EVEN IF A DECISION SEEMS EASY OR THE WAY AHEAD SEEMS clear, barriers can stop us from stepping into the callings God has placed on our lives. What holds us back? Apathy can leave us struggling to see his paths. Selfish desires can lead us in the opposite direction of that which God intends for us. Distractions can divert our attentions. Greed can cloud our judgments. Above all, however, fear can hold us back from the callings God has for us.
I know from my own experiences, and those of countless others, that fear and anxiety are apt to stalk us. Fear can come in many forms—it might be fear of personal harm, or fear of emotional distress, or fear of financial hardship. Depending on what we feel we are being called into, all sorts of fears might arise.
In this chapter, I want to focus on one particular type of fear. It’s a fear that nobody is exempt from—a fear that can cripple us even when we have our priorities correctly aligned and are wholeheartedly committed to following God’s call. This is the fear of failure. I believe this fear constitutes the greatest barrier to our callings.
But what fear bricks up, grace breaks up. Overcome the fear of failure, and we allow God’s favor to flood in and transform the future. God’s favor is the love that the Father naturally wants to show to his children. Parents want the best for their children, longing to find opportunities to encourage and inspire them. That is certainly my wish as a father for my own children. How much more, then, does God, our Father, want to encourage and inspire us? How much more does he long to break the paralysis of fear and anxiety in our lives?
Fear of failure is born of ignorance and uncertainty: ignorance of events that will shape the future, and uncertainty as to how we will react to them. In many ways, this is perfectly natural. We can’t control the future. We don’t know what is around the corner. Life, as we know from Forrest Gump’s mother, is “like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re gonna get.”1
I cannot break through the brick wall of fear that so often stands in the way of the next move of God in my life. But God can.
Disappointments can drain us of energy and fill us with doubt about our own abilities and judgments. Failures can sometimes bring us to a grinding halt for fear of anything so crushing, so humiliating, or so hopeless ever happening again. Anxiety is exhausting because we spend a huge amount of time and energy worrying about events that usually never happen. Most of the time our worst-case scenarios don’t come to fruition, yet we rehearse them as if they are realities. A friend of mine regularly reminds me, “Deal with what you know.”
Jesus concurs! In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made it clear that we are foolish to fret about the future over which we have no control: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). It’s a call to all of us to live in the moment and for the day. This is not intended to make us ditch all future plans but to choose not to worry about all the angst-inducing issues that (possibly) lie ahead of us.
So how do we fight anxiety and fear? How do we deal with disappointment and dashed hopes? How do we overcome these obstacles that so often slow us down and prevent us from walking confidently into our God-given callings?
There is a passage in Exodus 15 that has radically changed my perspective on dealing with the inevitable disappointments in life. This is the chapter that records the extraordinary circumstances in which Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt. They had this wonderful dream that one day they would live in the land of milk and honey, in the land of Canaan, away from the Egyptian slave drivers. And sure enough, one of the greatest miracles of all time occurred when the Red Sea was parted and they could pass through, unscathed and free.
Yet only three days later, they started grumbling: “When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water, because it was bitter. . . . So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What are we to drink?’” (vv. 23–24). Disappointment comes quickly.
Three days earlier, the Israelites had seen God save them in the most incredible of circumstances. Is the Lord who could separate the Red Sea not the one who could also give them water to drink? But they started complaining and grumbling, much the same way we do. We have great expectations of God, and suddenly something happens and we become dogged by disappointment.
“Moses cried out to the LORD, and the LORD showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink” (v. 25). (God was, of course, perfectly able to change the water without human intervention, but he chose to use Moses, drawing him into the miracle and demonstrating his involvement. We work with him, and he works through us.) The episode concludes: “For I am the LORD, who heals you” (v. 26). When translated literally, God actually said, “I am Jehovah-Rapha”—the word Rapha means “I am the one who takes the bitter, and makes it sweet.”
Disappointments can be overwhelming: disappointment in ourselves for the mistakes we’ve made or the grades we failed to achieve, or disappointment in others or in circumstances that have not turned out well. These past disappointments and failures can be crippling—they hold us back, making us think twice about trusting God or taking a risk in faith.
