How to Win Over Fear

By John Edmind Haggai

[Part 1]

I

This bitter man left the Church. I had almost forgotten about him until, two days after I’d preached my valedictory sermon, the sheriff phoned. He said, “Reverend Haggai, I have a warrant for your arrest.”

I

A friend of mine once told me he was concerned for my safety, traveling, as I do, to countries where visitors run the risk of robbery or terrorist kidnapping.

“Let me provide you with security,” he said. “I’ll underwrite full salary and expenses for three bodyguards, so you will have protection every hour of the day.”

I thanked him for his generosity, but I knew the offer was out of all proportion to the real danger I was in.

“Anyway,” I added, “What good is a bodyguard? Did bodyguards keep President Reagan from getting shot? Or prevent the Kennedys, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Moro or Somoza or Sadat from being slain?”

I explained to him that I took my own, low-profile precautions. There are usually five or six people with me on any major trip I make. In countries with poor security records, I always let the hotel staff know where I’m going, the number of the car’s license plate, and when I expect to return. And I tell them who to contact if I’m not back at the prearranged time.

I’m not sure my friend understood. But even in situations of substantial danger, it’s important to keep fear in proportion.

Paul the Apostle faced danger every moment of the day. “When we came into Macedonia,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “our flesh had no rest, but we were troubled on every side; without were fightings, within were fears.” Yet Paul never allowed his fear to overrun his reason. Fear galvanized him, never paralyzed him.

I’m sure you have found that keeping fears in proportion is harder than it sounds — particularly in a media-conscious world like ours. Fear boosts television ratings. It bolsters newspaper circulation. Every day, shootings, ghastly murders, rapes, massacres, accidents, and epidemics are pumped into American kitchens and living rooms via television. Report a killing in Georgia, a twinge of fear ripples out as far as Los Angeles.

A few years ago, two women were attacked in a park near my house in Atlanta. The attack received wide coverage in the media, and by chance coincided with the showing of a TV film depicting a similar crime. The effect was staggering. I know people who, as a direct consequence of that event, installed burglar alarms, bought firearms, put in wrought iron window bars, and fitted dead-bolt locks on their doors. Many of them also had their grounds equipped with emergency lighting that could be flipped on at the turn of a single switch.

Fear in America has gone global. Watching American TV police dramas has convinced many of my friends overseas that America is lawless from coast to coast. They wouldn’t dream of coming to visit. When I tell them I’ve never seen a man shot, never seen a gun battle in my town, never even seen a person robbed, they stare at me in disbelief.

Exaggerated fear is a plague of the modern world.

Did you know that the exaggerated fear of illness is most common among the healthy? A woman I knew spent forty years fearing she’d die from cancer. In the end she died of a heart attack. Sad! She wasted half her life fearing the wrong ailment.

Or take finances. I am old enough to remember the Great Depression. And I have seen people so fearful of a return of such times that they keep their savings in cash, even over two decades in which high inflation rates stripped the value of their money by over 60 percent.

Dangers confront us everywhere we go. Dangers of sickness. Dangers of impoverishment. Dangers of rejection or scorn from others. We are right to be afraid of these things. Right to anticipate them and take appropriate and measured precautions.

But exaggerated fear arms fear with binoculars. Every possible danger out there in the unknown territories of the future appears oversized and close-up, demanding constant and draining action to avert it. Even a fear of something absolutely harmless can imprison you. Fear of going outside. Fear of enclosed spaces.

Exaggerated fears have become America’s number two mental health problem, after alcoholism. They can be debilitating. And they’re on the increase.

Fact FIVE about fear: If you think you can live with your fears, think again. Fear can ruin you.

Fear means lack of influence. My brother, Tom, is one of the world’s premier speakers to business and professional groups. After hearing a colleague recently, he passed on to me an astute observation.

