Facing Down Fear

A while back someone asked me, “If you could do anything God wanted you to do, and you were guaranteed it would not fail, what would you do?”

After offering my answer, the person replied, “Then why aren’t you doing it?”

We all know why. Because there is no guarantee it will not fail. 😊 My friend’s point was well taken. The real culprit holding me back was fear.

All Locked Up

All too often, we are unable to be the person God is calling us to be, the kind of person we want to be, and the person we know in our heart of hearts we could be, because of fear.

Fear locks us in a prison of our own making. Perhaps more than any other factor, it keeps us from our God Destiny. Its paralyzing force keeps us from greater joy, higher effectiveness, and a deeper character.

Jesus had something different in mind. He said,                                                            

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

  John 10:10

Yet many of us live far below our privilege. Scripture is clear that sin, our own selfish choices that separate us from God, from others and even from ourselves, is the greatest barrier to living the kind of life Jesus offers.

But the second greatest barrier to living an abundant life is fear.

Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of the unknown, fear of success, perhaps even a fear of God.

The Antidote to Fear

How do we face down fear in our lives? 

The antidote to fear is faith.

In the human heart, fear and faith are mutually exclusive. If we have a heart 90 percent full of fear, the greatest amount of faith we can have is 10 percent.

However, as we increase our level of faith, by that I mean sheer heart-level trust in God’s love and ability to provide for us, we push fear out of our life.

As the writer of Hebrews describes it,

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 

Hebrews 11:1 (NRSVUE)

It’s the nature of faith to displace fear with assurance and conviction, although fear is hard to remove completely.

Finding Courage

That’s why heart-level faith enables courage. I like the way Mark Twain defines it: Courage is resilience to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Everyone who has ever faced a difficult or painful situation gets that. Someone said, “Courage in people is like a tea bag. You never know the strength until they’re in hot water.”

Pastor Andy Stanley talks about a time he was in hot water. He had inadvertently contradicted something his supervisor said and later found out that his supervisor was ticked. Andy told a mentor of his that he was thinking about avoiding the whole thing by not going into the office.

His mentor, Charlie, then launched into a story about a situation he had been in with some bankers in New York. He had leveraged his company beyond what was reasonable or wise. Then for no apparent reason, revenues started falling. Before long he was upside down with the bank. Normally when that happens, the lenders start calling and the lendees are hard to find. Charlie took the opposite approach. He called and made an appointment with the bank and flew to New York to meet with them.

As he tells it, “I let them know that they could count on me to work this thing out. They were never going to have to come looking for me, because I was going to flood them with progress reports. They weren’t sure what to do with that. I called them every week to let them know how things were going. They have been after me for more business ever since.”

Face the Gorilla

He went on to say: “The best thing to do sometimes is to open up the cage and face the 500- pound gorilla. He’s going to come after you anyway, so you might as well let him out.”

Charlie then leaned in, looked Andy in the eye and said, “When you get to the office, you go directly to your supervisor’s office. Open the cage and face the 500-pound gorilla.”*

Some of us have a 500-pound gorilla we need to face. It could be someone at work, at school or at home. There is a rift in the relationship and both sides know it. We are trying to dance around it, but it is not getting any better. In fact, it is getting worse. Although it may not be all our fault, we are a prime contributor to the problem.

Open the Cage

By faith, we can summon the courage to open the cage and face the gorilla. The longer we avoid doing this, the more it will slowly sap away our energy and our joy.

Exercising the courage to face our gorilla will free us from incessantly worrying about the outcome. God did not create us to constantly avoid our problems out of fear. God designed us to confront our problems with faith.   

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