For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die – but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. (Romans 5:6-11)
As I have related elsewhere, I came to know Christ after about a year of living in a horror story. After what I experienced, you’d be justified in thinking that I’d never again want to have anything to do with supernatural evil in any form. But God had other plans.
I had been a believer for about fourteen years when the leaders of the church I was attending made a string of very bad decisions, one of which was to allow a secular band that included at least one practicing occultist to use the sanctuary. (I won’t name the church because I haven’t been there in many years, so I have no idea what their current situation is. For all I know, they are a wise and loving, Spirit-led body now.) At the time I had been laid off from my job and I was working at the church as a custodian to keep food on the table, so it was not uncommon for me to be on the property by myself at night.
When I began encountering the same sense of unseen presence that had afflicted me as a non-believer fourteen years earlier, I talked with some of the other custodians, and learned that they were feeling the same things. So I went to the head custodian, who was a solid believer and a wonderful man of God. He told me that whenever I run into something like that, I should “go ahead and get rid of it,” and he reminded me of the authority I had, both as a son of God and as a designated caretaker of the property. Unfortunately, he had another appointment, so that night, and for many other nights over the coming months, I was alone.
I’m not going to go into detail about my experiences at that church. My purpose in this article is not to talk about spiritual warfare or how to deal with demons, but how to overcome fear. And by “fear” I don’t mean caution or good sense, and I certainly am not talking about the fear of the Lord. What I’m talking about is the heart pounding, hair standing up on the back of the neck, feeling of dread. The constant sense that something awful is about to happen, and the intense desire to be somewhere, anywhere, else. That’s the fear I want to talk about.
That kind of fear was present whenever I had to deal with the demons that had come on to the property. But I discovered that if I took just a moment to let myself feel the fear and examine, internally, what it was I was actually feeling, it always seemed that what I felt wasn’t coming from inside me, but from outside, as if something else were projecting the emotion of fear toward me. It got to the point that I could actually use that feeling as a reliable indicator that I was in the presence of something that shouldn’t be there. And it always faded quickly after I ordered the creature, the demon, in Jesus’ name, to go and never return.
So why am I telling this story? Because those months taught me a great deal about dealing with fear, not just of supernatural evil, but in general. And one of the most important lessons coming out of that time was that the fear only faded after I confronted it. Which leads to my first point:
You Must Face Your Fear While You’re Still Afraid
I’m certain that you’re heard this before, a million times. Every self-help book out there will say that the only way to overcome fear is to face it. If you’re from my generation, your parents told you to stand up to bullies, and my own experience fully agrees with this as well. Fear is a bully, and the only way to overcome it is to stand up to it. It’s not what anyone wants to hear, but it’s the truth.
Over and over in Scripture we see the admonition not to fear (for example, Isaiah 41:10, Matthew 10:26-28, 2 Timothy 1:7). This isn’t telling us not to feel afraid; God knows that human beings don’t have that much control over our emotions. Rather, he’s telling us not to act on those feelings of fear. Our culture sometimes tells people, wrongly, that being real means giving in to how they really feel. But the truth is the precise opposite: Being real means choosing to act out of what I know to be true, regardless of how I feel. Acknowledging the feelings as being present, but not allowing them to rule over me.
The apostle Paul serves as a good example of this. He told the believers in Corinth that when he first preached the gospel to then, “I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling.” (1 Corinthians 2:3). And not only in Corinth. Paul also writes, “for even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn – fighting without and fear within.” (2 Corinthians 7:5). But he didn’t back down, and as a result, churches were established all through the Mediterranean world.
The supreme example, of course, is Jesus, who prayer three times that the cup would pass from him. And after he had prayed, he did what he had been sent to do.
One thing more that I can tell you from my own experience; it never gets easy to face down fear, but it does get easier. It seems to be a universal rule that we get better at the things we practice, and I found during those nights of dealing with supernatural evil that facing fear is no exception.
Listen to Your Fear
My second point sounds like a contradiction of what I said in the first point, but it isn’t. My choice of wording here is very precise: I’m not telling you to obey your fear, I’m saying listen to it. Take your attention off the thing that you’re afraid of. Forget, for the moment, what the fear is pointing to, whether that’s sickness, poverty, government action, a physical danger, or even something supernatural. Examine the fear itself, that is, what you’re feeling. What, specifically, is your fear pushing you toward? Is it to run? To hide? To stay still? To say something you don’t actually believe? What is it fear hammering at you to do?