The key to overcoming such fear is recognizing we have a God who is bigger than even our greatest failings. How often have I tasted the bitterness of disappointments, fears, and failures, only to find that, by his Spirit, sweetness arises out of them? Years after a bitter disappointment, I realize that the very failure has taught me lessons I would never have learned otherwise, and that the result was far more enriching than success at the time could ever have been.
Quite recently, I had to face the pain of acute disappointment and failure. About two years ago, a number of colleagues and I began to create a private investment fund. We rented offices; we recruited people to work on this new idea; we started raising money. Then, a few months into the new venture, it was quite clear that the market had moved against us, and we had to face a decision of whether to linger on or to cut our losses and admit failure—not an experience I’d often had before. But there it was—the heartache, the failed dreams, the unmet expectations, the disappointment of having to let people go. Still lingering was belief that it might have been able to work, if only we’d had more time and the markets had been a little more moderate. But it was the end of the road. It was hard trying to dodge the inevitable questions about how things were shaping up in the new venture. The failure was acute and the pain intense. It still is.
But I take my strength in the knowledge that Jehovah-Rapha, my God and my Savior who turns the bitter into the sweet, will take my struggle and work on me in the midst of this failure.
Failure is best faced squarely in the eye. So often we strive to make sure that, at all costs, we avoid the pain of failure—but God is larger than the biggest failure in your life. He redeems, transforms, and turns what is bitter into something sweet.
J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, once said, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”2
She went on to say,
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. . . .
I was set free because my greatest fear had been realised and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.3
A typewriter and a big idea—out of which came Harry Potter. That was all J. K. Rowling needed. We just need those ideas that lie dormant within us to be awakened. We just need the courage to let those ideas and dreams, the callings God has placed on our lives, grow into reality whatever the circumstances.
Doubtless, we will all fail at something at some point in our lives. But we will never be failures. For that to happen Christ within us would have to fail. And he won’t. It’s a vital distinction. When we do not grasp this, we can easily spiral downward. What makes it so difficult is when we feel as if we keep on failing. Thomas Edison, faced with this frustration, asserted that he had not failed. Instead, he said, “I know several thousand ways that won’t work!”4
There’s a lesson for us here. Don’t linger on the inevitable failures. Do learn, but don’t look back, and certainly not in anger. Move on in confidence that you have God by your side.
One hears many leaders and managers declaring in a blustering tone to their teams, “Failure is not an option!” But this is wrong. Being willing to fail is an essential part of our callings.
As Christians, we are carriers of a great hope: hope in a God who is above and beyond all things, hope that places of darkness and despair might be transformed into places of life and light. But the hardest thing about this great hope is that we don’t know how it is going to play out in our individual lives. We are called to face an uncertain future in confidence, but we are not fortune-tellers. Ecclesiastes 8:7 says, “Since no one knows the future, who can tell someone else what is to come?” It is only God who sees all things and knows all things.
Whenever we step out in faith, we take a risk. Whenever we dare to hope in the face of hopelessness or dream the impossible dream, whenever we are willing to try what the world might dismiss as foolish, we are not doing any of these things in absolute assurance that our attempts will succeed. Even risks taken in the power of God are still risks! God is not an on-demand enabler who makes our every endeavor succeed. Every dreamer and schemer of the kingdom knows deep disappointment. Part of Christian faith, part of being willing to dream, means being willing to fail. It means being willing to take risks for God, in the knowledge that God is in control and we are not.
This is easy to say on paper, but in practice it can be a hard and painful lesson to learn. And once we have been burned from one risk, it can be incredibly difficult to take another. Fear of failure can stop us in our tracks. But if we’re not taking risks, then we are not living a life of faith, and “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). Playing safe is no answer to the fear of failure; it will never satisfy.
In the parable of the talents, which we find in Matthew 25, the master rewarded the servants who were willing to risk failure to grow what they had been given. The one who played it safe, burying his treasure in the ground because he saw the master as a hard man—a ruthless bully who didn’t tolerate failure—received the master’s wrath. Those who trusted in the goodness of the master were rewarded.
