Knowing God inspires courage.

   3. Those who know God show great boldness for God. Daniel and his friends were men who stuck their necks out. This was not foolhardiness. They knew what the were doing. They had counted the cost. They had measured the risk. They were well aware what the outcome of their actions would be unless God miraculously intervened, as in fact he did.
   But these things did not move them. Once they were convinced that their stand was right, and that loyalty to their God required them to take it, then, in Oswald Chambers’s phrase, they, “smilingly washed their hands of the consequences.” “We must obey God rather than men!” said the apostles (Acts 5:29). “Neither count I my life dear to myself, so that I might finish my course with joy,” said Paul (Acts 20:24 KJV).
   This was precisely the spirit of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. It is the spirit of all who know God. They may find the determination of the right course to take agonizingly difficult, but once they are clear on it they embrace it boldly and without hesitation. It does not worry them . (Were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego the only Jews who declined the worship of Nebuchadnezzars’s image? Nothing in their recorded words suggest that they either knew or, in the final analysis, cared. They were clear as to what they personally had to do, and that was enough for them.) By this test also we may measure our own knowledge of God.

—J. I. Packer, Knowing God (InterVarsity Press, 1993), 30.