Too often, even Christians believe that anxiety and worry are annoying but unavoidable parts of life. “Oh well,” we say, “No one enjoys fear, but it’s to be expected, right?” WRONG. This mindset is a major roadblock to living fearlessly. Let’s talk about it.
About ten years ago, when I first saw the ocean, the Lord began to show me why we should never shy away from the fear of God. In fact, pursuing the fear of God will allow you to be fearless about the very things that used to cause you to panic. In this video, I discuss this subject along with a few others, including the question, What does God’s wrath have to do with His love?
I battled with anxiety for decades (!!!!!), but I’ve been free of it for more than five years. So can you. Take a look at the story of Peter walking on water in a brand new way and discover the key to fearlessness.
First, my apologies for being so lax about posting! What a season this has been! For months and months, I focused on finishing my book (Seven Days of Fearlessness). Then it was time to jump into grant-writing season (yes, I’m also a grant writer). After 4 1/2 months of that, I’m finally coming up for air.
I plan to spend this next season, i.e. the summer of 2018, catching up on my writing, spending time with the grandkids, and doing short videos on the topic of fearlessness. Today I’m offering this excerpt in regard to the one fear that banishes all others: the fear of God. Enjoy.
Though you don’t hear many sermons about the fear of God—and although the modern American church has lost much if not most of its fear of the Lord—the Bible has plenty to say about it. “Blessed is the one who always trembles before God,” we read in Proverbs (28:14, NIV). To fear God is to recognize His authority, dominion, worth, and supremacy while also acknowledging our insignificance and depravity apart from Him. I realize that many people “tone down” this topic by claiming that the fear of God is simply a “healthy respect” such as we’d offer anything that has the potential to get out of hand, such as a bonfire. But I disagree. God isn’t anything like a bonfire; in fact, He can hold the fire of a trillion burning stars in His hand.
When I think about the fear of God, I’m reminded of the ocean. Almost every summer, Kenny and I spend a week in our favorite place on earth, Tybee Island. We’ve developed a ritual: the evening we arrive, after darkness falls, we walk down to the beach. When we’re 30 feet or so from the water, I hand Kenny my shoes and he waits patiently as I take off, barefooted, into the surf. There’s something about the ocean that completely unravels and overwhelms me, so every single year, the same thing happens: I cry, and then I laugh—and often I do both simultaneously. Sometimes I run up and down the beach a little, sometimes I shout into the wind, but always the feeling is one of terror and worship. Every trouble and sorrow that has hounded me is instantly washed away with the surf. I experience exquisite joy and relief, but also the compulsion to fall on my face and cry, Woe is me!
The first year we vacationed in Tybee was also the first time I ever swam in the ocean. Kenny and I bought boogie boards so we could play in the surf. As we jumped the gentle waves for hours, my emotions seesawed from exhilaration to dread and back again. From time to time, I was overcome with the realization that the body of water I was standing in was 25 thousand feet deep in some places and had swallowed thousands of lives. The potential for destruction was unlike anything I’d ever seen or felt, and yet I never wanted to leave.
I knew that what I could see on that brilliant, clear day was nothing in light of the vastness that was the ocean. I imagined the colossal creatures that swam deep under the surface, where no light penetrated. It made other so-called dangers seem laughable. And yet … something inside me wanted to experience this ocean in all its fury, to drown in it, for lack of a better phrase. Nothing had ever scared me like the sea did, and yet there was no place on earth I would rather have been—and this is still true.
Sometime during that first trip to the island, I realized I’d never encountered anything that embodied my feelings about God as perfectly as the ocean. On one hand, He’s “terrible” and terrifying; on the other, He shatters all my preconceptions, sweeps away all my sorrow and guilt, and makes all my other fears seem silly. He’s endless and infinite and yet I’m curled up in the palm of His hand. He evokes tears, laughter, joy, and terror. I want to drown in Him.
To fear God is to sense His fury: to recognize that He could, with a flick of His finger, annihilate every living thing. But here’s where the fear of God begets fearlessness in all other matters: the fact that He could annihilate us in an instant means He can do the same to our enemies.
And even though He could snuff out a billion times a billion stars with a single breath, He’s chosen to save rather than crush those who call Him Lord. Meanwhile, He’s defeated darkness, sin, and death, and one day His enemies “will wage war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will triumph over them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers” (Revelation 17:14, NIV).
“O Lord God of heaven, the great and terrible God…” (Nehemiah 1:5, KJV).
Photos: fotolia
In the late 90s and early 2000s, my friend Debbie and I went camping about twice a year. We’d load her car with everything from the basics (like tent and lanterns) to totally useless stuff (like whitener strips and a welcome mat) and spend a few days cooking pancakes over a butane burner, hiking until we hobbled, and pulling ticks off our ankles. At the time, I was almost two decades into a 23-year marriage that was void of everything that makes a marriage tolerable, much less meaningful. Anxiety played a daily role in my marriage and in life as a whole, but a few days at Fall Creek Falls always reminded me how to breathe again.
Debbie and I always took full advantage of those outings to work on our issues. Mine included codependence, unhealthy boundaries, a victim mentality, and—of course—fear. One of our approaches to helping me overcome fear was to take night hikes. We’d wait until nine or ten at night, when all was deathly still and dark, grab our flashlights, and venture down a trail, away from the safety of neighboring campsites and the reassuring flicker of our campfire. Into the deep woods we’d go, armed with nothing but my can of pepper spray and her husband’s buck knife.
