs were in the hands of the plastic surgeons and the orthopedic men, the scarred and wounded warriors’ will to live and to face life with steady eyes was in the hands of the villagers. They knew it. They accepted the challenge to be bringers of courage, and they did it.

Oh, the awful, aching need for courage all about us everywhere, every day. Here’s one poor soul, carrying heavy responsibilities and almost worn out with the burden, and needs courage so desperately to keep on a little longer. Here’s another who needs courage to endure pain, another, courage to face disgrace, another, courage to stand alone against temptation and keep himself unspotted — clean from the alluring evil, another needs courage to face death unafraid. Everyone needs courage every day.

And everyone can be a bringer of courage. No one is too old for it, no one too young. And you don’t have to discuss the matter at hand to bring courage. You don’t have to rake in the ashes of a man’s tragedy; you don’t have to probe in the raw, red wound of his shame or sorrow. You may not even say a word. But if you come in love with unshakable faith in God, and with the offer of your genuine friendship and confidence in that one’s ability to play the man, you can transmit the one indispensable ingredient that many a spiritually empty man or woman desperately needs. You can bring courage, that mysterious, spiritual mixture that comes of pouring together love and hope and faith and confidence. Yes, you, like Tychicus, can be a bringer of courage.

Now I want to say to you Boy and Girl Scouts, and you Scout leaders, in this historic season celebrating the 50th anniversary of scouting, just as St. Paul said to his Colossian friends, that this is partly why we have our scouting program at Idlewild — that you boys and girls may be bringers of courage. You see, we believe that courage is terribly important for people and we think the scouting program can help you become bringers of courage.

But how? Wearing a scout uniform won’t make you bringers of courage. Just having a scout organization in the church won’t do the job. Belonging to a troop won’t make a boy or girl a custodian of courage. Learning to come to a snappy salute and repeating the oath: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and obey the scout laws; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight” — high an ideal as it is, will not automatically make a boy or girl a bringer of courage. No.

But, we of Idlewild believe in the scouting program as a trustworthy producer of courage bringers because it molds ideals into habits. That’s scouting’s great value, transmuting noble principles into a way of life. Scouting fosters disciplines of wholesome thinking, clean living, and unselfish serving.

It also calls into play the help and support of a band of like-minded and committed young people. A grandmother said: “Do all you can to encourage my grandson to stay in the scout group so when he sees other young people doing wrong, he will have the courage to do the right.” The spiritual ideas of scouting, the habits of living those ideals, and the companionship of clean courageous lads, she believed, would build in courage to stand alone for the right.

We are living in a time when the moral and spiritual structures of western civilization are crumbling. American taste and honor are being debauched. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover links our national increase in juvenile crime with the apparent lowering of our public moral standards. In a special bulletin last month he wrote: “The spread of obscene literature across our land through the means of films, decks of playing cards, photographs, comic books, salacious magazines, paper-backed books, and other pornographic productions . . . threaten the morality of our nation and its richest treasure — our young people . . . These signs of decay, tolerated by adults, cannot but help debase the thinking of our impressionable teenagers.”

The Memphis Board of Censors is now telling our citizens that the last hope for any form of restraint on the films to be shown in Memphis theaters has toppled. We have no say, no judgment. The time has come when no one any longer dares raise his voice in favor of imposing community standards of decency and morality, for all confuse license with liberty. Now the only remaining safeguards are for families and churches to do what they can to help their children and young people and adults achieve built-in Christian standards of thought and reading and viewing and action, supported outwardly by their own Christian group.

Toward the close of the last century, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, a British soldier in South America, wrote a little book called, Aids to Scouting, which subsequently inspired the founding of the Boy Scout movement. Aids to Scouting was written primarily for the purpose of helping British foreign soldiers in the bush and wilderness places gain some knowledge and skill for survival in primitive surroundings, for Baden-Powell had seen hundreds of soldiers perish for lack of forest knowledge and skills. Today, boys are still interested in woodcraft and forest wisdom, but scouting is proving its remarkable power to keep alive in boys and girls the best qualities of the human spirit amid the jungles of a corrupt and decaying world. Scouting offers a program of clean, disciplined life in the day of unrestraint and immorality.

Soren Kierkegaard tells of a wealthy man who ordered a pair of fine coach horses, thoroughbreds, with the desire of driving them for his pleasure. When they arrived, they were the finest looking horses in all the countryside. No horses had such shiny black coats, were so sleek and well groomed, so thick of chest as they. No horses held their heads so high, trotted so fast, or had such fire in their eyes as these horses. But the rich man knew nothing about driving those thoroughbreds. He held the reins slack in his hands when he went riding about the countryside. He let the horses follow their whims. In a few weeks, that fine pair of horses were unmanageable. They had lost all their gaits. They grew dull of eye, they dropped their heads and they couldn’t run so much as a quarter of a mile without getting winded. In all the neighborhood, they were the worst looking and acting horse flesh to be seen.

In despair, the rich man sent for the king’s coachman to see what ailed his fine thoroughbreds. The king’s coachman began to drive the horses each day, and within a few weeks, they regained their former gaits and beauty, fire and endurance. The difference: the owner had driven the horses according to a horse’s understanding of what it is to be driven, while the king’s coachman had driven them according to the understanding of a royal coachman or what it is to be driven.

The spirits of men and women and boys and girls need the guiding hand of the Royal Ruler of men, Jesus Christ. We are not well-driven when driven according to our own understanding of what it is to be a man, and certainly we are not well-driven when we are motivated by what the lowest and basest of men seem to think are the dominant animal drives in the human heart. Only Jesus Christ can drive a man as he ought to be driven. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We need to be disciplined by His mind, by His spirit. Thus can we become bringers of courage for others and for a new day.