Finished With Fear Series

“How to Deal with the Way I Feel” part 2 (Finished with Fear)

Brian A. Moon

5-year old Johnny was in the kitchen as his mother made supper. She asked him to go into the pantry and get her a can of tomato soup, but he didn’t want to go in alone. "It’s dark in there and I’m scared." She asked again, and he persisted. Finally she said, "It’s OK--Jesus will be in there with you." Johnny walked hesitantly to the door and slowly opened it. He peeked inside, saw it was dark, and started to leave when all at once an idea came, and he said: "Jesus, if you’re in there, would you hand me that can of tomato soup?"

All of us can relate to “Little Johnny” from that story, we all have been afraid of the dark, the boogie man, spiders, and even clowns in our lifetimes. I can remember as a little boy being afraid of getting lost. Anytime we took a family trip we had to buy two maps because I always had to know where we were. I can recall going down a remote country road in Georgia onetime, taking what my parents called a short cut, and crying uncontrollably from fear. It got so bad that they had to turn around and go back to the main highway so that I would not go absolutely crazy.

While my parents may laugh at that story today, I have not quite been able to laugh about it yet; it does illustrate one of the terrible things about fear. Fear holds us back from doing things we normally would.

Fear keeps us from living our lives out to the fullest, and fear hinders us from becoming the person that we could become.

Recently I was listening to a National Public Radio newscast and they were talking about the sniper attacks in the Washington D.C area. They reported that the people living in Maryland we huddled up in their homes afraid to leave for fear of being murdered from out of nowhere. Businesses were having a hard time because people were afraid to come out and shop like normal, and schools were missing students because their parents kept them at home. All of this is because of fear.

More personally though we all don’t do certain things because of fear in our daily lives. Girls don’t go to out on days that they have big volcano size zits on their noses because they are afraid of what people will think. Guys don’t make a move with a girl until they are absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, sure that the girl is interested in them. And all of us have our own little personal fears that keep us from living our lives out to their fullest, God given potentials. Just listen to some of these personal fears:

Peladophobia: fear of baldness and bald people. Porphyrophobia: fear of the color purple. Chaetophobia: fear of hairy people.

Dextrophobia: fear of objects on your right side. Odontophobia: fear of teeth.

Our world is an ever-increasing place of unrest and turmoil and fear is something more and more people are living with, and accepting as just a part of life in these times. But it doesn’t have to be like this, we don’t have to live in fear!

Dr. E. Stanley Jones writes “I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath--these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely--these are my native air.

A John Hopkins University doctor says, "We do not know why it is that worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact." But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; We are inwardly constructed in nerve and tissue, brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. To live by worry is to live against reality.”

You see God is the only answer to how to be finished with fear. His Son, Jesus Christ came to this earth to defeat things like fear, and sadness, and even our mistakes and shortcomings.

1 John 3:20 “But even if we don’t feel at ease, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything.” CEV

Underline the words “he knows everything.”

God knowing everything is part of the first key to being “Finished with Fear.” To live the life that we were designed to live, a life that is free from fear you must first: