Introduction
You are asleep in your bed when your alarm shocks you awake. You pick up your phone and see the headlines filled with news of 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; they’re about your job. You live in constant fear of getting caught in the downsizing trend. Or you’re apprehensive about a business deal that has your career on the line.
Maybe your deepest fears lie at home. Can you meet this month’s 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. That’s the word that’s 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.
There’s no question about it: we live in a world that is often a scary place to be. When we face these fears that prompt us to pull the covers over our heads and retreat from the world, what will we put our hope in? Will we exert our energy in wishful thinking, crossing our fingers that our circumstances will change? Will we hold our breath in the hope that luck will go our way this time?
Biblical hope is not wishful thinking. It’s not a lucky chance. It’s not ungrounded optimism. No, it’s a rock-solid belief in the character of God. That’s not to say we are guaranteed rosebushes without thorns or a life free from tragedy or disaster. But because we know that God is all-knowing and all-powerful and for us, we can face down our fears and trust the outcome of our circumstances to Him.
Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The antidote to fear is faith. And faith gives us hope in the midst of whatever scary thing we face. When the apostle Paul was giving counsel to Timothy, his young protégé, 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 wouldn’t have felt fear at the prospect?
So what did Paul tell Timothy? “Your fear is not from God. What do come from God are power, love, and a stable mental attitude” (2 Timothy 1:7, my paraphrase).
Paul knew that when we get God’s perspective on the source of our fear, we can set aside what is not from Him and embrace what is. In all my years of following Christ, studying the Bible, and pastoring well-intentioned Christians, I have yet to find a fear for which God does not have an answer. And the reason is simple: God Himself is the answer to all our fears.
Think about it —fear is almost always based on the future. Sometimes we’re afraid because we know what’s coming in the future. But more commonly, we’re afraid of what we don’t know about the future. We’re afraid of what might happen. For instance, the Gallup organization asked thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds what they were most afraid of. In descending order, the top ten fears of these teens were terrorist attacks, spiders, death/being killed, not succeeding in life/being a failure, war, heights, crime/violence, being alone, the future, and nuclear war.[1]
Notice that all these fears are future focused, and all are merely “maybes.” These teens may encounter none of them. Whether the future is just a minute from now (you’re waiting on a doctor’s diagnosis) or five years from now (you worry about having enough money for retirement), fear’s home office is the future.
But what is the future to God? To Him the future is now! We live inside time while God, who made it, lives outside it. We know relatively little about the future, while God knows everything about it. All the events in our lives occur in two time frames: past and future. (The present is a continuously fleeing, infinitesimal moment that becomes past even before we can define it.) God, on the other hand, has only one frame of reference: the eternal now, in which He sees and knows everything, including the future.
That’s why God is the answer to all our fears. If God is good and loving (and He is), and if God is all-powerful (and He is), and if God has a purpose and a plan that include His children (and He does), and if we are His children (as I hope you are), then there is no reason to fear and every reason to hope, for God is in control of everything.
I know —that’s good theology, and you probably believe it. But you still have fears and apprehensions and a hollow place in the pit of your stomach, either sometimes or all the time. The great author Edith Wharton once said that she didn’t believe in ghosts, but she was afraid of them. It’s one thing to know something with the mind, and another to believe it with the heart.
How do you help a little child face her fear of the darkness? First you appeal to the mind. You turn on the light and show her there’s nothing scary in the room. Then you help her attune her heart to what her mind has accepted. This is the process of faith, for all of us. We accept that God is in control, and on that basis, we shift our burdens to His perfect shoulders.
But what about our shaky future? Pessimism doesn’t work, because it’s another form of mental enslavement. Optimism may have no basis in reality. The one way to walk with hope and confidence into an unknown future is to stake everything on the power and goodness and faithfulness of God.
To understand why God is the answer to all our fears, we must understand what the Bible says about fear. And it says a lot. It tells us more than three hundred times not to fear. “Fear not” is its most frequently repeated command. The word afraid occurs more than two hundred times, and fear more than four hundred. And lest you think our Bible heroes were fearless, more than two hundred individuals in Scripture are said to have been afraid. And not all these were the “bad guys”; many were the main characters —David, Paul, Timothy, and others.
Biblical heroes were regular people who had to learn the same things you and I have to learn —to drive out fear by increasing their knowledge of God, to shift their focus from their present fear to their eternal hope, to replace what they didn’t know about the future with what they did know about Him. They had to put away childish things (being afraid of everything) and grow up in their faith and understanding.
I wrote this book because I see fear as a real and present danger in the body of Christ. Many Christians are not living lives free of fear, and there can be serious consequences when hope is absent.
Jesus came to “proclaim liberty to the captives,” and I believe that includes those held captive by fear (Luke 4:18). He also says that truth is the key to freedom (John 8:32). And here is the truth: God is good (Psalm 119:68), God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), and God has a future filled with hope for His children (Jeremiah 29:11; Romans 8:28-29). God is a refuge and a fortress, a shield and a defender for those who trust in Him (Psalm 91:2-4). For those reasons, and more . . .
You shall not be afraid of the terror by night,
Nor of the arrow that flies by day,
Nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness,
Nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday.
A thousand may fall at your side,
And ten thousand at your right hand;
But it shall not come near you.
As you read this book, my prayers are that you will grow in your conviction that God is the answer to all your fears, that as you look to the future you will see nothing except His power and love guarding your every step, and that you will find the truth that sets you free to live the hope-filled life God created you to enjoy.