If God is who He says He is, then why do those who profess to be His children have fear in their lives?  Maybe you haven’t given that much thought lately, but you really need to, because once that question is settled in your life, EVERYTHING changes.

There are many places in the Bible where we are instructed to “FEAR NOT”.  Now, if God told us once to fear not, we might not get it.  If He told us twice to fear not, then we should pay attention.  But He has told us over a hundred times, fear not. Shouldn’t that tell us God is trying to get something across to us?  Fear is not a natural reaction to stimuli, it is a learned response.  How do we learn to fear?   Well, think back to your childhood: remember when someone told you about the monsters under your bed that come out at night to get you?  If you were never told something like that, you would not be afraid of the dark when the lights went out.  But unfortunately, people tell kids stuff like that and build fear into them from an early age.  Where does fear come from?  Well, I can tell you where it DOESN’T come from.  It is written in 2 Timothy 1:7: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Satan works constantly to build fear into people’s lives, from the cradle to the grave. If it isn’t the monsters under the bed, it’s the fear of rejection, or sickness, or lack. Fear instills distrust, and if Satan can get you to fear, he can get you where you don’t trust anyone, including  God.  The bottom line of all Satan does is to get you to doubt the integrity of God’s Word.  People who live in fear get some really strange ideas in their heads.  Some think everyone is out to get them, to do them harm, to cheat them or steal from them.  And there ARE some out there who do harm to others, but those with a spirit of fear think EVERYONE is out to hurt them.  Therefore, they trust nobody, even their loved ones.  Actually, they have no loved ones, for fear is their lover, and fear is a very jealous lover, which doesn’t easily turn loose of its victim.

Now, going back to the beginning, if God is really who He says He is, and we know God is love, then common sense would tell us that God loves us. But people who live in fear don’t believe God is love.  They don’t trust God, therefore they avoid Him, and let the devil keep feeding junk into their mind, and they spiral into the endless whirlpool of depression and fear.  Some get so bad they may not even go out of their home, but remain captive to torment their whole lives.  And of course that brings on sickness, which drives them further into the abyss.  Perhaps they lose their job, and of course that leads to the loss of whatever else they may have had.  And Satan continues to do his work, telling them they should just end their misery; that nobody cares for them anyway.  I know, because my mom suffered from severe depression her whole life, and lived in fear so bad that it affected my life more than you can imagine.  She was afraid for me to even learn to ride a bicycle because I might get hurt.  This fear of hers permeated every area of my life, so badly that I couldn’t wait to grow up and get away from her.

Fear continued to do its dirty work in my life as I grew up. I only went to church because of fear that God wanted to cast me into hell just as soon as possible and get me out of His hair.  I thought perhaps if I appeased Him, his anger might turn from me a little bit.  Being I was raised in a household of fear, my behavior was fear-based.  Satan took my dad to an early grave, and it drove my mom even more into fear, and it went from bad to worse continually.  I enlisted in the Army on my eighteenth birthday and I thought I’d get free..  Fast forward many more years of having the devil’s thumb constantly pressing on me.  Wait a minute: not just his thumb, why, he had both feet on me, as well as all the feet of all his buddies.  Then in 1993 I was diagnosed with five melanomas and liver cancer, and was told I had about three weeks to live.  Fear gripped me, for though I went to church, bottom line was I knew I wasn’t saved.  With all the earnestness in me, I begged the Lord Jesus to forgive my sins.  After all, I didn’t want to go to hell and didn’t figure there was anything left to lose by seeking salvation.  If God was who He said He is, then perhaps I would be forgiven.  And if He isn’t….? well nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes.

That day was I was truly “born again”.  Did all fear leave that moment?  No, I had a lifetime of fear built into me, and God would have to “reprogram” me, to say the least. The only one I truly trusted was myself, because everyone else in my life had let me down, but the Bible said it is impossible for God to lie, so as I walked back to my seat at church from the altar, the LORD impressed me to go read Psalm 103:2-3, which said, Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits:  Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases. Well, you’ve heard me say this before, I told the LORD, I just asked you to save me, are you going to heal me too? He said, I already did. Hmmmm, you could have fooled me, I don’t feel any different. But by two or three weeks the melanomas just went away.  Where did they go?  Who cares? they just went, though the symptoms of the liver cancer remained for about nine months, and I got down to eighty six pounds in the process.   Yet, God was using this time to build my trust, to cancel my fears and settle me that He is exactly who He says He is.  And, I had the pleasure of leading my mom to the LORD two years before she died, breaking the devil’s stranglehold of fear in her life as well.

That has now grown to 21 years in which God has remained absolutely faithful to His Word, no matter what the circumstances were, and no matter how insurmountable the mountain seemed to be.  I used the words “SEEMED TO BE”, because Satan uses fear to deceive people into thinking God is not Supreme, victorious, omnipotent, omnipresent, and undefeatable.  How does he do that?  Are we really that stupid and easy to fool?  Yes and yes. A sound mind only comes to us from God, and that is by reading and BELIEVING and ACTING UPON His Word.
Let me share some encouraging verses with you:

Rom_8:15  For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
Heb_13:6  So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.
1Jn_4:18  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

Whose perfect love are we talking about here; yours, or God’s?  Obviously God’s love is perfect because ours certainly is not.  Yet, God willingly accepts the love we offer Him, and though at first it will be tainted with fear, His faithfulness always leads us to love Him more, to trust Him more, and with each passing day, we will love more and fear less.  Will our love for God ever be perfect?  I think there will ALWAYS be room for us to trust Him more, to the point where when we read His Word and see something that stretches our faith, we say, OK, LORD, be it unto me according to Your Word, in the same manner Mary did when the angel of God told her she would conceive, though she was a virgin.  I imagine Mary must have had some kind of close relationship with God in order for Him to be able to use her in that way.  Think about when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on the altar in Genesis 22:2-13.  Abraham fully prepared to do so, and an angel of God had to stop him in verse 12:

And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
I say, could YOU have trusted God that much?  That kind of trust is what pleases God, and allows you to see miracles and signs and wonders from Him, which heals the sick, raises the dead, and casts out devils. That kind of trust only comes from a relationship with God, in which God has free reign in your life, and He knows He can trust YOU with His power, so that when you ask anything in the name of Christ Jesus of Nazareth, He may give it to you, for He knows you will not abuse His Word and His Power, but only use it to advance His Kingdom.

Imagine this: You trusting God, and God trusting YOU.  Is that possible?  It depends entirely upon YOU.  God already said He is willing, but what about YOU?  Are you willing to chuck your fears and fully trust God to order your footsteps?  I did, and still do.  God is trustworthy and true, and if you hang around Him long enough, you will become like Him.  And if you think about it, that’s the highest compliment you can pay God, that you imitate Him.  So when others see you, they think they just met God.

Rev 1:17  And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last:
From the front of the Bible, to the back of it, God is telling you FEAR NOT!!  For He is the first and the last, He loves you, He is FOR you and not against you.  Knowing all that, how can we possibly be afraid of ANYTHING?  Go read the 23rd Psalm, it starts off, The LORD is my Shepherd; I shall not want (be in lack).  Then go read Psalm 91.  Read it again, and again.  Memorize it, and every time you quote it, fear will flee from you instantly.  Remember this: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

FEAR NOT! And for those who want a second opinion, here it is:  FEAR NOT!