A Dead Dog Image

Back when I was in college, a friend and I used to go cave exploring as often as possible. Sometimes we went caving about twice a week. One evening we followed a lead for a new cave that we heard about, one that was in the top of a ridge and was supposed to be really huge. When someone tells you a cave is really big, then it probably won’t be much bigger than a groundhog hole.

After an hour of walking up and down some really big hills, we finally saw a small hole at the top of a knob. As we got down on all fours, we crawled in about five feet and we started smelling something really bad. We crawled a little further and we soon discovered the source of the smell. It was an old dead dog. We later named the cave Dead Dog Cave.

A dead dog is a very unpleasant image to think about. We don’t want to imagine such a thing, but how many of us actually think about a dead dog, perhaps on a daily basis? This probably sounds like a really strange question; but we will see today that fear can conjure within our minds the image of a dead dog. You see, if any of us live in fear on a daily basis, the dead dog we see is ourselves. Now, hang on and we’ll soon see what this is all about!

This morning we are going to look at the account of a young man named Mephibosheth who, after having an encounter with fear, looked upon himself as a dead dog. We will come to see that many of us view ourselves as dead dogs too; and we are also going to learn how we can overcome a dead dog image.

Fear Can Be Crippling (2 Samuel 4:4)

4 Jonathan, Saul’s son, had a son who was lame in his feet. He was five years old when the news about Saul and Jonathan came from Jezreel; and his nurse took him up and fled. And it happened, as she made haste to flee, that he fell and became lame. His name was Mephibosheth.

Can somebody say Mephibosheth? King Saul’s grandson, Mephibosheth, was taken away by his nursemaid in a flight of fear after she had heard about the death of Saul and the death of Mephibosheth’s father, Jonathan. It is not entirely Mephibosheth’s fault that he was on the run, but because he was running he fell and became lame. What I want to point out here is that when we run from tough situations because of fear it can become crippling to us.

Fear is crippling to our trust in God; and fear comes by way of a lacking of faith. “Fear whispers to us that God is not really big enough to take care of us. It tells us we are not really safe in His hands.”(1) The more times we doubt God, the more we become afraid, and the more we are afraid, the more we are wounded. And the more we are wounded, the more we continue to distrust God, and this cycle seems to go on and on, never seeming to end. We keep right on fearing, not trusting God and never living in the blessings that come from a wholehearted devotion and trust in the Lord – we are crippled.

Fear causes a person to back down from a difficult situation – perhaps even something to which the Lord could have called them – and then that person begins a pattern of running away. Running away leads to feelings of guilt, shame and failure, and we lose our “Christ-esteem.” We forget how our Lord, Jesus Christ, sees us. We forget how deeply we are loved and treasured.

The Christian must think in terms of Christ-esteem, but the world uses the term self-esteem. The American Psychological Association’s research on self-esteem explains that low self-esteem “boils down to one issue: When you face a difficult situation, do you approach it, take action, and face it head on, or do you avoid it, wimp out, and run and hide? . . . When you avoid facing up to a threatening situation, even if things end up turning out all right, inside you say, ‘But the truth is, I wimped out. I didn’t do the hard thing. I took the easy way out’.”(2) This is the point at which we begin losing courage to attempt anything else.

This research shows that avoidance kills an inner sense of confidence and worth. This, in turn, causes us to back away from God for we feel unworthy to come into His presence. God then asks us to follow Him in faith in a difficult situation, a God-sized task, and we fail to trust Him because we are distant from the Lord in our relationship with Him. And then after we fail to trust Him and follow in faith we feel even more like a failure. We feel that we are unworthy of God’s love altogether. Like I said, it’s a viscous and seemingly never ending cycle.