What would the master have said to one of those servants if he had tried to invest the money wisely, but forces outside his control had robbed him of that with which he had been entrusted? Only a hypocrite would have punished such a faithful servant. No, a good master would have said exactly the same to the servant who had tried and failed as he did to the one who succeeded: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much” (v. 23 ESV).
To those who have taken a risk in faith and found their hopes come crashing back to earth, to those who dared to dream that God might do a new thing but have been left crushed and disappointed, Jesus, too, says, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Well done for dreaming, for being willing to see things as they might yet be rather than as they are. Well done for stepping out in faith despite your fear and your hesitancy. Well done for daring to think that hope might not be lost.
Our failures are not failures in the eyes of God. When we step out in faith, we always triumph, whether or not we are successful on our terms.
But Jesus is also able to take our failures and mold them into something new. Some years ago I was affected deeply by the plight of the debts that the developing world owed to the developed world. It seemed wrong that irresponsible bankers and governments from these impoverished countries should have borrowed so much. As these were some of the poorest countries, they were unable to repay the interest, let alone the capital that was owed. Sometimes the borrowing had been fueled by corruption and government greed. Every cent spent on paying off debt was a cent not spent on education and health care. These countries were trapped. To make matters worse, the debt was invariably in dollars or other hard currencies. They were unable to repay, with crippling consequences for the ordinary people who had to shoulder massive burdens for the repayment of interest.
A group of friends and Christian leaders got together to see whether we could do something. We developed an imaginative program called BONDFIRE, which would seek to raise public awareness of this problem and would print documents that looked like loan documents—and then have a massive bonfire to show solidarity for all initiatives aimed at getting lender nations to write off these debts.
I invested some money, enlisted economists to write articles, and asked theologians to give reasons why debt relief of this kind was not fueling irresponsible behavior but part of a Christian response to injustice. I confess I was rather pleased with the strong support I mustered. And yet the campaign failed. I felt this acutely. The need seemed so obvious.
There were a number of good reasons why the project failed, including our failure to persuade the public that this debt was different from an excessive personal credit card debt.
But what appeared at the time to be a failure subsequently succeeded, as several initiatives from other agencies built a better argument and had greater traction. Campaigns such as Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History, which enjoyed endorsements from celebrities including Bono, succeeded. Some of the most crippling debt was written off. There lay a great lesson for the decade ahead, one I have learned again and again. The most important thing is not that my project succeeds, but that good is done.
Who knows how Jesus might use our failures? Sometimes just the act of failing can help us forge a deeper connection with the world around us. When we dare to reveal the fact that we feel weak, confused, angry, and ashamed, it is then that others can connect with us because they know how to relate to us. In these moments, our common humanity is more effective than any religious talk. Our lives become authentic, affirming, and accessible. Even our moments of failure and disappointment can be how God prepares us for the way ahead.
Take the story of Joseph, found in the book of Genesis. Joseph was the favored son of his father, with dreams of power and glory, when his jealous brothers kidnapped him and sold him into slavery. Later, he became the committed and trusted servant of Potiphar, an official of the Egyptian pharaoh. But when Potiphar’s wife falsely accused Joseph of assault, he was condemned to prison indefinitely.
At this point, Joseph must have considered his life a complete failure. He must have been utterly dejected. But it was from that dark and hopeless prison that God raised Joseph up to become the second most powerful man in all Egypt. There he learned the skills of leadership. It was through the experiences of his fellow prisoners that God showed him how to interpret dreams. And it was because of his relationships there that Joseph came to the attention of the pharaoh as someone who could explain nightmares.
Through Joseph’s failures God prepared him to be the person he was called to be—the man who would save huge swaths of the Middle East from the ravages of famine.
This points to one great truth that I have continuously learned throughout my life: often the long and tortuous route is more fruitful than the quick shortcut. We frequently learn deeper lessons in the byways than on the highways.
Like Joseph, Nelson Mandela was someone who seemed to have utterly failed. Imprisoned for twenty-seven years, he must have thought, sitting in his cell on Robben Island, that he had reached a dead end. Unable to communicate with the outside world, he must have felt his struggle for freedom was a distant memory and no more. The future was bleak.