“When a speaker who charges $5,000 a speech begins his address by telling the audience about his hectic schedule — the many miles he has traveled and how little sleep he has had, he really does himself a disservice. The people sponsoring him did not scrape up the money for the honorarium in order to hear about his fatigue. They came for inspiration and to gain benefit from his insights. Why would one of the most accomplished speakers in the world resort to currying sympathy from the audience?”

He didn’t need to elaborate. The man was afraid. Instead of wowing the audience with his great insights, he set out to neutralize their perceived hostility. He wanted them to feel sorry for him.

Fear means truant thoughts. Fear divides the mind and keeps a person from focused thinking. It corrupts the mind. The Biblical writer James wrote: “purify your hearts, you double-minded.” An elderly couple in Scotland suffer an irrational fear of mice. They think that if a mouse gets under their floorboards it will certainly get into the roof, and once in the roof it will certainly chew through the power cables and cause a short-circuit. And then there will be a fire and they will certainly be killed.

In a matter of seconds, fear turned the issue of mice under the floorboards into an issue of imminent and impending death. Truant thoughts do not dwell on the positive. They dwell instead on illusion of harm — sudden illness, the children flunking out of school, the betrayal of friends, the abandonment of a spouse.

I once told the venerable pastor Dr. Robert G. Lee how much I admired his immunity to criticism. He replied, “Oh, John, when I think of the hours I’ve wasted in the course of my life fretting about the criticism of others — hours I could have utilized writing or visiting or memorizing — it would depress me if I gave much time to it.”

Fear means isolation. Isolation is the side effect of taking a no-risk approach to living. The fearful person refuses to mix socially because he fears his looks are inadequate, his conversation dull, his opinions shallow. The fears, though groundless at first, self-actualize. Just like a car engine deteriorates through lack of use, so does a person’s ability to communicate. Soon enough, he will get to the stage where experience corroborates his suspicions. The isolation he chose ends up becoming his jailer.

Fear means struggle. A common result of constant fear is obsessional neurosis. The fearing person adopts an obsessive habit that he feels will keep danger at bay. There is no logic in this. If I touch wood every time I express a hope, or avoid walking on the cracks between paving stones, such actions will do nothing to avert disaster. This kind of behavior only intensifies and reinforces my fear, locking me into a spiral of wasteful and pointless effort.

Fear means conformity. Some years ago, I met a friend who expressed his Christian faith with a unique vocabulary of super-saint trigger words. I wanted to be gracious, but I knew that the average person would think he was on an outing from the insane asylum. I asked him how he was. “Isn’t Jesus precious?” he replied. I nodded. “I know how Jesus is,” I said, “but how are you?”

The use of religious jargon is a sign of fear — a way of reinforcing the point that we are members of a certain spiritual in-group. This doesn’t mean we should adopt the jargon of the world through fear of being seen as oddballs. Fear should not make us conformists to any mere cultural trait, Christian or otherwise.

Fear means godlessness. When the disciples got caught in the storm on the Sea of Galilee, they awakened Jesus and said, “Master save us! We perish!” Jesus got up and rebuked the wind, and the sea became as calm as a millpond. “Why were you so fearful?” He asked them.

They could have replied, “Are you kidding? In all our years at sea we’ve never seen a storm like that, and you call us fearful?” They didn’t. They knew that with Jesus in the boat there was no cause to be afraid. The storm had panicked them.

Fear means health problems. It’s well documented that fear causes tension in the muscles, restriction of the cardiovascular system, pressure in the head, and intestinal problems like duodenal ulcers. The accumulation of stress cannot help but wear down the body and shorten life.

Fear can kill in other ways, too. My Uncle Bill died at 49 from a strangulated hernia — because he was too scared to have surgery.

Fear produces all of these side-effects.

Here is the key to unlocking fear. Winning over fear – and I mean winning, not just learning to live with it — begins, paradoxically, with fearing in the right way. The whole message is packed into just 16 words of Psalm 147.

“The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, in those who hope in His mercy” (Psalm 147:11).

What does it mean to fear God?

Two things.

