David Jeremiah - What Are You Afraid Of?: Facing Down Your Fears with Faith

You are asleep in your bed when your clock radio shocks you awake, blaring into the beginning of the day with news of traffic tie-ups, approaching thunderstorms, overnight killings, fires, stock-market plunges, government scandals, and car wrecks. Instead of jumping out of bed, you pull the covers up over your head. You know what a fearful world we live in, and you dread facing all the challenges of the day.

But maybe your morning fears are not in the news; theyre about your job. You live in constant fear of getting caught in the downsizing trend. Or youre apprehensive about a business deal that has your career on the line.

Maybe your deepest fears lie at home. Can you meet this months mortgage payment? Does your marriage seem shaky? Are your kids worrying you? After a recent service at the church I pastor in Southern California, a young soldier who had just returned from Afghanistan wept as he asked me to pray for him. He feared that he might be losing his family.

Might. Thats the word thats haunting him. Our greatest fear is the conditional might the threat of what might happen. Fear trades in the market of possibility. Or even impossibility for fear is the tyrant of the imagination. It imposes itself upon us from the shadows, from its hazy mirror of maybe.

My friend Don Wyrtzen has been there:

The illusive monster of fear lurks in the shadows, waiting to claw my soul to shreds. As one prone to melancholia, I see its ugly face often: when Im struggling with the emotional stress of a difficult relationship, when Im afraid failure is just around the corner, when success seems too hard to handle, and on days when free-floating anxiety is getting the best of me.

That last phrase captures it for me: free-floating anxiety. Thats the worst one the foreboding fear that something is wrong, but you dont know what. It envelops you like a cloud.

If you have struggled with fear, you are not alone. Fear is no respecter of people or of ages. It strikes the weak and the powerful. It haunts the young and the old, the rich and the poor. Even those who seem to have it all, including celebrities and heroes and fearless leaders, confess to a wide array of phobias.

Jennifer Aniston, Cher, and Whoopi Goldberg are all aviophobes. They are afraid of flying. Barbra Streisand is xenophobic she is uncomfortable around strangers. Michael Jackson was haunted by the fear of contamination, infections, and diseases. He was mysophobic. But the celebrity with the most phobias is Woody Allen. Hes afraid of insects, sunshine, dogs, deer, bright colors, children, heights, small rooms, crowds, and cancer.

Famous people of the past were no different. George Washington was scared to death of being buried alive. Richard Nixon was terrified of hospitals, and Napoleon Bonaparte, the military and political genius, feared cats.

Phobias: a circus parade of mental enslavement.

Some fears attack us only momentarily, but others can stay with us for a lifetime. A person with a fear of heights might feel her pulse shoot up when she steps into a glass-walled elevator and ascends twenty stories over a hotel lobby. But her fear is over the moment she steps out of the elevator into the hotel hallway.

On the other hand, our fears of failure, loneliness, rejection, impending disaster, or contracting a major illness never seem to go away. They are lifetime fears that simmer on the minds back burner. They are fears that prey on life itself. Those are the fears I address in this book.

These fears can be described with what linguists call a semantic range of words: fear, worry, anxiety, intimidation, unsettledness, dread, unease, alarm, distress, apprehensiveness, and others. Sometimes its hard to know exactly which of those words best describes what were feeling, and it really doesnt matter. Whatever term we use, these feelings can all trigger toxic responses: immobilization, paralysis, withdrawal, passivity, depression, and psychosomatic disorders physical maladies with no discernible physical cause.

When I ask, What are you afraid of? Im asking, What is it that immobilizes you? What is stealing your joy and destroying your hope? What is robbing you of sleep, night after night? What keeps you from living by faith and being a risk taker? What keeps you from giving your life wholly to a loving God who wants nothing but the best for you?

I think I know the answers to these questions, at least in part, because Ive lived shoulder to shoulder with a lot of mature Christian people my entire life. And Ive been a pastor to thousands for nearly five decades. Ive discovered that everybody including me is afraid of something. Our challenge is to discover and analyze our fears and find a godly (biblical) response to them.

When the apostle Paul was giving counsel to Timothy, his young protg, he knew Timothy was afraid of something probably of his assignment to lead the large church in Ephesus. Timothy was raised in a small town in Asia Minor, and Ephesus was the big city. Paul himself had spent three years in Ephesus, building up the church there. It was led by a strong group of elders, yet false teachers were causing trouble. And Timothy was supposed to go in and be the leader of the whole thing. What young pastor wouldnt have felt fear at the prospect?