That cell was the most hidden of byways, but, ultimately, it was the path to his life calling. If he had not been locked up and brutalized through all those years, he would never have become the iconic leader not just of a nation but of the world. It was in those dark cells that he learned the painful truths of forgiveness and reconciliation, which he was able to put into practice once he was released. Because of that grueling experience, he understood forces of institutional evil that corrupted people into following a hideous ideology.
Mandela did not remain hidden. But many of us do. Unlike Mandela, we often do not see the extent of our own fruitfulness. There’s a wonderful quote from Henri Nouwen that reads, “The beauty of life is that it bears fruit long after life itself has come to an end.”5
We see the lasting effects of a fruitful life in the biblical story of Leah, Joseph’s stepmother and Jacob’s first wife. For many years, Jacob worked for his uncle Laban in order to gain the hand of Laban’s beautiful daughter Rachel. After this period of work, however, Laban tricked Jacob into marrying Rachel’s sister, Leah. From that point on, Leah pretty much remained in the shadows. She never knew the extent of her own fruitfulness. She was disliked, dishonored, disappointed, and always referred to in contrast to her sister’s beauty. She was neither respected by her father nor loved by her husband, Jacob, who lusted after her sister. The only reason he slept with her for the first time was because he was inebriated after their wedding party.
But Leah’s one gift, which distinguished her from her sister, was that she was fertile. After she gave birth to her first son, Reuben, she thought, “Now my husband will love me” (Genesis 29:32 ESV). After her second son, Simeon, and her third, Levi, she hoped desperately that her husband would be a companion to her (v. 34). But he was not. Then, she discovered a key that unlocked her life—and it will unlock yours. After having a fourth son, she said, “This time I will praise the LORD” (v. 35). Reuben, Simeon, and Levi would be fathers to three of the great tribes of Israel. But her fourth son, Judah, would be ancestor to David and ultimately Jesus! Leah learned the great truth that only God loves us unconditionally. She failed to win her husband’s love, but submission to God in praise transformed her life.
As J. K. Rowling would ask, whose version of “failure” did Leah measure her life by? In the world’s eyes, she had very little to offer. But God chose her as a mother to the ancient nation of Israel. Thousands of years later, the full effect was seen in the person of Jesus Christ.
At the point of his death, Jesus himself must have seemed like the ultimate failure. All those promises made at his birth. All those miraculous signs and wonders. All that incredible potential, yet here he was, nailed to a tree, breathing his last breath, just a few years into his ministry and well before his thirty-fifth birthday. Most of his followers had abandoned him, and there was no hope for the movement he had started. Except, of course, that his apparent failure was not the last word. With his resurrection and ascension, the greatest movement that has ever been was birthed, touching the lives of billions of people.
The death and resurrection of Jesus show just how powerless fear really is. With God, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know how he might use our apparent failings for his glory and his works. In the resurrection of Christ even the great, final fear—fear of death—is rendered impotent.
In the financial market, the Vix Index, also known as the “Fear Index,” measures the fears of investors. When investors are concerned by future instability and uncertainty, the index goes up. This echoes the fear index in our own lives, which tends to oscillate, often quite sharply.
We need to be as vigilant in our own lives as a trader would be watching the impact of fear on the markets. As we become more fearful of the future, we need to be more active in taking necessary steps to protect ourselves from this fear. God is open 24/7 to swap our fears for favor. But we need to initiate that trade.
Here are five “fear flippers”—tools that will help us turn from fear to faith.
1. LOOK TO JESUS
Jesus encouraged his disciples, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). He could not have been clearer. Fear is a powerful impostor, but Jesus has overcome the world that tries to breathe fear into life. And when we come to know in our hearts that we have secure life in Christ and that he loves us and guides us, the world changes. As the apostle John put it, “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18 ESV).
On the cross, Jesus made a spectacle of the powers of evil (Colossians 2:15); he literally disarmed the enemy. His cry from the cross—“It is finished!”—meant that his work of overcoming every resistance to God’s rule was done. But more than that, through his resurrection, he conquered death. So now death, the ultimate enemy, can be taunted with the rhetorical question: “O death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55 ESV). It needs no answer. The same power that was at work when Jesus rose from the dead works in us, too (Ephesians 1:19–20), and no failure or fall can separate us from it. As Paul wrote so beautifully to the Romans:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35–39)
The God who has overcome all things is with us and beside us. Failure, suffering, pain, and trouble all might come. But our God is greater than anything on this earth. And “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (v. 31).
