Freedom From Fear, prt. 1
Freedom From... prt. 7
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
October 18, 2009
If you’ve attended Wildwind for more than a few months, you know this is not the first time I have spoken to you about fear. I have been up front about my lifelong struggle with fear, worry, and anxiety. I shared with you in detail because I want to do everything I can at Wildwind to create an environment here where we understand that frailty, struggle, flaws, and weakness are the things that bind us together – we are all human beings and we all share the human condition. Did you hear me? Don’t just let that slip by. Please realize this applies to you, with whatever shortcomings and afflictions you have. Please do not excuse yourself from this. Please do not think, “Yeah, you say that, but you don’t know what I struggle with.” Please don’t make that mistake. Please do not set yourself apart from the rest of not only our faith community here at Wildwind, but from the human community, as if you have some affliction, some issue, some spiritual condition which renders you beyond the reach of God’s love, and beyond the reach of other struggling people who want to extend hands and hearts to you. Listen, please hear me. No matter your issue, God loves you. No matter your struggle, in fact, BECAUSE of your struggle, you are one of us. Yes you are flawed. Yes you are scarred and wounded. Yes you are damaged goods. Yes, without question, you are part of the community of the fallen. And yes, without question, because of that, you are part of the community of those who are being redeemed, the ones for whom Jesus died, to show us how far love goes, that no one stands so far from the cross that we are out of its shadow, that no one – NO ONE need be lost for a lifetime. Paul prayed for the Ephesians:
Ephesians 3:14-19 (NIV)
14 For this reason I kneel before the Father,
15 from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.
16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,
19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Knowing the love of the Father – this infinite love that cannot be known and yet which Paul prays we will know anyway – this is what our whole relationship with God rests upon. You will have to come to know this love if you are ever to feel that you are included in the community of those who are being redeemed, and as you come to increasingly know that love, fear will drop off of you like clothing that no longer fits. And until you come to know that love, you can pray, you can read scripture, you can come to church, but you will still walk around with these places in you that are so deeply and desperately broken that you wonder if even God can put those pieces back together again.
Last time I spoke to you about fear, I spoke to you as one who had been humbled by years of struggle with it, who had largely not found success in breaking its chains. Today I stand here a free man. This does not mean I never experience anxiety or fear at all anymore, but it means that it no longer defines my life. I no longer live in the nightmare of anxiety and panic. I have found, and am continuing to find, freedom from fear. You can too. I’m the poster boy both for a life of fear and of the journey into freedom from it. I know I speak to some fearful people today. Some people who, like me, have fought this battle until they are weary, and perhaps are even in despair that they will ever be free. Fear engenders that despair, as it enslaves the mind, plunges us into vivid nightmares, and we live those nightmares as if they are reality. Fear weighs us down in the daylight, and haunts our sleep in the night. It steals the joy from life’s finest moments, and replaces it with sorrow and sadness and mourning for what we imagine we are surely to lose, or to suffer, in days to come. Fear does not wait for a reason to approach and attack. It finds, designs, and manufactures its own reasons. It keeps us from taking the risks that are required in order to grab a hold of opportunities in this life. Fear is ruthless. When you are in its grip it rules over you and you are a marionette, powerless to escape it or its dreadful effects. You pray over and over again for relief that does not come, so you doubt your faith, you doubt that God listens and hears, and you feel cut off from God and his goodness, which of course generates more fear.
The story of my life is the story of fear. I have gone into great detail with that story before, so I won’t do that again. But there’s something about that story I have not told you before. During my worst days of fear and anxiety I would have moments where I was so wrapped up in fear, where life had become so horrible, that sometimes I would cry out to God as I would lay down to sleep, begging for relief. And sometimes, relief would come. It never lasted. It was never permanent, but I often found that my only relief was when I would name my fear and cry out to God. One evening about three years ago I was slipping quietly into my room trying not to wake Christy, and as I got ready for bed, I was praying one of those desperate prayers, “Lord, save me -- not from any real crisis, but from all the ones I am dreaming up and living in anyway. I cannot sleep this way. I can barely eat. The joy in my life is bitterness to me. Please, if you are there, and you are listening, banish these monsters in the dark and bring me peace. And Lord, please do this in a way that I know it was you, a way that I would struggle to dismiss or make light of.” At that instant, almost before I finished praying, my burden was lifted. I lay down and slept in peace. And I sensed God had heard and responded. I was already convinced God was caring for me.
