Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Acquaint yourself with him now, and be at peace. By it, good will come to you. Please receive instruction from his mouth, and lay up his words in your heart.
Job 22:21-22 (emphasis added)

This is great advice. Wonderful stuff. And graciously delivered. It is one of the best invitations that I have come across in the Word. Come to the Lord and get to know Him. Seek Him and find Him. Be at peace. As believers we get to walk in that. “Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; through whom we also have our access by faith into this grace in which we stand. We rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1-2). This is the best deal in all of Creation ever.

God gives us the faith to believe (Ephesians 2:8-9). Believing, we receive Grace (John 1:16-17). Having received Grace, we can accept Jesus as Lord over our lives, believing that He died for our sin, paid the price we should have paid, was resurrected to life again (Galatians 1:4). Believing, we confess Jesus as Lord of our lives, and get baptised–joining Him as we symbolically die to our old self and get resurrected into Him (Matthew 28:19-20). He does it all. God made the way for us. Completely, totally, and absolutely. All the steps are laid out for us. The Holy Spirit walks us through them. Jesus is there holding our hands the whole time. And the Father is smiling down on us as we do it. New creatures. New creations. Children of the Living God. His Peace is now our peace (Ephesians 2:14).

This is the peace that passes understanding (Philippians 4:7). This is the total confidence in the Lord peace (Matthew 8:24). This is the peace that enabled Jesus to go willingly and joyfully to the Cross (Hebrews 12:2). This is the peace that gets us through any and every trial we might face (Acts 16:25). This is vital stuff for any citizen of the Kingdom, regardless of whether the address is heaven or earth. It is peace that comes in two parts. “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, I give to you. Don’t let your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful” (John 14:27). Jesus leaves us with His peace. The peace between God and humanity (Luke 2:14). The peace of salvation. The peace wherein we have our confidence (Hebrews 4:16). Jesus also gives us peace. The ability to not let our hearts always be troubled. The ability to walk in peace with Him and in Him. The empowerment to leave anxiety behind. The peace that is our heritage. “For God didn’t give us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control” ( 2 Timothy 1:7).

We do NOT need to fear. We don’t have to entertain it. We don’t have to pick it up. We don’t have to accept it. We don’t have it as part of our psyche. We don’t need it or anything that comes from it. It may be a part of humanity’s journey, but we are new creations in Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:17). We do not have to accept anything from the curse whether physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual (Galatians 3:13). Fear is not our motivation and should not be our motivation in any way. Faith is what we are to operate with and on. Faith based not on visible things, but the invisible: Jesus. The Rock on which we build our faith. “Isn’t my house so with God? Yet he has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure, for it is all my salvation and all my desire. Won’t he make it grow?” (2 Samuel 23:5). This peace is the fertiliser of our faith which we feed with the Word. Together they produce in us the strength we need to put aside the things of the world. The panic. The fear. The anxiety. Mental issues, conditions, and sufferings cannot stand against this. As we seek the Lord and acquaint ourselves with His ways, this is what gets built up inside us. Not automatically, but intentionally. We claim the promises and we pick up our cross to follow Jesus. “For it isn’t he who commends himself who is approved, but whom the Lord commends” (2 Corinthians 10:18).

It’s all a gift, isn’t it? The gift of God to man: fixing our mess. If nothing else gets people to look to God, that one single thing should sweep our whole society into Jesus’ arms. We have built up a web of helplessness and memory. The bureaucracy of life has gotten so complex. We fill out form upon form, book our appointment via the internet, arrive for it, answer the same questions, fill out a sheet on a clipboard, get into the actual appointment, and get asked why we are there? That kind of thing has been embedded in every facet of our lives. It can leave you feeling lost. Feeling like you don’t know how to continue. How to navigate. How to stop the ride and get off. That feeling of being afloat with no rudder, no direction. That is where anxiety comes from. It’s no wonder the world is awash in meaningless words. The enemy has engineered it over time. Taking the morass we throw out there and tweaking it until everywhere we look there are waves. Everywhere we go, there is wind. A tumult meant to have us give up. To be depressed at the nature of it all. To get to a place we’ll accept a diagnosis without a fight. Claiming the curse. Sinking into the waves until we are just so much sea foam on the beach.