2. BREAK THE LIE
Behind almost every fear lurks a lie from our enemy, the father of lies (John 8:44). And contrary to what some people think, the devil is still spreading his deception. He is a fecund liar, fathering deception, despair, and discouragement.
There will always be a battle surrounding the Christian life. Fear is such an insurgent. It wants to rule without any responsibility; it wants to destabilize us wherever possible.
But the spirit of fear cannot form a bridgehead into the land occupied by a person whose trust is set on the Lord. The enemy can only sow trouble, anxiety, and depression; he cannot reap. That is the key to understanding fear. His only ability is to undermine our callings.
The most powerful understanding I have of this undermining role came to me during a time of real spiritual battle. The more I thought about the tricks of the evil one, the more I realized that he has one colossal failing: he is not God. He is not omniscient. He therefore cannot know—and will never know—the future. He will fight, but he cannot win; the battle has already been won by God.
The devil therefore needs to deceive us into believing that he knows and can govern our futures. He relies on us to do his work: the work of eroding our trust in Jesus Christ. He will throw out misinformation, falsehood, and anxiety in the hope of causing as much disruption as possible. He has no idea which of his lies will hit the mark, because he simply does not know what the Lord’s plans are for our lives. He is therefore disarmed by the truth, which is Christ in us, and it is this truth that sets us free (v. 32).
Unless we feed fear, it will not grow to be powerful. Ultimately, it is illusory and without substance. Gripping and enthralling, yes, and at times utterly destructive, but it is a deception and has to pass. It has no energy of itself. Fear is parasitic, sucking life from us to sustain its claim on our lives.
Fear makes a powerful attempt to grip our attention. A knot in the pit of our stomachs reminds us of its physical consequences, as does the metallic taste of excess adrenaline in our mouths. But once we know that behind most fears lurks a lie, then we can ignore it by remembering God’s truths in our lives.
3. SPEAK THE WORD
Scripture is a powerful weapon and has “divine power to demolish strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4). Words of God’s love, of his faithful promises, and of his power—when spoken out in faith—can dismantle the gruesome blockades that fear tries to build around us. If I sense that my own fear index is rising, I vigorously reject the oncoming fears, sometimes quite loudly and always with the sword of the Spirit—which is the Word of God—wielded high above my head. I brandish “the one who is in [me] is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4) as a sword of words. It cuts the enemy down to size!
My friend Charles used to work at a large US investment bank, where he had a boss who used fear to control his team. His boss was malevolent, micromanaging, and sarcastic, and the team was both terrified of him and debilitated by him. Charles suffered from terrible insomnia as a result and eventually had to leave the company due to the stress caused by this boss—though not before officially reporting him to the authorities within the organization.
He had worked for months in an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. It is the great myth of the workplace that instilling fear produces results. It is, of course, true that a boss whom you fear can get some assignments done through pressure and bullying. But it is not sustainable, nor is it moral.
Charles’s colleagues also suffered the effects of this bully. But, two years later and now in a new career that he loves, he reflects on how God carried him through that testing period. Often, he told me, he would walk into the office speaking under his breath, “so do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10). He put Post-it notes on his computer with verses that would sustain him during the day. And so it was that Charles, though experiencing what felt like an inescapable nightmare, could still find hope in Paul’s experience of being “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8–9).
We have in Jesus the greatest teacher of all time. We would do well to learn from him. In the desert, the devil offered him a range of temptations: food (during a time of fasting), power (when Israel was ruled by Romans), and loyalty (from his adversary). Jesus met each temptation head-on with a sharp retort quoting Scripture. Jesus replied, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’ . . . It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’ . . . It is said: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Luke 4:4, 8, 12). There is no gap in the reply, no hesitation, and above all no need to add a measure of logical debate or conversation to empower the riposte. The Word doesn’t need our assistance. It has momentum of its own.
