When FEAR speaks, DON'T LISTEN.
It is said that fear is a liar, but I believe something even more elemental; fear is not just a liar, but fear IS A LIE. It’s very nature is a lie. It’s language is spoken from a place of truthlessness, doubt, despair, and hopelessness. It lives it’s life in a murky, shadowy world of deceit. It has no real access to truth or light, so it invents its own truth derived from this place of darkness.
Fear is afraid of truth and light and faith, because they reveal fear for what it really is, a bully that can only use threats and intimidation to get it’s way. Fear cannot present evidence, for it’s all a lie. But it’s job is to convince you of it’s “truth.”
Fear has an insatiable appetite. It devours courage, hope, faith, peace and leaves the human spirit withered, wrinkled and desperate. It has never created anything good or beautiful, it only destroys and ruins. Fear tells you “you’re not good enough”, or “that can’t be done”, or that “everyone is against you.” It will present the worst case every time, because that’s it’s nature.
In spite of that, we so easily succumb to it’s warm embrace and settle into it’s cocoon of deceptiveness. Because of that, fear has become perhaps the enemies most popular weapon to use against humankind. Fear of death, fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of non acceptance, fear of the dark; you see, none of that matters, as long as fear get it’s tentacles into your soul he doesn’t mind what source he uses. He figures that once he’s there, he’s there.
Faith and fear have been locked in combat since the beginning of time and the human soul has been the battlefield. Many have been lost in this battle because they gave up there freedom to fear and he trampled them mercilessly under his heavy weighted feet. That may be some of you here today, but I’m here to say that his time is over, it’s done. At this very moment, in this very place, fear is finished.
When fear says you’re not good enough, faith says “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
When fear says you can’t possibly be a child of God, faith says “the Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God.”
When fear says you’re in this all alone, faith says “I will never leave or forsake you, I am with you till the end of the age.”
We are here today as the church, God’s church. We are in the midst of a world controlled and driven by fear, but we are God’s church and He has called us to so much more. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love and of a sound mind.” We have come here today to loudly proclaim “I am no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God.”
The church must hear our loud and bold proclamation and be encouraged and enlivened by it.
The world must hear this message and be moved by it.
Hell must hear it and be shaken by it.