He’d like it to end there, wouldn’t he? All of us just a pile of our neurosis. At the mercy of a world without root or direction. But God was unwilling to let that happen. No. He loved us too much for that. Jesus came and saved us. Established us. Allowed us to be grafted into Himself. To give us root. To hold us fast. Freely given by Grace so that we don’t have to do it ourselves—which is the cause of our despair in the first place: our inability to fix things, solve things, and manage things. The most well-ordered life that you can live is built on the structures and formulas of this world. It is smoke and mirrors. We work a job to get money, we need money to buy things, we need the things to live, we work more to buy other things, we work more to earn the right to not work and enjoy the things, and this is success. But money is arbitrary and its value is made up. Formal jobs are make-work inventions of man to get the money we also made up. This wasn’t the plan. We were always meant to work. To caretake this planet. Money wasn’t part of humanity’s journey until we made it one. We didn’t work for money originally. We worked, sure. But it was task oriented, not paycheque oriented. I’m not sure where holding something we say has value was supposed to bring us satisfaction, but it’s what we chose to accept. And it’s one more level of the human systems we set up so that we can feel that we are a success.

It’s all foolishness. At the end of the day, at the twilight of our years, we don’t look back and reminisce about money. Or the forms we fill out. Or the procedures we follow. Or our chores. We hold of no value the myriad of things that make up our days and weeks. The things we stress about that overwhelm us, they are fleeting. Which is an area the enemy has also worked hard to fix. Memory is too unreliable. We forget the junk and remember people. We forget the stresses and remember the fellowship. Luckily, we now have technology. A great repository of artificial memory. An avenue to forever bring to remembrance those things that we would often prefer to forget. At a moment, our social media engines dig deep and bring up days, events, posts, and pictures from our pasts. Good ones, bad ones, the algorithm doesn’t care. If you go looking hard enough, you will find every keystroke you ever used somewhere online. It is all floating out there just waiting to pounce. The enemy would like us to end there too, wouldn’t he?

Jesus saves us from all of that. All of it. His perfect love drives out fear from our hearts if we’ll let Him (1 John 4:18). Jesus heals our hearts (Psalm 147:3). He soothes our memories, removing the pain and trauma (Matthew 11:28). In His light, the darkness cannot even exist, much less have power over us. On Jesus we have a firm footing. We don’t feel tossed about. The waves may be high and the wind forceful, but we have rest in His peace. We have security. We are guarded and protected (Psalm 91). We get to have peace. We get to choose to look to Him instead of looking to what is causing our anxiety and stress. We get to look to Him, rely on Him, be guided by Him, and carried by Him. Our covenant has been ordered in ALL things. In ALL ways, God has a plan. We can be sure-footed when our Shepherd is guiding us. His Word is always coming our way. We need to do more than listen to it. We have to cache it.

In computing, a cache is a high-speed data storage layer which stores a subset of data, so that future requests for that data are served up faster than is possible by accessing the data’s primary storage location. Caching allows you to efficiently reuse previously retrieved or computed data. When we read the Word with intent, we do just this. We take the Word and run it through our minds. As we process that, we download it into our hearts. We can’t feel it. We can’t measure it. But it happens. When it is in our hearts, the Holy Spirit brings it up to our minds faster than we could ever manage. Every day as we hit those bumps and snags that are part of daily life, the Holy Spirit can respond by reminding us of what is in our hearts. That is why again and again the Lord tells us to put His Word before our eyes constantly. To be ever thinking on it. Ever processing it. Ever putting it into our hearts. If it isn’t there, then it cannot be accessed. Not in times of leisure and certainly not in times of trouble. Since we live in a world of times of trouble, it is vitally important to have that Word in our hearts.