First, fearing God means holding Him in awe and respect.

The word for fear used most commonly in the Old Testament describes a particular kind of experience. It is the experience you might have when you first see the Grand Canyon. To be sure, it includes that feeling in the pit of our stomach, that we are vulnerable in the presence of something greater and more powerful than ourselves. But it is balanced by the strong assurance of safety. We are completely overawed — but we know that we are not in peril. This is what Peter means when he says “Be holy in all manner of conversation . . . pass the time of your sojourning here in fear.”

Second, fearing God means trusting in His providence.

Remember, God has committed Himself solemnly to look after us. As Jesus says, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32) That “fear not” tolls like a signal bell through the pages of Scripture. The message is hammered home on over 300 separate occasions in the Old Testament and the New. To fear God is to trust in His provision for your need. If you are a believer, God will meet your needs just as He met the needs of the Israelites when they journeyed in the wilderness. His promise is sure; His power beyond limit.

Do you fear God? Do you relate to Him in reverent awe? Do you trust in His readiness to meet your every need? If you do, your problems with fear are over. Nothing can shake you. The person who fears God fears nothing else. Period.

But let’s be honest. You and I are still on the learning curve. It takes time for that healthy, life-giving, godly fear to seep into the extremities of our being. If we want to be filled with the fear of God, we will need to give it the same effort and determination we give to raising children or pursuing a career. Ask yourself quietly and prayerfully whether you are ready for that commitment. But have no delusions you won’t win over fear any other way.

You won’t win over fear by avoiding dangers. Dangers confront you from the moment you switch on your coffee pot in the morning to the moment you drive home at night. Have you ever pricked your finger while sewing buttons on? Of course you have. You can’t avoid danger any more than you can stop breathing.

You won’t win over fear by concealing it behind a veneer of confidence and assertiveness. Peter boasted that he’d never deny Jesus, whatever the circumstance — yet before the night broke into daylight he’d denied the Lord not once, but three times.

You want to face down your fears? Then pay attention to the Bible’s answer to fear, tucked away in one of Paul’s letters to Timothy. Timid Timothy knew fear as well as anyone. Which is why Paul spells it out in the simplest possible terms. “God,” he says, “did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).

DELIVERANCE FROM FEAR.

DELIVERANCE FROM FEAR.

First, let’s look at DYNAMISM.

For around $2,000 you can take a 16-week course to cure fear. It will give you, the clinicians claim, “the ability to lead a normal life without avoidance.” In effect, what the course does is teach you to maximize your own powers of reason and concentration. What you get for $2,000 is exactly what you had beforehand — plus a teaspoon of psychological method and a pinch of extra confidence.

No wonder the results are limited! Compare that with the resources you can claim through divine dynamism. It is the same power that brought the world into being and which governs the motion of the universe. It is the same power that sliced open the Red Sea for Moses and raised the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.

As Paul wrote, God is “able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us” (Ephesians 3:20). That’s why Paul was able to endure such terrible hardships.

“We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed,” he wrote to the Corinthians. “We are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” These words were written from the midst of the furnace. Paul wasn’t sitting in a posh penthouse apartment. He wasn’t munching on chocolates, writing his letters with a $1,000 gold pen, under a six-way lamp, on non-glare paper. In fact, he was awaiting execution.

How on earth could Paul express such satisfaction and enjoy such transforming power in circumstances that would drive most people to despair? Well, here’s the secret. Discovering God’s dynamism has nothing to do with feeling strong or confident. On the contrary, God’s dynamism is made available to us because we are powerless and weak. And the weaker we are, the more available it is!

Why else could Paul write, “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong” (II Corinthians 12:10).

DYNAMISM = Deliverance from fear. Not our dynamism. God’s dynamism, given to us free at the very times we ourselves feel closest to collapse. Think of every bad experience that could ever happen to you — every worst fear — and you will still be able to say with Paul, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us” (Romans 8:37).

