What do we do with the fear that we face in a crisis like this, let alone in daily life? What does the Bible say about fear?

<p>What do we do with the fear that we face in a crisis like this, let alone in daily life? What does the Bible say about fear?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

CORE Evangelism School

Dee Casper

There’s No Thief Like Fear

I almost said my topic for tomorrow in the Philippines.

So, tonight's topic is on the topic of fear.

There's no thief like fear is the name of it.

That name is borrowed, but I liked it, so I stole it.

It's from a song, but I'd rather hear the acoustic version of that song, but it's a whole other story.

All right, let's pray, and then let's begin our interactive Bible study this evening on the topic of fear.

God in heaven, thank you for this privilege to pray.

Thank you that you love us, that you've been so good to us, that we have life, we have health, we have the internet, we have a way to fellowship with people from around the world.

So I just pray that your Holy Spirit would be among us in a very special way.

That you give me clarity in the things that I need to be communicating and I just pray that this would bless these people and whoever will hear it afterwards.

Now Before I go into tonight's study, I want to make 1 point of clarification from last week's study.

So, we were talking about the topic of pain and finding purpose in pain, and I had mentioned the fact that in working with my therapist, 1 of the things that he had mentioned was the only way to deal with pain is to feel it.

I want to be abundantly clear that we are not asking that you relive traumatic memories and graphic details of those memories.

More what was being implied was to actually allow yourself to grieve the fact that this happened, to let yourself feel the pain that something has happened as opposed to just trying to stuff it down or do something else with it.

We're not encouraging people to relive traumatic experiences, but to allow yourself to actually grieve and feel the pain that that situation caused.

So I'm passionate about this topic for a multitude of reasons.

For 1, fear has been a massive stronghold of my own life because of experiences when I was younger, but 2, there are many people I love and care about who wrestle with this idea of fear that they have just been hurt in different ways or different things have happened and fear had kind of governed their decision-making and it could just make a slave out of us.

It can make us invalid spiritually and can cause us a lot of difficulties, and so I want to go into that this evening to hopefully allow some healing to come to all of us, including myself.

2 Timothy 1, verse 7 says that God has not given us a spirit of fear, this doesn't come from Him, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

Now I'd like to kind of take this and say what it isn't saying.

This is implying that fear robs us of power, that it robs us of the ability to love, to love God and others, and to be loved by God and others, and it robs us of the ability to be able to think and make decisions with a sound mind.

Fear literally alters the way that we do the basic essentials of life.

It can cause us a lot of difficulties, and God doesn't want that.

Fear can even lead us to make bad decisions.

Some examples of this are the people in the Gadarenes in Luke chapter 8.

So Jesus goes to the Gadarenes, casts demons out of this guy.

Text says later that he's seated and clothed in his right mind, but before that happens, the demons are cast into these pigs, they run off the end of the cliff, and the people are so freaked out by what Jesus has done and the fact that they see this guy who's, you know, was demon-possessed and naked in the cemetery now seated and clothed in his right mind, it freaks him out, right?

And so Jesus doesn't want that for any of us, but fear can lead us to make bad decisions.

So literally their response to this miracle of Jesus is to tell him, get out of here, man.

They're scared and they tell him to leave.

Can you imagine telling the Messiah, the Lord of glory to leave?

Basically the entire life of King Saul after his fall and onward is filled with fear and making terrible decisions.

We see Elijah in 1 Kings 19 being horrified by the fact that Jezebel wants him dead and he runs for his life and even runs from the call of God on his life.

Peter denies Jesus in John chapter 18 because of fear, and many other examples could be marshaled, but the point is fear can lead us to make poor decisions, decisions that are not in our best interest.

So if God hasn't given us the spirit of fear and doesn't want us to have that type of experience, what's the solution then?

Well, 1 John chapter 4 verses 16 and 17 says this, and we'll read a little bit more from there too, but it says, God doesn't want you to just know intellectually that He loves you.

He wants you to know experientially and believe that He loves you and the love that he has for you.

And it says that he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.

And that love has been perfected among us in this that we may have boldness in the day of judgment.

Many of us may have an experience that is filled with fear when we think about the judgment.

He wants us to be able to stand in boldness in the day of judgment because as He is, so are we in this world.