But it turns out that was not all. The next morning I awoke, to find that my fear had returned. I remembered the peace of last evening and prayed, “God, you heard me last night and you intervened. Surely you can do again today what you did yesterday.” This time no immediate relief came. I kept driving and listening to my iPod. I was listening to a new Derek Webb album that Jason had just recommended to me the previous day. You can imagine my overwhelming shock and surprise, and joy, when the song that had been playing as I prayed concluded this way:
“Do Not Be Afraid.” 16 times over. 16 times. The actual words. Do you think I knew God had again heard my prayer? Do you know what that moment became for me? An Ebenezer, a memorial stone. In dark months to come when I plunged back into fear, I would remember that moment, and I knew that even if relief did not come again in such a miraculous way, it was not because God is silent. It was not because God was not listening. It was because I just could not hear him for more than a few hours at a time. After all, the command “Do not be afraid” shows up 366 times in the Bible – one for every day of the year, plus one more.
As I realized this, I realized the problem was not with God but with me. How many times does God need to say it? 366 times? Plus 16 more after that? Will those 382 times be sufficient? And if they are not sufficient, do I get to say it’s because God does not understand that I am fearful and has not told me to take heart and have confidence? Do I get to say he is deaf to my cries, that he cares nothing for how I feel, or do I have to face the truth that despite his unbelievable attempts to reach me, his amazing breakthroughs, I live most of my life in a place where I cannot hear him, cannot remember his promises, and when I remember them, I simply cannot take comfort in them? It’s like how I kept saying at the beginning of this message that I hoped you all would hear me say that God loves you, that you belong in the community of those who are being redeemed. Despite my saying that to you, some of you are nonetheless going to walk out of here feeling like you do not belong here, like no one understands, like we, or maybe even like God, does not hear you and care for you. But God has assured you of his love over and over and over, and assured you there is no reason to fear over and over and over. We are left with the simple fact that it’s not that God has not spoken, it is that we have not really heard -- not in a way that brings change.
Philippians 4:6-7 (MSG)
6 Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns.
7 Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.
Matthew 6:30-34 (MSG)
30 "If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you?
31 What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving.
32 People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works.
33 Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.
34 "Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.
These are two passages on fear that have much to tell us both about how to find relief from fear, why our periodic prayers to God for relief either do not work or only work temporarily. Let’s spend some time looking at them as we continue to lay a foundation for how to deal with fear that we’ll build on next Sunday.
I think the sentence that sums up both passages the best is “It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.” This idea of displacing worry is huge. It’s the reason that our prayers for relief from worry and anxiety so often are ineffective. What happens when you worry? When you worry you get caught up in future possibilities (remember, a possibility, by definition, is something that has not happened and that very well may not happen), and that is where your attention goes. You dwell on those terrible possibilities over and over and over, and they begin to take on the appearance of reality. You may intellectually know they aren’t real, but your brain doesn’t. Your brain responds to them as if they are real It triggers the fight or flight response, causing your heart to beat faster, your palms to sweat, your breathing to speed up, blood to rush to your face, your pupils to constrict – the whole deal. Start worrying about something and you can actually work yourself, physiologically, into much the same state you would be in if you found a Bengal Tiger seated at the end of your row right now. That’s how much your thoughts affect your feelings. And that is what happens when you are worried. In order to even BE worried, you must stay focused on the source of your fear, rather than on anything else, and chronic worriers are great at doing this.
So you’ve spent all day in a state of fear and anxiety. You’ve rolled a thousand movies through your head today, with a thousand gruesome endings. You’ve ruminated on your fears all day long, maybe spending a good 14 hours out of the 16 you’ve been awake focusing on your fear. Then you say a 20 second prayer, asking God for relief. Then as soon as you finish that prayer, you go right back to focusing on your fear again. And you can’t figure out why God isn’t answering. But the Apostle Paul makes it clear. Christ must displace worry at the center of your life. Do you know what displacement is?
