Part One: "Fear" (Awakening The Warrior Spirit) Series

Dealing with Difficult Emotions Series:

Part One: Fear (Awakening the Warrior Spirit)

This morning, I’m starting a new series where we are going to look at what God teaches about dealing with difficult emotions, emotions like sadness, anger, jealousy, and several others.

And this morning I want to talk about dealing with fear.

But before we can do that, I need to show you a very important principal that is going to be foundational to this series of messages and foundational to you and I being able to deal with difficult emotions successfully. If you and I don’t learn this principal and apply it to our emotions we will never be truly successful in dealing with them.

Because maybe you are hear, and you have a hard time dealing with difficult emotions, and what you have been told is to just stop feeling, stop being scared, stop being angry, and you try and you try, but just stopping it doesn’t work.

Harrison, my son, when he was younger had this toy where there were several knobs on the top of it, and what you would do was you would take a hammer, and you would hit the knob in, and as soon as you did that, another knob would pop out, so with his toy, you could never get all the knobs down. And I guess that’s what made it fun.

But I can tell you what isn’t fun, and that is when we try to apply the same method to dealing with our emotions. Cause the same thing happens when we simply try to stop our emotions (hammer them down), you may be able stop it or subdue in one situation, but then it pops out in another, often in worse ways. And so it really hasn’t been dealt with.

That’s why when a person says to just stop being angry or just stop worrying it doesn’t work. You maybe able to control that emotion for one moment but then it pops back up the next. Sweeping emotions under the carpet, pretending they don’t exist, trying to get around them doesn’t work. So there has got to be a better way of dealing with difficult emotions, one that is successful and really works.

Take a look at this…

Ephesians 4:28 He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.

What part of the body do you steal with? You hands… so the solution to stealing isn’t just to stop stealing, no, it’s to stop stealing, and the replace stealing with doing something better with your hands.

Romans 12:21b “…overcome evil with good

In part, the solution to overcoming evil is no to just stop evil, but then to replace it with good.

See, there is a huge principal at work here… overcoming anything, whether it be evil, stealing or anything, it isn’t just in stopping that behavior, but stopping that thing and replacing it with something better.

Think about when you go to a dentist and they find a cavity. Well, the dentists doesn’t just go in a and clean out the cavity, and leave it wide open, no he replaces it with a filling, cause he knows, if he just cleans it out without replacing it with a filling, the tooth will actually get worse.

And see the same is true when it comes to dealing with difficult emotions. The way you deal with difficult emotion isn’t just to stop them, it actually gets worse, cause all you are doing is burying them, going underground with your emotions, no, the solution is to stop them and then to replace them with something better.

As a matter of fact check this out:

Romans 5:3-4 Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings (and you can imagine that suffering entails a lot of difficult emotions), because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

Every difficult emotion can actually become a catalyst to calling out, producing the very best in us, to developing us, awakening in us something better. See usually, difficult emotions call out the worst in us, but they can actually call out the best in us, awaken us to greater things in our life.

See, difficult emotions aren’t something to avoid, they are something that can actually be harnessed if we handle them in the right way.

So in this series, we are going to talk about dealing with difficult emotions, and what greater thing that emotion can call out of us, so that we can replace the emotion with a solution instead of band aid.

So let’s talk about fear.

Because some fear is good, it’s what keeps you from walking out in front of cars.