Continuing in verse 18, it says, there is no fear in love, but that perfect love casts out fear.

God wants us to have an encounter with his perfect love that will cast out all of our fear, because fear involves torment.

But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.

She who fears has not been made perfect in love.

Then it says that we love him because he first loved us.

It is impossible to love God until you first encounter his love for you.

So listen to this, This is from the book Desire of Ages.

Love revealed throughout his pilgrimage on earth from the manger of Bethlehem to Calvary's cross and the sight of him attracts it softens and subdues the soul and love awakens in the heart of the beholders they hear his voice and they follow him beautiful beautiful this is from from eternity past this kind of like a modernized version of Patriarchs and Prophets.

Let the youth see the tender love the Father in heaven has manifested toward them, and the dignity and honor to which they are called, even to become the sons of God.

And thousands would turn with contempt from selfish aims and pleasures that have hitherto engrossed them.

They would learn to hate sin, not merely from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment, but from a sense of its inherent baseness." So, love is the only pure and true power that should motivate us in our experience and in our decision-making.

And the only way to find that love is to first encounter God's love for us.

Again, this is in 1 John 4, 19, that we love Him because He first loved us.

So, fear robs us of our love for God and our love for others because we're afraid of being hurt.

It even keeps us from letting ourselves receive love that we feel that we don't deserve.

We're afraid to trust again, to be vulnerable again, to hope again.

But what we desperately need is a life course altering encounter with God's perfectly selfless love for us to be fully known and fully loved.

It drives out all of our fear and it brings us to a deeper love for Him and the capacity to be willing to love and to be loved ourselves.

There's an example of a friend of mine that just still makes me sad, someone who's actually 1 of the reasons I became a Seventh-day Adventist Christian and is no longer in the faith, is no longer really a practicing Christian, still a very good friend of mine, but I remember sharing with them, it's very difficult for me to understand what's so attractive about naturalism.

Because it completely denies the intrinsic moral value of a human being, that right, you have no real purpose, you came from nothing, you'll end up as nothing, and all of us desperately want to be fully known and fully loved.

So it's a difficult thing for us to, it's hard to understand what's so attractive about that.

And the answer they gave me I was totally unprepared for as a minister of the gospel.

They said, I wrestled, and I told them, I wrestled to understand the appeal of atheism because it denies the intrinsic moral value of a human being, and then the response was, what makes it so appealing is that you don't have to deal with the fear of having hope and then end up being disappointed anymore.

What makes naturalism so attractive is the fact that I don't have to get my hopes up and then be disappointed or heartbroken.

And it's a tragic, tragic response and thought process, but I am fully of the mind that many people, especially in the Western world, are not atheists because of scientific reasons.

They're atheists because of experiences that are deeply discouraging and are not reflective of what God is actually like.

Bad religion, bad experiences with religious people, discouragement.

You got your hopes up and then your heart was crushed or you were violated or hurt by other people.

But Romans chapter 5 and verse 5 says that hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

So it's not something that God wants in our experience to lose hope, Right?

God pours His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Psalm 119 says this, 1 Corinthians 9.10 says this, observe your statutes continually.

1 Corinthians 9 10 says this, that he who plows should plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should be a partaker of his hope.

Galatians 6 9 says, let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we don't lose heart.

And in Romans chapter 15 and verse 13, 1 of my favorites, it says, now may the God of hope, we talked about this last week, the God of comfort, he's also referred to as the God of hope in Romans 15 and 13.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, and that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So abject fear is not God's chosen method to reach us or to motivate us.

In fact, in many ways, it's a selfish motivation.

If you're making religious decisions and moral decisions based upon fear, it's largely rooted in selfishness.

It leads us to make decisions to protect ourselves and to provide for ourselves instead of relying upon God to protect us and provide for us, which can be problematic because then our decision-making becomes our Savior instead of our Savior, right?

Interestingly, in many of the supernatural encounters that the people of God had with Him or with angels, they would be greeted with a tender charge to fear not or do not be afraid.

God doesn't want our experience with Him to be driven by fear, but by true love.

He wants our perspective to shift to something better." And this reminds me of Hosea chapter 2, right?

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There’s No Thief Like Fear

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