Fear diminishes our quality of life, our ability to love, and keeps us from the freedom we gain in Christ. But how does fear affect faith? How can we move from fear to faith?
Below is an excerpt from Max Lucado’s Encouraging Word Bible. Max gives you notes, short articles, and various study tools to meet you where you are with encouragement and insight.
Your Encouraging Word
What’s your worst fear?
A fear of public failure, unemployment, or heights? The fear that you’ll never find the right spouse or enjoy good health? The fear of being trapped, abandoned, or forgotten?
These are real fears, born out of legitimate concerns. Yet left unchecked, they metastasize into obsessions. The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans. Paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.
The words plunge and water come to mind as I’m writing this while sitting on the edge of a hotel swimming pool. (Amazing what a hot sun, a cool soda, and a pool chair can do for creativity.) A father and his two small daughters are at play. He’s in the water; they jump into his arms. Let me restate that: one jumps; the other ponders. The dry one gleefully watches her sister leap. She dances up and down as the other splashes. But when her dad invites her to do the same, she shakes her head and backs away.
A living parable!
How many people spend life on the edge of the pool? Consulting caution. Ignoring faith. Never taking the plunge. Happy to experience life vicariously through others. Preferring to take no risk rather than any risk. For fear of the worst, they never enjoy life at its best. By contrast, their sister jumps. Not with foolish abandon, but with belief in the goodness of a father’s heart and trust in a father’s arms. Such was the choice of Jesus. He did more than speak about fear. He faced it.
How to move from fear to faith:
As followers of God, you and I have a huge asset. We know everything is going to turn out all right. Christ hasn’t budged from his throne, and Romans 8:28 hasn’t evaporated from the Bible. Our problems have always been his possibilities. The kidnapping of Joseph resulted in the preservation of his family. The persecution of Daniel led to a cabinet position. Christ entered the world by a surprise pregnancy and redeemed it through his unjust murder. Dare we believe what the Bible teaches? That no disaster is ultimately fatal?
Are you ever in a situation when you are afraid to do what is right? Is your fear affecting your faith? Plan how you will handle those situations to bring honor to God. Ask Him for strength to respond correctly. Be bold!