Second, DEVOTION = Deliverance from fear.

I prefer the word “devotion” to the word “love.” “Love” has been devalued in our culture. To read the current literature, one would think love is here one day and gone the next. It is something we feel. The feeling is wonderful, but as soon as the feeling goes away, we lose interest.

Anyone who has lived in a family knows devotion means a lot more than that. There are times when children are desperately annoying, when they get under their parents’ feet, break windows in the greenhouse, or ask you to do something at the moment you’re stepping out the door. We love our children even when they drive us crazy, because real love — devotion — is a lot more than a feeling. It is a commitment, a loyalty, a readiness to see a task through to completion.

God loves us like that, and when His dynamism transforms our love and turns it into devotion, amazing things start to happen.

When I was 12 years old, my father took me to Camp Barakel, where he was chaplain and main counselor. One day we had to drive to Battle Creek, Michigan, about 50 miles away, but had not gone 14 miles before the car stopped. We had run out of gas. This was extraordinary because we’d just filled up. Dad got out to take a look. He soon found the problem. Somebody had driven a spike into the gas tank.

This was a blow. In 1936, Dad’s income, which had to feed a family of five, was $30 a week. He and my mother certainly lived on faith. The car was an old jalopy, a 1930 Chevrolet. I sometimes tell people that we worked on that car from Monday through Saturday so we could drive it on Sunday. Yet we couldn’t have done without it.

As soon as I saw the damage, I knew who was responsible. He was a miserable little rascal, a double-distilled bully, and a cocky, incorrigible troublemaker. But when I exploded to Dad, he scolded me and told me not to jump to conclusions.

In the end, we got help and returned to the camp in time for dinner. But I didn’t eat. As the oldest child in the family, I was always concerned about the family finances, and I couldn’t imagine how Dad was going to get money to replace the gas tank and fill up for the journey home. My fear turned into hostility when I saw Dad seated on the edge of the dock with his arm around the shoulders of the same little monster who had spiked his tank!

I could not understand Dad’s attitude. Yet it is my view now, 73 years later, Dad’s response made a positive and lasting impression on that boy. Dad revealed the spirit of the Lord Jesus. He had every reason not to. He could have let fear of impoverishment drive him into resentment and rage. But he didn’t. He turned an unpromising situation into an opportunity for life-changing love.

DYNAMISM + DEVOTION = Deliverance from fear. Finally, DISCIPLINE.

The three form a team, a triumvirate. Each on its own won’t secure optimum effectiveness. Together they will help you win over fear — permanently. And discipline is the “quarterback” of the trio. To apply dynamism through devotion requires discipline.

Don’t confuse discipline with enthusiasm. It’s wonderful to leave a church service fired with new determination to live the way God wants. But let me tell you straight: if discipline depends on such “high moments,” it will accomplish nothing. Some days you will want to honor your commitments. Other days you won’t feel like getting out of bed. Put yourself at the mercy of feelings, and you’ll be lost before you begin.

Discipline is a momentum of good habits. Isn’t it easier to push a car that’s already moving than a car just sitting at the side of the road? You face initial inertia. But discipline gets progressively easier as the new habits sink deeper and deeper into your personality. Eventually the momentum is so great that stopping is harder than continuing.

I am not trying to infuse you with a new state of mind, a new feeling, or a new way of looking at commitments. I am recommending a set of positive actions which, with about the same amount of effort you would put into jump-starting a car, you can use to get your spiritual life moving. God gives you the nourishing and life-sustaining breath — but you must do the breathing.

Briefly, there are five ways to activate discipline in your life.

First, set a regular quiet time. The most powerful countermeasure against fear is the awareness of walking in fellowship with God. That’s why beginning each day with a quiet time is so essential.

