Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!!! tagged: , , , ,

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!!!

Posted by in Church & Missions, IMPACT Features, News & Culture

The enemy wants you to be afraid.  When you are afraid of anything other than God you are engaging in idolatry.  We have several sayings on our team concerning fear.  ’100% of all decisions based on fear are the wrong decisions.’  ‘You serve what you fear, so fear God alone.’  There are more but you get the point.  We are told in the Word to fear God.  We understand that we do not fear him because he is excessively ugly, mean, or even dangerous in any worldly sense.  We fear Him because He alone has the power to give or take away our lives, our souls, our eternities.  No one else can do this… unless…  Yes, it is this ‘unless’ that is the problem and the reason for this post.

We fear losing what we desperately don’t want to lose.  We fear things that injure our pride, our status, our way of life.  We fear things that go against what we value.  When we give in to fear we allow the voice of the world to drown out the voice of God.  I stood on the street corner of a very restrictive Muslim country (I call it Rohan) being peppered with questions from a guy from the security services.  I was afraid.  I feared what he would do if he knew that I had been a pastor in the West.  I feared he would have me kicked out of the country.   I feared being arrested and interrogated in unpleasant ways.  Some of these fears had foundation and some did not.  The result was that I not only didn’t share the Gospel with him I came as close as I have ever come to denying my Lord.  Later I looked back at that conversation and I determined that I would never again fear anyone save God alone.  It is a promise that I have largely kept.  It is not an easy promise to keep.

OUR ministry.  Yes, when the ministry is yours and you have invested your whole life in it you may well fear losing it or seeing it damaged.  I live with the reality that the Government of Gondor could ask me to leave at any time and everything I have worked for could disintegrate in a day.  Many of you are pastors serving at the behest of your congregations and job security is not one of the fringe benefits of being in ministry.  We know this and this can make us afraid.

OUR Country.  Most of us reading this are Americans and you would be hard pressed to find people more proud of their country than Americans.  Now, we know that is because our country is the best but that is quite beside the point here.  When we say OUR country we mean our community, our values, our way of life.  We have a lot invested in our country.  Think about it, when those guys in Tunisia tossed their Government hardly any of them felt that they were tossing ‘themselves’.  When they said ‘their’ country they referred to a place and a culture but it was understood that one family owned it all- the leaders where not ‘us’.  We are different.  We are responsible for OUR country.  We can vote.  We can decide.  We can make changes and that builds into it a huge investment on our part.  But we could lose it.  THEY want to take it away and we can’t let that happen.  We know this and this can make us afraid.

OUR Family, Friends, Community, Church (even the SBC).  These people are dear to us.  When someone is sick we all suffer.  When someone dies we all grieve.  God has called us to love these and we must love them well.  But life is fragile.  People make horrific decisions that harm themselves and others and there is nothing we can do to help them, or stop them, or control them.  We know this and this can make us afraid.

OUR Lives, Hopes, Dreams, Health, Happiness.  We pray and we seek God’s will for us and then we go for it.  We have tremendous resources at our disposal.  Everything to grow a successful ministry, family, lifestyle.  We can and should be happy.  We have what it takes to accomplish this.  But things change.  Life is full of surprises, curveballs, blindsides.  Some of my teammates had made extensive plans to accomplish many important things over the next two weeks.  Yesterday they had a head on collision with another car and their vehicle will now be two weeks getting repaired.  They are all ok, which is a huge praise, but their plans have been destroyed by a guy whose tire just happened to blow out right THEN.  The timing for them to collide at that place and time is incredible.  But life is just like that.  We know this and this makes us afraid.

So, there it is.  I told you that you must never be afraid of anything but God Himself and then gave you a long list of things that you sincerely value that you could lose, in fact, you will eventually lose every worldly thing.  How can you possibly reconcile that?  I might suggest that God loves you and knows what you value and assure you that He will protect it.  You already know better.  There will be an end to every ministry, Country, organization.  Everyone reading this will one day die and everyone you love will one day die.  “Gee Strider thanks for the encouragement, now I wont be afraid!”  The news casts are all warning you that the end is in sight.  Our Country is in huge debt, our Nobel Peace Prize winning President has bombed Lybia, and the rest of the Middle East seems as though it will self-implode.  Japan is shaken to the core and all of these major headlines have drowned out the many many smaller disasters that compete for the 24/7 news space.    Again, how can you reconcile this?

Perspective.  We need a new perspective on our lives and this world.  If we will fear God alone then we need to gain His perspective alone.  Everyone is going to die?  Yes…. and no.  For those of us who believe in the resurrection death is not to be feared.  America may or may not go down the drain anytime soon.  Honestly, that is not relevant.  We are citizens of an Eternal Kingdom and our King will never act unjustly or unrighteously.  When we are faced with the pressing issues of the day our perspective should be, ‘what is God doing in all of this?’  I think that bombing Lybia was and is a horrific foreign policy blunder.  Who cares what I think.  God is up to something.  Are we ready to move when He says go?  Are we praying for His Kingdom to grow among the Lybian people during this great upheaval?  Same question for Japan.  Disaster has struck and it is overwhelmingly awful but are we ready to move with our King, in His name, and see His eternal purposes accomplished?  When I first moved to Gondor I had a fear of being lost and stranded in its remote mountains.  I have never been lost but I have been stranded by broken down vehicles, floods, landslides, and political unrest.  EVERY SINGLE time this has happened I have had an unusual opportunity to share the Gospel with someone who had never heard of Jesus before.  Is that amazing or what?  I am always conflicted on how to pray before a trip now.  Do I pray for smooth travel?  Usually, but I never despair when it isn’t because I have seen the fruit of what God can do with a broken vehicle too often.

I had a friend who came to faith here about 12 years ago now.  She was very afraid that her parents would find out and when they did it was even worse than she feared.  They beat her.  They locked her up.  They burned her Bible and read the Quran to her everyday.  The beatings by her father and grandfather whom she loved were severe.  She went to bed every night bruised and bleeding.  This went on for several months.  One night after a particularly bad beating she was crying out to God.  She asked Him why He was silent, why He had abandoned her.  An audible voice spoke to her in the darkness of the room.  God spoke aloud to His suffering child and He said, ‘You can’t hear me because of fear.  Your fear has drowned out my voice.’  She wept some more and confessed her sin of fear.  Later she escaped but rather than run away she came back to her family to witness to them about the truth.  Now she is married to great Christian man and they are starting a new church in an unreached village in the south of Gondor.

God does love you.  He loves you so much He will not allow you to devote yourself to anything that is not eternal.  Love Him and His Kingdom and labor for that which will never perish.  The world does not want you to do this. It knows what God can and will do with a life devoted to Him alone.  The world knows this and this makes it afraid.