Tag: When I Am Afraid

Learning to Trust

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This week we are wrapping up our short series, When I Am Afraid. For the last three weeks we have been talking about how to deal with times of fear and anxiety in our lives. Ultimately, the way we are going to get through that particular storm is through our willingness to trust in God. But what if we don’t trust in God? What if someone we know who is struggling under the weight of life doesn’t trust in God? What then? Well, we have to learn how and why trusting Him is the best decision we’ll ever make. In this last part of our journey, unpacking that truth is what we are talking about with the help of something Jesus said that reveals a great deal about His character. Let’s dive right in.

Learning to Trust

I want you to think for a second about someone you just don’t trust. My guess is that you have at least one person in your life who fits that particular bill. I’m not as concerned with the precise reason for the mistrust right now as I am with the presence of the mistrust itself. Do you have that person in mind? Now, imagine that you are struggling with something fairly significant and this person comes and offers you help. Are you going to accept it? Probably not, right? Maybe if you are sufficiently desperate you’ll give it some consideration, but absent that, you’ll keep on struggling on your own rather than take help from this person. Why? Because you don’t trust them. You don’t trust they are really going to be there when you need them. You don’t trust they aren’t offering with insincere or ulterior motives. You don’t trust they aren’t going to let you down in the end. You don’t trust them. And when you don’t trust someone, it’s hard to receive much of anything from them. 

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More Than Meets the Eye

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Sometimes we feel alone. We feel alone when we are all by ourselves. We feel alone when we are surrounded by people. Isolation isn’t a function of the proximity of other people. It’s more often first a mental state. When our circumstances get hard, or when we get into sin of some kind, we start to feel disconnected from the people around us, the people who love us. When this happens, our anxiety starts to grow. Then we start to feel disconnected from God. We struggle to see His help in our situation, and things just get worse. Elijah understood this feeling. He felt isolated and alone and terribly anxious because of it. Today as we continue our series, we are going to look at God’s encouragement to him and what that means for us. Let’s dive right in.

More Than Meets the Eye

I finally finished watching the Cobra Kai series on Netflix recently. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically a modern continuation of the Karate Kid story from the trio of excellent movies in the 1980s and early 1990s. To say the whole thing is a remarkable story of redemption and restoration is an understatement. It was fantastic. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch—very little out of Hollywood is these days—but it got Gospel redemption right in some really profound ways. There’s something else it got right as well. 

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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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