Start with a little. Read ten minutes a day—audiobook versions are fine. Take just ten minutes and listen with your heart. Focus on the words you read or hear. If you don’t understand something, ask the Lord about it. Think on it. Look it up. Ask your pastor. Ask a spouse or partner. Don’t just take one opinion on it, look around. See what’s there. The enemy loves the internet for all the darkness that is spread there, but use it for good. There is more teaching, preaching, and instruction available for anyone to freely access than ever before in human history. Avail yourself of it. Check it out. Test it and keep the good, rejecting the bad (1 Corinthians 11:1). Lay the words up. Store them. Let the Word of God become the cache you access, not the world’s airy narrative.

What’s that hymn? ‘In Christ alone, my hope is found/ He is my light, my strength, my song/ This Cornerstone, this solid ground/ Firm through the fiercest drought and storm/ What heights of love, what depths of peace/ When fears are stilled, when strivings cease/ My Comforter, my All in All/ Here in the love of Christ I stand.’ This was the prophetic message of Micah 5:4 “He shall stand, and shall shepherd in the strength of Yahweh, in the majesty of the name of Yahweh his God. They will live, for then he will be great to the ends of the earth.” This is the message Jesus had for His church: “Remain in me, and I in you. As the branch can’t bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you, unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. He who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5). It is in Jesus that we have stability.

Peter walked on the water and took his eyes off Jesus and so began to sink (Matthew 14:29-30). Jesus took him by the hand and saved him. And then together they continued walking in the water (vs 32). They weren’t right by the boat. They were within shouting distance of the boat, but not right beside it. Peter could have walked a long way before he sank. Together they walked the whole way back. This is where we can be. Amidst the storm of this world. Amidst the collapse and panic and shortage. Amidst the war and conflict. The strikes and protests. The elections and litigation. The personalities and the persecutions. But peace filled. Not fearful. At peace. Hand in hand with Jesus. Laughing at the confused fish wondering what you’re about.

We serve a good God. Our Father gives us good things. Peace is among the highest of the gifts. The eternal expectant hope of security in what He is and what He is doing. Any aspect of the world system could go down at any moment—and it has been said some will by prophets of the Lord. We’ve been told this so that when it happens, we don’t faint. We don’t take up fear. We don’t panic. We rely on the Lord. Who is our peace (Ephesians 2:14). Who is our provider (Philippians 4:19). Who is our upholder (Isaiah 41:10). Who is our strength (Psalm 46:1-3). Do not fear. Let Him be your peace. Good things will come from it. Put His Word inside your heart. It will come out when you need it. He is the Lord. He is our God. He is our Father. He has you.

Daily Affirmation of God’s Love: Proverbs 18:10

A refuge is a shelter or place of protection from danger or distress. Something to which one has recourse in difficulty. It means back or backward. Not a reverse or again. This is a specific place behind you (protecting your back) that you can go to in order to gain protection from what you are facing. It is a hiatus. A rest. It is not giving up. It is not a defeat. It is not an escape hatch. It is a place of restoration. A place to recharge. A place to reorient your attack. It is a place to hold firm. It is a place where you are ministered to as you rely on the strength of another for respite from what you face. It’s being in a boat in a storm instead of swimming. Everything is still happening, but you have an opportunity to not be affected by it. To witness it, but not have it touch you. This is what Jesus offers to the righteous. Does that mean that your works are going to make it happen? No. In the New Covenant, our works are not what gets us in. Our works are proof that we are in. By Grace we are in Jesus. By faith we remain. Faith is more than eager expectation. You can also define faith as the manifestation of obedience. In Jesus, all things are possible. By the guidance and correction of the Holy Spirit, we can follow in Jesus’ steps. We can keep the commandments Jesus gave us —the two by which all the others are also kept. We can believe in our hearts, seek with our minds, choose the Lord, and seek to please Him. Without faith, no one can please Him (Hebrews 11:6). We can’t please Him without obedience. We can’t be obedient if we don’t love Him (John 14:15). We love Him because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). When we hold to that love, we can obey. Love enables us. Enter into Jesus today. Embrace His rest and recharge that love. It is the flagstones of the path we tread. It is the stone from which our refuge is crafted. The container of the peace we breathe. God IS love. Don’t fear. Take refuge in Him today. As the world swims and swirls, rest on the Rock and let His love fill you up for the next steps you’ll take in Him.

Your Daily Confession of God’s love to YOU:

Today God loves that I _______.