The Fear Killer-How to Dismantle Fear in your Daily Living, Dreaming and Doing.

Stay with me on this one. I was thinking about the things I fear, the things that cause me to be timid, to stop trying, to not care, to control. It dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, I’m afraid of fear. Again, stick with me. Here’s my argument.

Just as we are wired for worship, we are wired for fear – but the right kind of fear. One of the protests that we sometimes receive in presenting the Fearkiller message is – “Are you saying that it’s possible to have absolutely no fear? You’re kidding, right? It’s just not possible.”

No, this is not the message of the Fearkiller. In fact, I want to make the case that we are wired for fear – the right kind of fear. In other words, we fear all the wrong things (plural). We do not fear the right thing – person (singular).

To embrace the fear of the Lord – to stand in awe of His creative majesty, to revere His holiness and judgments, to view with wide-eyed wonder His love and mercy in the face of Jesus Christ, to see Him come through in saving and sustaining ways – is to embrace a fear that causes us to release all other lesser fears. To embrace Him is to embrace freedom from all anxieties, fears, timidity, and cowardice.

But we are afraid of this kind of fear. We do not like this kind of fear because it calls for us to fear something – someone – that we cannot control. We would rather hang on to lesser fears that we think we can control, pretending that we’re fighting some kind of epoch battle of the ages, when the real war is internal, spiritual, and eternal. For example, why should I fear what others think of me, to fight what I think are those epoch battles of relationships, without being concerned with how God rightly thinks of me? We forget that to embrace Him is to be set free to rightly love others. Again, we are afraid of the ‘fear of the Lord’ because of where it may take us and what it may require of us – absolute surrender.

What we’re missing when we refuse to embrace this kind of fear to the demise of all lesser fears is a sweet freedom that allows us to serve in love, to risk for great reward, and to try when previously we had been unwilling to try. How silly to be afraid of this kind of fear.