God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline. (2 Timothy 1:7)We are a scared society. We are scared of terrorists, we are scared of each other, we are scared of our cars breaking, scared of our food poisoning us, scared of our drugs, of our environment, of our very existence.
To feed this, every day, the news media tells us another bad thing happening in the world. And not only do they tell us about it, they go there with cameras and take pictures of suffering people and get stories of suffering so that we can know exactly what it is and exactly how we need to be scared.
After a while, it breeds suspicion. It is a suspicion not only of each other, but of all of the stuff we use and come into contact with.
The worst part is that we have to use these things, we have to see each other, we have to live in this scary world. and that makes us eve more scared. There is nowhere we can go to get away from the fear.
We are afraid because we do not trust God. We are afraid because he is not firmly enough planted in our lives. Because he is not there strongly enough, we have to rely on ourselves. And we are not enough to protect us from the thought of dying.
There it is. We are afraid of dying. And all of the stuff around us is the stuff that will kill us.
When God is in our lives, death is not the great Monster that it is when he is not in us. And what is more, fear is not the pervading feeling in our lives.
That is not to say the Christian will not be afraid on occasions. God gave us a healthy dose of self-preservation instinct to keep us from harm. And he expects us to use it.
But when a person is in Jesus, in his grace and in the presence of God, he doesn’t need to be afraid.
Whatever it is you are afraid of, it is not a fear that is sent by God. It is sent by your own heart in its effort to rule your heart instead of letting God rule it.
Fear of change, fear of having the wrong translation, fear of certain food and drink, fear of worshiping wrongly – these are all fears of the devil, not of God. And they are one of his greatest tools to separate you from God. As long as you are afraid, you have trouble really living for God.
If it comes from God, it is power, love and self-discipline. If it comes from God, it is strength to live. If it comes from God, it is power to praise him anyway no matter what else happens. If it comes from God, it is the ability to look at the scary world and say If God is for us, then who can ever be against us (Romans 8:31).
When we recognize that power, we learn to live above the world. the scary stuff is still there, but it is not as important any more. He is in control.
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