Every few years somebody publishes a Bible for men, and I open it with my guard up. Too many of them are the same Bible with a rugged cover and a few articles about hunting and leadership stapled to the front. The word “courage” on a cover makes me even more wary, because most of what our culture calls courage is just volume.
So I want to say up front that the Courage For Life Study Bible surprised me. Not because it is flashy. Because it is not.
What it means by courage
The description on the back of the box says men face constant challenges to take a stand and step into danger. That is true enough. But then it says the real challenge is seeing our own weaknesses and recognizing God’s truth over the lies we have been told. That is the sentence that made me sit down and actually read this thing.
Because that is the right definition. In Scripture, courage is almost never about swagger. When God tells Joshua to be strong and of good courage in Joshua 1, the Hebrew is chazaq (חָזַק, H2388), which means to be strengthened, to be held fast, to take hold. And the second word, amats (אָמַץ, H553), carries the idea of being made firm and steadfast. Neither one has anything to do with bravado. They describe a man who has been steadied by something outside himself and is refusing to let go of it.
That is the kind of courage this Bible is built around. The publisher’s Courage For Life ministry has a seven-step discipleship path, one step for each letter of the word, and those steps are woven through the study material from Genesis to Revelation. I was braced for gimmick. What I found was a fairly disciplined attempt to walk a man through the whole Bible with one question in front of him the entire time. Where are you weak, and what does God say about it.
A study on every page
The main feature is exactly what it claims to be. Every page carries a short Bible study on a passage from that page. Not every chapter gets one, because there is not room for that and the editors were honest enough not to pretend otherwise. But every page does.
The studies follow a familiar shape. There is a short prayer, then a look at what the passage says, then what it means, then what to do about it. If you have used the SOAP method, this will feel like home, with the prayer moved to the front. I think that order is right. A man who asks God to open the text before he reads it is a different reader than one who reads first and prays if he has time.
The studies are brief. That is a feature, not a bug. They are written for a man who has fifteen minutes before work, and they ask one good question rather than five mediocre ones. I read through a stretch of the prophets with this Bible, and the reflection questions kept finding the nerve. Where are you making excuses. Who have you stopped praying for. What have you decided God cannot fix.
The one honest knock I have is that the Courage steps in the “apply” section at the bottom of each page start to repeat after a while. Seven steps across more than a thousand pages means you will see each one a lot. It is a small box and easy to skim past when it does not land. But it does repeat.
The profiles
Scattered through the text are profiles of courageous men, some from church history and some from our own century. These are short, a few paragraphs each, and they do something the study notes cannot. They show you what the thing looks like with skin on it. A man who stood when standing cost him something. I found myself reading these before the study notes more than once.
The NLT
I teach from the NKJV and I always will. But I have said before and will say again that the New Living Translation is the text I hand to a man who has never read the Bible and is a little afraid of it. It reads like plain speech. It does not stop and make you decode it. For the kind of reader this Bible is aimed at, a man who is serious about growth but not yet at home in Scripture, that matters more than the precision a more literal translation preserves.
If you are that man, read this Bible and then, when a passage grabs you, go read the same verses in the NKJV or ESV and notice what shifts. That is how the deeper study starts.
Filament
This Bible is Filament enabled, which means you point your phone at a page and the free Filament app pulls up study notes, maps, videos, profiles, devotionals, and the audio Bible for that exact page. The physical Bible stays a normal size and weight and the extra material lives on your phone.
I like the idea and mostly like the execution. The interactive maps and infographics are good, the kind where you tap a spot and something opens. The study notes are plentiful. The audio Bible is a real gift for a man who does his best thinking behind the wheel.
The videos are the weak spot. They come almost entirely from one source, and the same handful of book overviews and theme videos get offered again and again across many chapters. After a while you stop tapping. That is a complaint about a free app, not about the Bible you paid for, but you should know it going in.
The physical Bible
The LeatherLike cover with the lion engraving is the best looking cover I have seen on a men’s Bible. It is dark and restrained and it does not shout. The binding is solid. The thumb index is helpful if your hands know their way around the books and slightly annoying if they do not. Font size is fine for most eyes. The paper is what you would expect from a study Bible, which is to say thin, with some ghosting in bad light. The outside margins and the top of the page leave real room for notes if you write small.
Who this Bible is for
If you are a young man, a new believer, or a man who has been in church for years and never actually read the book, this is the Bible I would put in your hands. It will not embarrass you and it will not let you off easy.
If you lead a men’s group, this Bible gives you a ready-made structure. Everyone reads the same page, prays the same prayer, wrestles the same question. I can see a Thursday morning breakfast group working through it for a year.
If you are looking for a heavy technical study Bible with textual notes and original language work, this is not that and it was never trying to be. Keep your primary study Bible for that and let this one do its job.
Here is the job. A man opens the Word every morning and, on every page, somebody asks him a hard question and points him back to the God who can answer it. That is not a gimmick. That is discipleship. And it takes a kind of courage most men have never been asked for.
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