Living Courageously: You Can Face Anything, Just Do It Afraid (8 page)

The example of Jesus challenges and inspires us to become
finishers too. No matter how difficult our task seems, we can have the heart of a finisher because the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells within us (see Romans 8:11). Let me encourage you to ask yourself,
Have I set my mind to finish?
If the answer is no, why not do it right now? Today—and every day moving forward—pray that you will be the kind of person who always finishes what they start.

God doesn’t remove every obstacle that could possibly prevent us from finishing our race and obtaining our prize; as a matter of fact, there are times when He places obstacles in our path in order to test and strengthen our faith. We are strengthened as we deal with difficulties, but if we run from all of them, we will never grow and become stronger in our faith and abilities.

If God allowed us to go through all of life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been. Many times our obstacles are what God uses to give us the strength to fly, as long as we refuse to quit when there seems to be no way to go on. You can face your fears and overcome them, and when you do, you’ll often find them turning into a blessing.

God’s Word says in Romans 8:37 that we are more than conquerors. To me that means we choose to believe we can overcome anything that stands in our way with God’s help. It is amazingly freeing and good to trust that you can overcome problems before you even get them.

Are you dreading things that have not even taken place yet? If you are, you don’t have to because you can adopt the attitude of an overcomer. You can replace those dreads with a confident attitude that says, “No matter what comes my way in life, I can face it and overcome it with God’s help.” Will you decide today to have the attitude of an overcomer? If you have this confidence you can live without allowing fear to rule your decisions in life. This confident attitude eliminates dread in our lives, and that in turn sets us free from fear. Fear always begins with a feeling of dread and
shrinking back from difficulty instead of boldly going forward. Dread is “baby fear.” It is not fully grown yet, but it will develop into full-grown fear if we feed it with wrong thinking and attitudes. Resist the devil at his onset by refusing even a minor dread and replacing it with an attitude that declares, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (see Philippians 4:13).

Always remember: Don’t look to the right or the left, don’t look back, don’t look down in discouragement or despair, but look up and ahead at the prize that is waiting for those who go all the way through to the end fulfillment of their dreams.

Both fear and faith contain creative power. By faith God created the world that we live in. By faith Sarah conceived and gave birth to a child even though she was far too old to do so. Many people have done seemingly impossible things by faith. They have received strength beyond their natural ability, as when Samson killed 1,000 men with the jawbone of a donkey (see Judges 15:16). History tells of those who believed in God that were burned at the stake while they sang praise to God. I, for one, don’t know how that would even be remotely possible without a strong faith in God. I know for sure that fear didn’t urge them to sing while they were burning.

Faith is leaning entirely on God in absolute trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness (see Colossians 1:4). Faith believes for something good to happen. It believes that God can do what would be impossible with man. Faith contains creative power.

Faith believes what it cannot see yet. It believes in its heart, not with its eyes. You can choose to believe in your heart that something wonderful is about to happen. Believe that God’s power
is in you and that you need not fear anything because He has promised to be with you always. Wake up every morning with an enthusiasm for the day. You might not awake every day feeling especially enthusiastic (I know that I don’t) but we can decide to believe and expect good things, and as soon as we do, enthusiasm begins to fill our soul.

You can do something that nobody else on Earth can do exactly the way you can do it. Celebrate your specialness and explore the potential of each day. Don’t waste your day shrinking back from life in fear, for today is all we truly have. Be open to all your possibilities and above all, always believe in miracles!

I would venture to say that the six-year-old girl was wiser and probably had more joy than the teacher. If we are only able to believe what we see with our natural eyes, we lack true vision and have no ability to dream. We have no faith, and where there is no faith, fear will always rule and torment.

Just as I believe that faith has creative power, I also believe that fear contains creative power. Fear believes that something bad will happen, and we see over and over that if a person consistently believes something awful will take place, then it usually does. Take the example of people who have phobias concerning germs and disease. They are constantly afraid of getting sick, and then the stress of their negative belief frequently makes them sick. Quite often I have witnessed someone experience a problem and then heard them say, “I was afraid that was going to happen,” or, “I knew that was going to happen.” They had already planned for the problem before they even got it! Some people are afraid they will lose their jobs and they do; others are afraid they will be lonely all their lives and they end up that way. A student might be afraid they will fail a test at school and they do. I have done the same thing in the past, but thankfully God has taught me to expect good things rather than bad ones.

Fear totally blocks our creativity and we are disabled from doing what we are well able to do. The student who fails the test
out of fear may have known the material well, but fear disabled him. The employee who was afraid of losing their job may have let fear disable them from doing a good job, so their employer let them go. People who are afraid of being lonely and rejected are unaware that their fear causes them to behave in a way that makes people uncomfortable around them. They may even be unfriendly, which prevents others from befriending them, and it is due to their fear of being rejected.

I am not suggesting that every time a fear presents itself to us that we are in danger of having something bad happen, but I do believe that if a person consistently believes and speaks that bad things are going to happen, they may well be releasing the creative power to make them happen.

After having many difficult and painful things happen in his life, Job said…

According to the Bible, our words contain the power of life and death (see Proverbs 18:21). That is a truth that we definitely should not ignore. If you and I can speak life to others, ourselves, and our future, why would we want to speak death? We do not really want to, but due to being deceived about the power of our words, we open our mouth and speak out all of our thoughts and emotions without realizing what we are doing and the power that those words have.

