Fear

In the struggle for the release of fear I have learned an important truth. “You cannot love what you fear.” This principle applies to all of life. For you it could be the person that betrayed your love. It could be your children. It could be your spouse. It could be your job. Fear keeps you from truly loving. We cannot love what we fear.
Most of us go through life plucking petals from daisies. With every situation we ask ourselves does God love me or have I done something to disapprove of his love. We don’t do it intentionally because we have been taught that God’s love is infinite and never changing but yet we cannot help to react this way because we find this is how life works. We have discovered what pleases people and we either do it so we can be loved or we do not do it so we can get the attention we may be lacking. We grew up knowing what pleased our parents and if we wanted to go to a friends house on the weekend we did what pleased our parents. We know what pleases the boss and to get a pay check we do it. We get a reaction from our parents as a child that we didn’t expect and we say, “Do they love me?” We get a reaction from our spouse and we ask the same thing. We go through life playing this game: He loves me. He loves me not. We are left with a life filled with fear, doubt, anger, guilt, and worry.
Over the next few weeks we will explore how to live life beyond a daisy petal existence. My goal for this series is that all of us will understand that God’s love is constant no matter if our reality changes. I want you to know that you can live your life from the center of God’s love and not have to be questioning whether he loves me or he loves me not. Life does not have to be full of fear, doubt, anger, guilt, or worry.
We start with fear. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve have sinned by disobeying God’s command. When God seeks them out for their daily walk we find them hiding. The bible gives the reason for their hiding – they are afraid. And we have been afraid ever since. Afraid of God and of life. (Show video)
Every one of us can name our fears. We know what scares us. I am afraid of disappointing people, of letting others down. Some of us are afraid of getting sick. Some of us are haunted by being alone. Some of us have nightmares of finding out the truth so we live a lie. We are afraid of death. We are afraid of living. From a religious perspective we are afraid of displeasing God. We are afraid of failure. We are afraid of being made a fool. We are afraid of losing all we have worked so hard to get. We are afraid we have not done enough. Afraid of being found out that I am not who I really say I am.
One time I went to a church to preach. I had never been there so no one knew me. I walked around talking to the folks introducing myself only by my first name. I sat down beside this one woman. Introduced myself and we talked. She poured out her life story. She talked about how sorry her husband was, how rebellious her children were, and how boring she found her job. Later in the evening, the minister introduced me and the woman felt embarrassed that she had just told her miserable existence to the preacher. Here she was a leader in the church thinking she is telling this to some visitor and it turns out to be the guest preacher. When you are the “guest preacher” or “preacher” in general it changes the dynamics. Because this person represents God we cannot be real. We must put on a front, be something that we are really not, we must act as though I have it together and that nothing in life scares me. When we do this and we all do, it reveals more about our understanding of God than most of us realize. We believe that God cannot handle the real me. We are afraid of what God may think. The underlining truth about fear is that fear is the belief that God is unable or unwilling. When we fear something or someone we are stating that God is unable to handle the situation or the person. We cannot love what we fear. As long as fear remains in our lives we will never love life or others the way God intended.
In Psalm 27 we learn that David attacked his fears by focusing on God. Let’s look at Psalm 27 again. David says, “The Lord is my _____________” What? He doesn’t say God will give me a light but that God will be his light. He goes on to say, “my light and my ____________”What? He says the Lord is his redeemer, the one who saves. The next part of verse one David says, “The Lord is my _____________” What? God is the one who holds my life in the palm of his hand. He is the one who has the final say over life and death. God is David’s light, salvation, and refuge. The point is that God does not give us light, salvation, or refuge but that He is our light, salvation, and refuge. David does not pray for a light, nor does he pray for salvation, or for a hiding places because he understands God to be all these things. We are still playing the he loves me. He loves me not game because we have trusted in God’s provisions instead of God. We have never fully trusted God. We say we have, we may have made some type of profession but many of us have not fully placed our trust in God. Fear in our life shows that we have areas of our life that have fully never been given over to God. It says to God, “I’ll trust you with my salvation, my eternal destiny but not with my finances, job, children, or health.” This Psalm teaches us to go deeper than asking, “Am I afraid?” It challenges us to ask, “Why am I fearful?” Take a moment to reflect on your fear. Does it come down to the fact that it is one area that you have not surrendered to God yet? Is it an area you are still trying to figure out on your own? Is it a place in your life you have been trying to fix? The area of your life that you still fear is an area that you have yet to surrender to God. Jesus died on the cross so that you do not have to live in fear. When we fear we are saying we don’t believe that the cross has the power to overcome. The cross of Jesus Christ is not just about God taking on our punishment. The cross is about how much God loves us and shows us at what length He is willing to go to demonstrate that love.
So how do we live beyond fear? How do we conquer the fear in our life? It is really simple actually – focus on God. Turn your attention to God. David in the Psalm ask for one thing. In verse four he says, “One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.” For an Israelite, the “house of the Lord,” the temple is what housed the presence of the Lord. If you wanted to hang out with God, you went to the temple. So what David is saying is “The one thing I want is to be in the presence of the Lord.” I want to walk in the shelter of God’s love. I want to be in constant communion with God. Now some of us think that we still have to go to a physical building to make that happen. We think that the only place I can do that is in a building on Sunday morning. But that is not true. After the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we can have God’s presence constant in our life regardless of where we may be or what may be going on. When we make Jesus the leader of our life, really the leader of our life, we can walk without fear. Focus on God and your fears will disappear. As long as you fail to have Jesus at the center of your life you will always have fears. For this reason I believe that following Jesus is a journey. It is a journey to displace fears with trust. Some of you have come to a place in your life today that you need to do that now. You need to stop focusing on your fears and start focusing on God. Have you ever prayed this prayer, “God, please take away my fear?” How about if we prayed instead, “God, show me why I am so fearful?” Fears demonstrate a belief that God is unable. God is not unable but until you let go of those fears and trust Him you will be living your life with that understanding. I also know that trusting is one of the hardest things you can do.
I grew up on a dirt road and you know what people do on dirt roads? They dump their unwanted pets on dirt roads. We would always come across an abandoned cat or dog. We took in a few dogs. Remember me saying, “We cannot love what we fear.” Well that was the relationship I had with cats. I didn’t fully trust a cat so, well you know. A dog though, especially a puppy, I would feel sorry for. Have you ever tried to win the trust of an abandoned puppy? A puppy that was malnourished, abused, and abandoned. You get down eye level with it. So it can see you. The puppy tries to decide whether I’m safe or not. She makes a few steps forward, then thinks better and turns her head away as if to break the spell about to overcome her. On those occasions I would love to rush in, scoop her off her feet and convince her how safe she is, but if I so much as lean forward , she runs off further into the darkness. This little puppy has no idea what awaits her if she can overcome her fear.
In John 14: 2- 3, Jesus says, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” When we read this passage we normally think of what? Heaven. But Jesus is still talking about his first comimg – his death on the cross; and his second coming back – the resurrection. The cross stands as the event that opens the door for us to dwell in God’s love. Like David, Jesus is saying, “we can live constantly in God’s presence.” To be in the place that Jesus speaks of is not necessarily a place, heaven is a place we will one day experience, but it is a reality. It is a life without fear, a life of trust.
The puppy just outside my reach has no idea what awaits her is she can overcome her fear. All the food, love, nurture, and assurance of life that she needs I can offer if she can just turn her focus from her fear. The same holds true for us. We can fear less and trust more by focusing on God’s love for us – a love that is unchanging.