Usually we’d walk for ten or twelve minutes, congratulate ourselves, then turn around and walk back. But on this particular night, we either took an unfamiliar path or went a little farther than usual—I don’t recall the exact circumstances—but the point is that our surroundings seemed especially eerie and unfamiliar.
Just a few minutes into our walk, we both shrieked as a deer, startled from its bed in the underbrush, shot to its feet and darted away. The forest was so dark that, even with flashlights, we couldn’t tell if it was a buck or doe, but it sounded massive, cracking tree limbs as it retreated into the blackness. Hearts pounding, we pressed on, determined to go a little further.
Suddenly, we stepped out of the thick woods and onto a peninsula of sorts. The area looked like a swamp. In front of us was a stretch of land or water—the shadows made it impossible to tell which—interrupted by clumps of tall grass that shuddered in the breeze and created peculiar shadows. The place screamed of swamp monsters and unnamable creatures with jagged teeth.
For a long, icy moment, we both stood motionless. Then, as if on cue, we pivoted as fear propelled us into a dead run—down the dirt path, through the brush and the inky darkness we sprinted, tripping over one another, flapping our arms like birds caught in a snare, laughing one moment and screaming the next.
When we burst out of the trees, back into the fire-lit circle of our cozy campsite, we collapsed to our knees, choking with laughter and trembling with lingering fear.
We were appalled at how miserably we’d botched our night hike. But today I have to wonder: Was our experiment in fearlessness a complete failure? I don’t think so. Granted, we bolted, but not before we’d completed the task we’d set out to do. In spite of all the screaming and flailing, by golly, we did it.
Sometimes God will ask you to jump through a ring of fire and you’ll say yes even though you’re terrified of fire. Sometimes you’ll jump while shrieking and flapping your arms. In the end, the fact remains that you said yes… and you jumped.. and you cleared the ring without being burnt to a crisp…
and that is victory.
Here’s a sneak peek at the book I’m currently writing, Seven Days of Fearlessness. My goal is to finish it by the end of this month. My plate is less full than normal right now, and I’ve set aside a week to hide and write at a cabin in the woods owned by some friends of ours (thank you S and T, I love you), so finishing is actually feasible. However (if this isn’t the most ironic thing I’ve said all year, I don’t know what is), the whole idea of finishing this book about fearlessness is giving me anxiety: What if, when I’m finally done, I realize I’ve written nothing more than a 30,000-word collection of drivel and slop? Or what if I leave out something crucial, or—worst of all—say something that’s not doctrinally sound? What if I not only fail to find a publishing company who wants it, but they send me rejection emails full of LOL emoticons?
And that’s when I remember that I’m doing the very thing this book addresses: fretting. Spending my energy on worry. Wasting precious time on ridiculous, exhausting thought processes. In other words, the truth the Lord gave me, and which I’m attempting to put down on paper in this book, needs to be said. So let’s get on with it.
When Jesus called His disciples, He expected immediate obedience, and they gave Him just that. The moment He said, “Follow Me,” they dropped what they were doing and walked away from their old lives. There was no time to second-guess Jesus’ command, work out the details, overthink the situation, or even say goodbye to their friends and family. Imagine if Peter, Andrew, and the rest had said, “We want to follow You, Jesus, but it’s scary to abandon everything we’ve known to go who-knows-where and do who-knows-what as Your disciples. As soon as we muster up the courage and work out the details, we’ll give You a call.” No doubt Jesus would have moved on and found other disciples who were willing to obey before they possessed full understanding, unwavering faith, or unflappable courage.
Sometimes, faith and fortitude arise in our heart, followed by obedience. But more often, obedience must happen while faith, understanding, and courage are in short supply. Don’t wait for the courage to follow Jesus unreservedly, or one day you’ll be eighty years old and wondering why He never gave you the wherewithal to change your corner of the world. The original command—”Follow Me”—is all you need to obey. Courage and clarity will be released in the obeying.
From: Seven Days of Fearlessness
From the moment we’re born, we long for security. And then we grow up, and one day we realize we’re still searching for that “everything’s-gonna-to-be-okay” feeling. Some of us spend year after year scrambling for something—anything—that will produce at least an illusion of security. We might run after relationships, control, wealth, pleasure, experiences, or prestige in the hope that we’ll finally feel safe. Sooner or later, we discover that our bogus safety nets have failed to give us the security we long for.
And then we encounter Jesus. Hurray! we think as we breathe a sigh of relief. He’ll keep me safe! My troubles are over. But our contentment is short-lived if our methods of feeling safe are no better than they were before (even though they might look more virtuous). For example, if we make up our mind to be “good enough” so that God won’t reject us, we discover we just can’t cut it. (We’ll also become overbearing and legalistic in the process.) Or if we assume that security lies in “head knowledge,” we’ll educate ourselves until we become theologians with no heart. Frustrated and exhausted, we’ll eventually realize our religious safety nets have failed us as miserably as our conventional ones did.
Here’s the clincher: the deep sense of safety we all long for can’t be found through worldly methods, but it can’t be found in Christian living, either. There’s a lot to be said for living according to God’s principles, but He—not holiness or good works—is our hiding place. Security comes only through Him. “No one is able to snatch [you] out of the Father’s hand” (John 10:29). You are secure only when you’re hidden in Christ.
The God-life doesn’t guarantee safety and in fact might take us into dangerous circumstances, so we might as well forfeit all counterfeit forms of security and cling only to Him.