If individuals are afraid, then they will speak fearful things out of their mouths, and those words can adversely affect their
lives. Fearful thoughts and words block our ability to hear from God, and we can fall into harm’s way simply because we are not acting wisely. We need to be led by the Spirit of God and walk in His wisdom. In order to do that we need faith, not fear. We receive everything from God only by faith, and likewise we can receive the negative and bad things that Satan has planned for us through fear. I realize that most people prefer not to even think about the devil, let alone believe that he is alive and well on planet Earth and has the capability of adversely affecting our lives. We are sure to be defeated if we don’t know our enemy. There are many Scriptures that teach us about the reality and work of Satan (the devil):

These two Scriptures make it clear that we need to resist Satan and that we can only do so through faith. If we allow fear to rule in our lives, we are giving the devil an opportunity to work. We are instructed to be cautious at all times and vigilant in our resistance to the devil, and that includes aggressively resisting fear. We cannot be passive, for if we are, we will
be taken advantage of. We can resist fear, and it is not difficult to do once we learn to walk in faith at all times. In each situation, we can choose to believe God’s Word instead of the thought or emotion of fear that is being provoked by Satan. Remember, according to God’s Word, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV).

Satan is a deceiver. The book of Revelation tells us of a time when Satan will be cast out and down, but for now he is still deceiving people. In the
Vine’s Greek Dictionary
, the word “deception” is defined
to cheat, that which gives a false impression, whether by appearance, statement, or influence
. The feelings and thoughts of fear give a false impression. We receive, as a probable reality, something bad that isn’t in existence. Fear is filled with thoughts of “what if,” and the mental images we conjure up are never anything pleasant.

The Bible mentions deception in connection with many things. For example, it speaks of the deception of riches. Many people think that their security is in their riches, and then they become afraid of losing them.

Satan also tries to lure us into self-deceit, and it is said to be a sin against common sense. Self-deceit leads a person to think more highly of themselves than they should, and that can hinder
them from total dependence on God. Self-deception can lead us to be so self-reliant that we become afraid to trust anyone or anything except ourselves. We are also deceived when we think God accepts us because of our good work. It is our faith in Jesus that makes us acceptable to God, and not because we keep all the rules and laws of religion. If we think we must keep all the rules to be accepted, the by-product of that deception is that we become afraid of God’s anger when we don’t keep the rules and behave perfectly. I think it is safe to say that all deception leads to fear in some way, which is of course Satan’s main goal.

Faith is the only true antidote for fear. If a person unknowingly swallows poison, as soon as they become aware of it, or begin to experience adverse symptoms, they look for the antidote. An antidote has the power to reverse something harmful. Fear is harmful and as soon as we sense the adverse effects of it, we should immediately return to faith. We can always overcome fear with faith. We recognize fear and keep going forward with God, knowing that our faith in Him is greater and will produce much better results than the fear.

Fear has symptoms. It makes us tense and nervous. We cannot relax or truly enjoy anything that we are doing. If I were at a party, but was afraid that some of the people there didn’t like me, then I wouldn’t be able to relax and enjoy myself. That would be a mild reaction compared to some of the experiences I have heard about. People can get such intense physical symptoms from fear that they need to go to the hospital due to feeling that they cannot
breathe or feeling that they are having a heart attack. This type of reaction is called an anxiety or a panic attack. Some people have these attacks and unless they are caused by a chemical imbalance in their body, they are always connected in some way to fear. Often the root cause is difficult to locate because the fear may be due to something that happened to them in their childhood that they have blocked out of their consciousness and can no longer remember.

Other symptoms of fear would include shrinking back from a challenge instead of facing it boldly. Feeling incapable instead of capable. Always sticking with things that are familiar rather than stepping out into anything that would be adventurous or new. There is a long list of physical symptoms one might experience as well. Fear has dangerous and devastating symptoms, but we have the antidote, and it is faith in God!

You are not alone! God is with us, and because of that we can conquer fear. God assigns angels to each of us to watch over and protect us, and we have the Holy Spirit with and in us at all times.

The Holy Spirit is our constant companion! That makes me feel safe, and I pray that it does you also. I think it is a great thing to realize that we are not alone. Because honestly, quite often we
do feel alone. We think that nobody understands us, or our problems, and that there is no one to help us. The aloneness that we sometimes feel feeds the feelings of fear.

When Jesus was being tempted by the devil for 40 days and nights in the wilderness, angels came and continually ministered to Him (see Mark 1:13). When He was suffering and facing His most difficult time in the Garden of Gethsemane, He was strengthened by an angel (see Luke 22:43), and He was enabled to press into His heavenly Father’s plan. All throughout Scripture we see angels ministering to and being with God’s people. Perhaps we need to become more aware that we have ministering and guardian angels with us always.

We have a promise from God that as we obey and serve Him, He will not only be with us Himself, but He will give His angels a special charge over us. We should be more conscious and aware of this promise and perhaps even say out loud a few times a day in our private moments, “I have angels with me right now!”

I heard a story about a girl who was swimming in the ocean when she got into a swell and realized she was in terrible trouble. She was too far out for anyone to get to her, and her friends watched helplessly from the shore as she thrashed about trying to save herself. Suddenly a very tall man appeared in the water with her, but he was standing on top of the water, not swimming
in it. He swooped her up, and walking on the water, he carried her to shore and lay her down. Her friends first ran to her to make sure she was breathing, and a few seconds later when they looked for the man, he was gone. They were sure they had seen an angel.