How to Stand Up for What's Right

The Shop Didn't Charge You Enough — What Do You Do?

It is a small moment. You are at the till, you glance at the receipt, and you realise they have missed something off. The total is lower than it should be. Nobody has noticed. You could walk out, pocket the difference, and nobody would ever know.

What do you do?

It seems like a trivial question. But as Matt explores in this talk from the book of Acts, what you do in those small moments is a remarkably accurate predictor of what you will do when the stakes are genuinely high. Standing up for what is right is not primarily a matter of courage. It is a matter of character. And character is forged long before the big moments arrive.

The Anatomy of Standing Up

There are actually two challenges buried inside the phrase "standing up for what's right." The first is the standing up part — being seen, being heard, changing your position in a way that others will notice. That is the bit that makes your heart race.

"We worry about how people may react, about the potential of conflict, whether we'll be seen as a bit of a fruit cake," Matt says. "What happens when we stick our neck out and put it on the proverbial chopping block?"

The second challenge is knowing what "right" actually is. We tend to assume we know, but the moment someone pushes back, doubt creeps in. Do we really know what is true here? Are we sure enough to put ourselves on the line for it?

Both of these tensions — the fear of conflict and the uncertainty about truth — can paralyse us into silence. And most of us have been there. At work, when a decision was made that felt wrong. Online, when a friend posted something we disagreed with. In a conversation, when we knew we should speak but could not bring ourselves to do it.

Stephen and the Character Question

In Acts chapter 6, the Bible introduces us to Stephen. He was one of the seven chosen to help serve the early church — a practical role, looking after the needs of the community. But the description of his character is striking: full of faith, full of the Holy Spirit, full of God's grace and power.

The Bible also tells us he performed great wonders and signs among the people. But Matt is careful to point out that the wonders and signs are not the headline. The headline is the character underneath them.

"The Bible is kind of painting a picture of Stephen and his character," Matt says. "He is a caring and kind guy. He knows God and he is demonstrating God's love and compassion practically through serving and spiritually through prayer."

This matters because standing up for what is right, at its core, is a character issue. It is not something you can switch on when the pressure arrives. It is something that has been built — or not built — in a thousand small moments before that.

"Character is not something that we buy," Matt says. "It is something that is forged. And it is forged in how we respond to the guy in the shop that hasn't charged us enough. Because it's here that I learned to feel that slightly uncomfortable feeling, to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and to do the right thing."

Understanding the People Who Disagree With You

Here is where the story gets more nuanced than we might expect. Opposition arose against Stephen from members of the synagogue of the Freedmen, and they began to argue with him. It would be easy to cast these people as the villains. But Matt resists that reading.

"Before we jump in and judge them, let's find out who is this vocal minority and why are they opposing Stephen," he says. "It's easy to read this story and just think of these guys as the bad guys, but I'm not so sure they were."

These were Jewish people who genuinely wanted to please God. They had customs, laws, and traditions that were deeply important to them, and they felt those things were being threatened by the growing church. Their reaction was defensive, not malicious. They were protecting what they valued.

And Stephen, crucially, would have understood this. In all likelihood, he attended the very synagogue these opponents came from. These were not strangers with alien beliefs. They were people from his own community, operating from his own traditions.

"Stephen went to this synagogue where these guys were coming to oppose him from," Matt explains. "He understood those that opposed him, and it's important to understand."

This is a vital principle that gets lost in an age of online arguments and tribal positioning. Understanding the people who disagree with you is not the same as agreeing with them. But it changes how you engage. It moves you from combative to compassionate. From dismissive to genuinely curious about what is driving their reaction.

The Paralysis of Cultural Pressure

One of the most honest parts of this talk is Matt's acknowledgment that standing up for what is right has become especially difficult in a culture that labels disagreement as intolerance.

"We may have questions about a topic, or we may see something that conflicts with our faith or our values," he says, "but we worry that if we ask those questions or take a stand on certain issues, we're gonna be labelled as intolerant or bigoted. And it can be actually quite a paralysing thing to feel that pressure."

This is not a theoretical concern. Many people — Christian or otherwise — have felt the weight of knowing they should say something but fearing the social cost of doing so. The fear of being misunderstood, of being placed in a category they do not belong in, of losing relationships or standing.

The irony is that avoiding this discomfort does not make it go away. It just shifts the discomfort inward, into the quiet knowledge that you did not say what you believed to be true when it mattered.

Five Things That Build the Courage to Speak

Matt outlines a practical framework from Stephen's story. The first element is working on personal character — building the muscle of integrity in small, everyday moments so that when the larger tests come, the response is already wired in.

The second is understanding and empathising with your opponents. Not to capitulate to them, but to engage with them as actual human beings with real concerns, rather than as caricatures to be defeated.

Stephen did not treat his opponents with contempt. He engaged with their tradition, their history, their scriptures. He took them seriously enough to give a thorough, well-informed response. That is a very different posture from the one we typically see modelled in public discourse.

The Cost That Stephen Was Willing to Pay

What makes Stephen's story ultimately powerful is not that he won the argument. He did not, at least not in any immediate sense. His opponents were enraged by his words. They dragged him out of the city and stoned him to death.

Stephen became the first Christian martyr. He stood up for what was right, and it cost him everything.

But his story did not end with his death. The persecution that followed scattered the church across the region, spreading the gospel further and faster than it had ever travelled before. And watching from the sidelines, holding the coats of those who threw the stones, was a young man named Saul — who would later become the apostle Paul and carry the message of Jesus across the known world.

Stephen's courage had consequences he never lived to see. And that might be the most important lesson of all. Standing up for what is right does not always produce an immediate, visible result. Sometimes the fruit of your faithfulness grows in soil you will never stand on.

The Practice Ground Is Today

If standing up for what is right in the big moments depends on the character built in the small ones, then the most important arena is not the dramatic confrontation. It is the Tuesday afternoon decision. The receipt that is wrong. The comment you know you should make. The conversation you have been avoiding.

"I practice in the small things," Matt says, "so when the big things come along, I know what to do."

Something to Sit With

Where is the Holy Spirit putting his finger on your character right now? Not in the dramatic, headline-worthy areas of your life, but in the quiet, unremarkable ones — the places where nobody is watching and the cost of doing the right thing is small enough that you could easily avoid it?

That is where courage is built. And it is built one small decision at a time.