I once traveled for three weeks with Korean world Christian statesman, Dr. Han Kyung Chik, who built a Church from 26 refugees to a membership of 60,000. Twice the communists had stripped him of all possessions. He bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus. Every morning, Dr. and Mrs. Han attended the five o’clock dawn prayer meeting. This man — pastor, educator, humanitarian, statesman, author — not only began his day with at least one hour of quiet time, but he bowed his head inconspicuously in prayer before every activity, event, and conversation.

What a deterrent to fear! What a guarantee of God’s victory! I have no doubt that Dr. Han’s serenity, after a life of considerable hardship, can be attributed to his quiet time with God.

Second, make sure you get regular fellowship. In 1987, when he was ninety years old, my father hadn’t missed a week of Sunday School since 1923. Even when he was in the hospital for surgery, one of the classes he taught met in his hospital room so he would be able to keep up his record and minister to the business and professional men who made up the class. He remained fearless to the end of his life, and I can think of no better example of discipline than he.

Third, make sure you regularly testify to your faith. I can’t explain it, nor can I back up my argument with chapter and verse, but I have been convinced for years that those who exercise the discipline of telling what God has done for them receive, whether or not they realize it, a freedom from fear. Philippine Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno, oil man Jody Stubbs and lumber man Rusty Wood are among the people I know who discuss their faith as easily as they discuss family life.

Fourth, make sure you practice regular obedience. Not every one is brilliant. Not every one is handsome or beautiful. Not everyone is well-connected socially or from a famous family. But anybody, anybody at all, can live a life in accordance with God’s commands. Do that, and you will enjoy “the peace that passes understanding.”

Fifth, make sure you engage in regular acts of service. My mother never knew good health. She suffered from pernicious anemia, emphysema and angina, among many other ailments. Forty-five years before her death, the doctors said she would not live much longer. In fact, she lived to be 80 years old. She had every reason to be fearful for her health. She spent hours in doctors’ offices, endured a regimen of medication and shots. But, instead, she devoted herself to serving others. My father said that she could write legibly in such small handwriting that she cheated the post office back in the days of the one-cent postcard! Right to the last she kept up a constant correspondence that gave hope, encouragement and spiritual counsel.

DYNAMISM + DEVOTION + DISCIPLINE. Together, these three will defeat every kind of fear. But it’s easy to roll out a formula — and quite another to live by it day by day. So I want to focus on “getting off the ground” or “getting real” with fear.

Many years ago, former President of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, invited Jackie Robinson to become the first black to play in major league baseball in the United States.

Robinson replied, “It’s a dream come true, Mr. Rickey, but I see trouble ahead — for you, for me, for my people, and for baseball.”

At this, Branch Rickey laid a hand on Robinson’s shoulder, and told him, “You know, Jackie, I was a small boy when I took my first train ride. On the same train was an old couple, also riding for the first time. We were going through the Rocky Mountains. The old man sitting by the window looked forward and said to his wife, ‘Trouble ahead, Ma! We’re high up over a precipice and we’re gonna run right off!’ And you know what happened? Right after the old man spoke, our train course bent into a tunnel and we came out on the other side of the mountain.”

That’s the way it is with fear. We must stare our problems down — and trust God to bring us out on the other side of the mountain.

It’s no use pretending everything’s okay. I love my brothers and sisters in Christ, but frankly, unreality has seized a large segment of the church in its viselike grip. How often I’ve heard church members stand up and say, “Jesus saves, He keeps, He satisfies!” while their faces are long enough to suck marbles out of a gopher hole.

“Saying the right thing” is not the answer to your fear — no matter how much pressure you feel “not to let the team down” or “to keep smiling.” If Jesus saves, keeps and satisfies, then demonstrate it!

Remember, fear is never abstract. So what are you afraid of? What person or object has your fear attached itself to? What future event — or events — do you dread? Think them through, and write them down. You fear frailty in old age? Write it down. You fear losing your job? Write it down. You fear others will reject you? Write it down. Make it your business to become thoroughly acquainted with your fear — just as a skilled hunter becomes thoroughly acquainted with the habits of his prey.

Copyright © 2009 John Edmund Haggai