Fear Series

Sermon Date 08-18-2013 Fear (Chuck Gohn)

If you have your Bibles please open them to 1 John 4:7. As you know, we have been going through the sermon series called “Do not conform. Be transformed.” As a refresher, in this series were are exploring the idea that there are various negative patterns in the world and that there are consequences to following those patterns. What we are looking at a biblical response to those negative patterns. Again, Romans 12:2 summarizes that response: “Do not conform to the patterns of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Today what we are going to be looking at is a pattern that I think most of you would recognize. It is called the pattern of fear. Many people are obsessed with a lot of different fears. Fears that are real, unreal, imagined, or whatever. A lot of them are just the basic everyday type of fears like fear of spiders. Is anybody afraid of spiders here? What about mice? What about snakes? Even some of the men are afraid of snakes, including me. Snakes are one of the greatest fears according to a recent survey. The second greatest fear among Americans is public speaking. How many of you are afraid of public speaking? A few of you. I have my hand raised because you terrified about public speaking. I wouldn’t say I am terrified. I have moved from general terror to just extreme anxiety, especially on a Saturday night when I don’t have my sermon finished. I am getting through that. But anyway, the way I began to get over my fear of speaking was being part of a Toastmaster’s group. It is a group that you meet in a restaurant once a week and you sit around and you basically give each other speeches. I started in the Toastmaster’s group and then I began to just put myself in environments where I was forced to speak in front of a group of people. Over time, I became more comfortable with that. I still have a little bit of fear of public speaking. There are other fears that are less external. There is a fear of being judged by others. There is fear of failure. Fear of getting an F in class or experiencing failure in some sort of a work environment. On the other extreme, there is also fear of success. Sometimes getting that A in school or getting that promotion at work because all of a sudden you find yourself in a place where there are new levels of expectations that are placed on you. We have those types of fears that we are dealing with. Because of September 11, 2001, we have a whole other range of fears, of things to be afraid of. Obviously, we are afraid of terrorists, but what happened too is that now we are not only afraid of terrorists, but apparently there are a lot of people that have a fear of flying. In fact, a large percentage of people still have a fear of flying and a lot of that has to do with the terrorist attacks of 2001.

The consequences of fears are many. Starting with the health consequences. If any of you have experienced fear, you know that it can involve something as simple as a little bit of stress or it can begin to develop into some sort of a panic attack where you find yourself short of breath, maybe your heart racing, the possibility that you experience insomnia, you can’t sleep, or possibly lead to even other form of behavioral health issues such as depression or some sort of a phobia. There are very clear health consequences associated with obsessive fear.

But as bad as the health consequences are, one of the biggest consequences of being obsessed with a fear or multiple fears is the fact that you never really engage life to its fullest. A simple example: if you do have a fear of flying, which I suspect some of you do, you are really limited in what you can do as far as where you can travel. Really you are pretty much limited to where you can travel across America. Yes, you can drive but some may never drive to California because it is too far. But it is unlikely that you will ever make it to Hawaii unless you take a boat. So you miss out on the beauty of Hawaii. Hawaii is a beautiful place. There is no place like it on earth. You never get the opportunity to fly to Europe or see the sights of Europe because you are afraid to get on an airplane and fly over the ocean. That is a very common fear, but it restricts you, as It keeps you from fully engaging life.