When I was in the middle of a major transaction for the acquisition of a large London store, I sensed enormous angst that would not leave me. It was unsettling. I was unsure of what to do. I had to speak to one of the parties involved on the telephone and felt extremely anxious about the call. As I was waiting to be put through, the music playing on the phone was the theme from Chariots of Fire. As I listened, I had a prompting to look in the Bible. And there in 2 Kings 6 was the extraordinary assurance that there were unseen chariots of fire protecting Elisha from harm: “Then the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (v. 17). Speaking out that word in faith was a breakthrough and gave me great assurance.
4. REMEMBER TO TRUST
Fear cannot create. If teams of professionals need to find creative solutions to different issues, then they have to work in an atmosphere of mutual trust. Firstly they need to know that their boss trusts them—which, of course, leads them to trust in return. What follows is productive and fruitful collaboration. Fear can force employees to execute projects, but it cannot energize people. Fear is crippling and inhibiting, and it is one of the most dehumanizing forces in the workplace.
I recently read an inspiring article about the way in which Richard Branson runs one of his companies, Virgin.6 His employees are free to leave the office at any particular time; they are not restricted to the 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. routine. The deal is that they fulfill their tasks to the best of their abilities and complete all their work to the standard that is expected of them. They can also take as much annual leave as they like, based on the same principle. In so doing, Branson is creating an atmosphere of total trust and freedom. It is a risky, bold strategy for Branson to take, but by all accounts it is paying off. The employees feel empowered and trusted; the result is that they do their best for Branson because they want to serve him and please him, not because they have to. This is the very opposite of Charles’s experience in the bank.
At a human level, Branson’s model reminds us that reciprocal trust builds flourishing relationships, and flourishing relationships build successful organizations.
At a divine level, God’s ultimate act of trust is to give each of us free will, which empowers us to trust God in return. When we remember that we are trusted, we are emboldened to stand against the claim that fear has the power to dominate our lives. By the Spirit of God, we can consciously embrace the truth we know about God’s character. We choose to walk not by fear but by trust—by faith.
5. THROW YOURSELF IN
In times of intense pressure and equally intense fear, we must use all these strategies. In my experience, fear cannot be dealt with equivocally. It needs the robust flow of the love of God in full flood to drown its efforts. It is the work of the devil to pretend that those lurking fears of the future are live and real. It is the work of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, to remind us that they have been overcome. If, ultimately, the fear of death is taken from us, what fear can hold us in thrall? Grasping this truth is the object of our lives as Christians: Death has lost its sting. Fear has lost its supports. It has to crumble at the end when Christ is vindicated. But, oh, the damage it wreaks until then!
If we want to live fearlessly, our aims are to appropriate the depths of Jesus’ love for us into our inner beings by the power of his Spirit. We need to be proactive. We have to throw all that we have into this struggle. We have to “set [our faces] like flint” (Isaiah 50:7), knowing in every fiber of our beings that we have the victory over fear and need to act accordingly every day.
At the height of the financial crisis in 2008–2009, I had to remind myself repeatedly of the need to fight fear, especially when it threatened to bring such colossal damage to the world. I was asked to speak to a group of business executives on how to respond to the frightening financial tsunami we were facing. I came back to Hebrews 12 and asked the question, “What is the bedrock of life?” The answer is that we stand on a solid rock “that cannot be shaken” (v. 28), which is Christ himself.
It was this knowledge—that there could never be a shaking so severe as to dislodge the life that Christ wanted to have in and through me—that sustained me day in and day out as the crashing markets threatened the whole world. This was one strand of my defense. I also consciously increased my times of prayer, even if I didn’t know exactly how to pray.
My favorite painting, which hangs outside my study, is by a wonderful artist and friend, Roger Wagner. It shows Peter getting out of the storm-battered boat with one hand still tentatively holding on to the side. He hears the call of Jesus to come to him. With his other hand he reaches out to Jesus, as a child holding to the side of a swimming pool might reach out to her mother who is just out of reach.