That is displacement. Displacement is when you get so filled up with something that it forces out whatever was there before. Our little 20 second prayers don’t accomplish that. Our 20 second prayers are like this:
[“God help me.” Pour in a tiny drop. “God, please help me.” Pour in another drop. “God, why aren’t you helping me?” Pour in another drop.]
We don’t approach this with a displacement approach. We mistakenly think that in our little prayer bursts, God will magically replace our fears with peace. The fact is, Jesus never said he’ll replace our fears with peace. Jesus said,
Matthew 6:33 (MSG)
33 Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions.
We’re talking here about STEEPING. Ever made hot tea? You pour the water into the cup, then you take the teabag and do what? You dip it briefly into the water for two seconds and it makes a rich cup of tea, right? No! You have to keep immersing it over and over and over and over. The more you steep it, the richer the tea becomes! Likewise, the more we steep our lives in God, the richer our lives become. This whole thing is about steeping, and that is what we miss. Not only do we miss it with our approach to worry, fear, anxiety, etc., but we often miss it with our entire approach to God. We’re living completely immersed in the world 95% of the time, then can’t figure out why we’re not carrying more of God with us.
Clearly, as we steep our lives in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions, Christ begins to displace worry at the center of our lives. Another popular Biblical reference to fear paints this same picture for us:
1 John 4:18 (MSG)
18 There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear...
This passage is talking about displacement. There is simply no room in love for fear.
“Here’s fear, and here’s God’s love.”
It’s not that you’ll have to work to get rid of fear. It’s not like there’ll be all these daily tasks you have to perform and all this effort you have to make. You just come to increasingly know and live in the perfect love of God, and fear begins to drop off of you, like clothing that no longer fits.
We read this stuff wrong. We bring such a Western, rationalistic understanding to everything. We read this passage and think, “Hmm…there’s no room in love for fear. Therefore I should stop fearing. After all, I want to be a loving person.” Then we try really hard to stop fearing. We say, “Jesus said not to worry, therefore I should stop worrying.” But this is impossible. The truth is that Jesus, talking about fear, said, “Steep your life in God.” That is the answer to fear.
I spent years of my life dipping instead of steeping. I prayed – earnestly, with good intentions – for God to take away my fear. But I was dipping and not steeping. I lived all of my life in fear, thinking fearfully, thinking on things that God was not in, not being open to God’s reality and love in the present moment. What did I expect? This was just one more way of living in darkness – for when we are away from the reality of God, we are in darkness. As Christ-followers, what often happens is we find Christ, the source of light, yet continue living in darkness in many ways, going back to the source of light when the darkness gets too uncomfortable or inconvenient. Then we pray for God to shed just enough light so as to make our darkness more comfortable. But God will hardly ever do that. In those times when God sheds light into our darkness, it is always meant to call us out of darkness and into light. If God always had intervened and sent incredible songs my way, or mysteriously removed my fear, I’d be still living in that fear today, just going to God and pulling his chain every time I was fearful, like a person in the recovery room after surgery, pounding on that pain button to dial up the morphine every time they get uncomfortable. The goal, at some point, is to not be dependent on the button anymore. God’s goal for us is not that we keep coming and asking him to dial up the morphine to numb us to our fears, but that we increasingly steep our lives in him so he can displace the fear and we can say goodbye to it. And then we must continue to live in his love because as soon as we stop doing that, as soon as we allow God’s love in our life to dissipate, what happens?
Jesus described this phenomenon this way:
Matthew 12:43-45 (MSG)
43 "When a defiling evil spirit is expelled from someone, it drifts along through the desert looking for an oasis, some unsuspecting soul it can bedevil. When it doesn’t find anyone,
44 it says, ’I’ll go back to my old haunt.’ On return it finds the person spotlessly clean, but vacant.
45 It then runs out and rounds up seven other spirits more evil than itself and they all move in, whooping it up. That person ends up far worse off than if he’d never gotten cleaned up in the first place. "That’s what this generation is like: You may think you have cleaned out the junk from your lives and gotten ready for God, but you weren’t hospitable to my kingdom message, and now all the devils are moving back in."
Our lives must remain full of the love of God, or else we’ll quickly return to the same state we were in before, and maybe even worse. We must steep and keep steeping. We must abide in Christ, as he makes clear in John 15.
Next week I’ll talk to you about ways of doing this.
