Tag: Fear

Trust When All Else Fails

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We live in a world awash in anxiety. We hear all the time about just how anxious everyone around us is. Kids are anxious. Teens are especially anxious. Women are anxious. Men are anxious. Young adults are anxious. Older adults are anxious. Everyone is anxious. And we’re miserable because of it. It seems like this is not how things should be. Well, that’s because they shouldn’t be like this. In the Scriptures we can find all sorts of wisdom and counsel for dealing with anxiety in our lives and in the world around us. For this and the next three weeks, we are going to be talking about just like. We’ll start today with the very first thing we should do when fear and anxiety make a play for our hearts.

Trust When All Else Fails

Let’s start with an informal survey this morning. By a show of hands, who in here likes to be scared? Okay, for all the rest of the normal people in the room, who doesn’t like to be scared? There are some folks—as indicated by our little survey—who enjoy being scared. These are the kinds of people who love scary movies or going to Scarowinds in the fall. Personally, I do not count myself among their number. I don’t typically watch scary movies, and I generally avoid the horror genre. I love you guys who do. I admire you. But I am perfectly content watching you intentionally put yourself in situations that will leave you losing your mind and looking really silly while you do it from the sidelines. I will give you two guarantees: I will support you, and I will also laugh at you. 

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Woman sitting cross-legged on a blanket meditating on a mountain overlooking a valley at sunrise

Morning Musing: Philippians 4:6-7

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“Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Our world is awash in anxiety. It’s popular in many places to have a therapist or counselor these days which is a good thing, but the very fact that so many feel like they need that help is an indication of the problem. The truth is that many more people could use it than actually get it. Yet while there is undoubtedly anxiety that is genuinely clinical, a great deal more of it is more situational in nature. It is the result of not having the worldview resources to deal with the challenges life throws our way from time to time. Christianity has such worldview resources, and one of the best of them is right here. Let’s take a look.

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Giving An Answer

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Imagine you’re in a conversation and somebody asks you why you are a follower of Jesus. What would you say? For most of us, the very prospect of that situation unfolding is enough to make us break out in a cold sweat. The last thing in the world we want to do is to be asked a question about our faith that we potentially can’t answer. And yet, we are called to be able to give a response. Let’s talk today about the apostle Peter’s counsel on giving an answer and some practical steps we can take to be able to do just that.

Giving An Answer

We are a people given to fear. We fear all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Go look up a list of phobias sometime. You won’t be able to pronounce most of them, but the definitions will at least amuse you. Some of them seem like they have at least some sort of a rational justification for them like a fear of snakes (herpetophobia) or heights (acrophobia). Others seem just silly like a fear of the number 4 (tetraphobia) or the color yellow (xanthophobia). Then there are some that seem like someone just made them up entirely so they could create a long, impossible to pronounce word like hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia which, of course, is the fear of the number 666 (which, in case you were interested, my spell checker actually caught and flagged as being misspelled; not because it is a random jumble of letters, but because I swapped and “e” for an “a”). Most of those fears, though, are pretty niche. I don’t know of many people who suffer from arachibutyrophobia, the fear of peanut butter getting stuck to the roof of your mouth. But there are some fears that are common and which have plagued humanity from time immemorial like death. 

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Morning Musing: Matthew 6:31-32

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“So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat? ’ or ‘What will we drink? ’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Do you really know who God is? How well do you know Him? Do you know what His character is? Those are all questions you may answer instinctively if you’ve been around the church long enough to be programmed to answer them in a certain way, or they may prompt a bit more reflectiveness in you. I’d like you to really give it some thought today. Yesterday at camp we talked about having a trusting heart. This is a heart that has a grasp of God’s character that goes beyond the surface. There are several places in the Scriptures that call us to have this kind of a heart. Here’s one we talked about yesterday.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 4:10-12

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“But Moses replied to the Lord, ‘Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent – either in the past or recently or since you have been speaking to your servant – because my mouth and my tongue are sluggish.’ The Lord said to him, ‘Who placed a mouth on humans? Who makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I hate excuses. Hearing someone else refuse to take responsibility for something they have said or done, but instead offer up a list of reasons why it is everybody else’s fault makes me want to drive my head through a wall (or better yet, their head). I hate excuses. Unless, of course, I am the one making them. Then they aren’t excuses at all. They’re explanations for why things turned out the way they did that are entirely reasonable. When God answered Moses’ hopefully disqualifying question of what would make the people believe he really came from God so convincingly, he switched from objections to excuses. Let’s take a look at what he said and how God responded.

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