I have often puzzled over this painting. Like so many of the stories in the Bible, the economy of the expression leaves questions unanswered. Peter, along with the other disciples in the boat, was terrified by the storm and by the appearance of Jesus. They thought Jesus was a ghost (Matthew 14:26). Of all the questions Peter could have asked of Jesus, why on earth did he say, “Lord, if it’s you . . . tell me to come to you on the water” (v. 28)?
Surely it would have been simpler to ask Jesus to come closer and show himself to the disciples. Or, more sensibly still, to ask Jesus to calm the wind and the buffeting waves. What could be the benefit of Peter walking out to Jesus on the water?
It seems to me that Peter wanted proof of Jesus’ presence, which would be validated through him; Peter wanted to be a part of the miracle.
But there is another possible explanation: Peter wanted to be where Jesus was. And it is Jesus’ habit never to turn down anyone who wants to come to him, wherever he is and whatever the circumstances. So Jesus called, “Come” (v. 29), and Peter responded to what he believed was the voice of Jesus commanding him. He stood on the word of Jesus. He had to take a risk. The act of faith was not, as my picture depicts, Peter getting out of the boat but Peter responding to the voice of Jesus without guarantees.
At this point, he held on to the word. I suspect he could not see Jesus in the crashing waves and sea spray. All he had was what he thought was Jesus’ voice calling him over. Then the waves overwhelmed him, as adversity can overwhelm us.
We are not guaranteed that our steps of faith will succeed. If faith were knowledge, it would not be faith, and there would be no need to trust. Trust is the way Jesus tests our relationship with him. And though Peter’s trust diminished, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” And in response, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him.
Without Jesus, failure is a sink-or-swim situation. With Jesus, it’s not sink or swim—it’s saved. His hand reached out to Peter to save him. This is the huge comfort we have when we are facing the failure of a dream. Even if we embarked on the action, believing it was in response to Jesus’ word, he doesn’t leave us to sink under our failure, but to survive with his favor. This can only be understood as pure grace: actions taken in faith, even if they fail, will not cause his love for us to falter. Peter failed to do what he wanted to do. True. But Jesus prevailed in what he wanted to achieve: to show his grace whatever the circumstances might be.
Will you keep walking toward Jesus in the moments of life when you cannot see the way ahead? All of us face fear, failure, and disappointment in the course of our lives. You might be in the middle of an almighty failure right now, and you might feel as if you have burned all your bridges. But there is one bridge that will never burn: Jesus’ grace saves again and again.
In 1854, Elisha Otis stood on a platform that had hoisted him above the New York crowd milling around him. He then instructed an axman to cut the rope that had hoisted him to that height. The crowd held their breath. To their astonishment he did not fall from his lofty position to the ground. Instead the platform dropped only a few feet. The new braking system he was demonstrating for his new safety lift locked into position and held the platform without the security of the rope. For the first time people were given the confidence to use what the Americans call an elevator.7
The rest is history. Otis elevators are now operating in most of the tallest buildings in the world. The equivalent of the entire population of the planet is moved up and down in buildings throughout the world every seventy-two hours. And we now have the possibility of an elevator one kilometer high as the result of technology developed from that first risk taken by Otis. But Otis himself did not think it was a risk. He knew he would be held safely by his automatic braking system. But the people around the prototype elevator gasped.
So it is with the Christian life. Yes, we take risks. Yes, we know that the rope needs to be cut. And yes, we may fall, sometimes quite spectacularly. But above all our failures and our falls is a God who is above and beyond all things. God, in Christ, has overcome all things. And he is here to catch us. He is the automatic braking system that can always be relied upon.
Jesus will not let us drop to the ground when we act in faith. We may stumble and fall, but we will not be lost or broken. As Psalm 37 puts it,
The steps of a man are established by the LORD,
when he delights in his way;
though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong,
for the LORD upholds his hand. (vv. 23–24 ESV)
That knowledge is the single most important determinant of my Christian life. I can never grasp its fullness. Many times—just as when I use an elevator—I presume that when I step out in faith there will be someone whose hand will reach out, as it did for Peter on the water, and catch my fall. And though I might sometimes fall further and harder than I hoped, God has never let me down.
What a God! By him I am loved, known, and called. Fear cannot break that bond. What a calling to follow him!