Fear can be an ungodly and dangerous thing. Fear can overwhelm your senses. It can distort your thinking. It can kidnap your desires. It can capture your meditation so that you spend more time worrying about what could be than considering the God who is. Fear can cause you to make bad decisions in the short term and fail to make good decisions in the long run. Fear can cause you to forget what you know and to lose sight of who you are. Fear can make you wish for control you will never have. It can cause you to distrust people you have reason to trust. It can cause you to be demanding rather than serving. It can cause you to run when you should stay and to stay when you really should run. Fear can make God look small and your circumstance loom large. Fear can make you seek from people what you will only get from the Lord. Fear can be the soil of your deepest questions and your biggest doubts. Your heart was wired to fear, because you were designed for life shaped by fear of God. But horizontal fear cannot be allowed to rule your heart, because if it does, it will destroy you and your ministry.
Fear is only ever conquered by fear. Awe of God really is the solution here. Only fear of God has the spiritual power to overwhelm all the horizontal fears that can capture you heart. These relational-situational-location fears are only ever put in the proper place and given their appropriate size by a greater fear---fear of the Lord. Perhaps this is a good portion of what is being said in Proverbs when it declares, "Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." Allowing yourself to be twisted and turned by whatever fear seizes you at the moment is an unwise, unstable, and unproductive way of living. Living to alleviate fear never leads to being fear-free. It simply makes you more afraid of fear, more fear-alert, and ultimately more fearful. Only when God looms larger than anything you're facing can you be protected and practically freed from the fear that either paralyzes you or causes you to make foolish decisions.
Paul Tripp
1 comment:
I really enjoyed reading this about fear. The last couple of years I have experienced many fears, mainly around my employment. As I have come through this I think God has been showing me just how faithful He is and this has built my sense of awe.
i think busy-ness goes hand in hand with fear because it can lead to less and less time spent with God and a cycle of fear and ignorance can build up. I have certainly found this.
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