Here’s the critical question: is the fear pushing you to do something that you know you should do, or that you know you shouldn’t? Remember that you have an enemy, the devil, and fear is one of his favorite weapons. My own experience is that, the majority of the time, whatever it is that fear is pushing me to do is the exact opposite of what I know I should do. But not always. If I’m in a building that catches fire, I already know that fear will be telling me to panic and run away at full speed. That’s doing the right thing – leaving the building – but in the wrong way. The right way, as any firefighter will attest, is to walk quickly but calmly to the exit, and assist anyone I encounter who needs it. Sometimes, then, what I should do is simply use a different means to achieve the same basic end.
So acknowledge what you feel, accept it as real, but then act on what you know. In the end, once I’ve taken a moment to listen to the fear, it comes down to a question of who will be the boss. Will I obey fear, or will I obey what is right? And again, I have to accept up front that choosing not to obey my fear is not ever going to be easy to do, but with practice it will get easier.
Pray
Duh! This seems so obvious that I was tempted to skip over it, but far too often we fail to pray just at those moments when we most need to do it. It was after a night of prayer at Gethsemane that Jesus faced his fear and allowed his enemies to arrest him. How much more, then, do I need to pray? And not just for the courage to what I should; when I’m afraid, I need God’s help to know what it is I should do (James 1:5), especially if the fear is making it hard for me to even think in that direction.
Sometimes, when fear is pushing me to do something right now, even taking a moment to pray can be hard. The first battle might be to just stop and ask God to help me, without eloquence or fancy language. “God, help!” has been my prayer on many occasions. And even when I don’t know what to pray for, he has always still heard me. (Romans 8:26-27)
When is Fear Rational?
I said a few paragraphs ago that I need to acknowledge what I feel, but act on what I know. So what can I know? Remember that I’m not talking here about caution, much less the fear of God (a phrase that always refers to great respect or reverence). I’m talking about the emotion of fear; when should I let it drive me to action or inaction?
That’s where the passage I quoted at the beginning of this article fits in. Bear with me for a moment and I’ll explain. The crucial point in this passage is not just that Christ died for us, but specifically that he did it “while we were still sinners.” I’ll say it again; Jesus gave his life to reconcile us to God while we were his enemies. If this is how God treated us when we were his enemies, how will he treat us now that we are his children?
Whatever I face in this world, I face it in the knowledge that Jesus died to reconcile me to the Father while I was his enemy, in open rebellion against his lawful rule. Whatever happens in the world, whatever the stock market does or doesn’t do, whatever the president does or doesn’t do, whatever happens to my finances, the bottom line is that God was my friend when I was his enemy. Now that I’m his son, I know that my future is absolutely secure. That’s why Scripture says in Romans 8:15, “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” If it’s true that Jesus died for my sins, and if it’s also true that he rose from the dead, then all fear is ultimately irrational.
I don’t want to trivialize the problem, although I really wish I could. I’d like to give you an easy answer, but there isn’t one. Fear is scary. Sometimes it’s terrifying. Acknowledging what I feel, letting myself feel it, but choosing to act only on what I know, is never going to be anything but hard. That’s why the enemy uses fear; it works, and it’s hard to resist.
But for whatever reason, God did not instantly perfect us when we were saved. Instead he gave us his Spirit, so that we can obey him, and he trains to be prepared to do what we need to do. In Psalm 144:1, David writes, “Praise be to the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” Jesus told his disciples, “The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.” (Luke 6:40) And Hebrews 12:11 says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” We are, all of us sons and daughters of God, in training to become like Christ. And part of that training is learning to overcome fear. And, paradoxically, that’s incredibly encouraging, because anyone who is in training has reason to expect that, in time, they will be fully trained. As John writes, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”
The bottom line, then, is don’t fight to control your feelings. Let yourself feel afraid. Pay attention to your fear. Listen to what it’s telling you. But then pray, and do what you know is right. May God give you the courage to do what you need to do.