“Fear not.”

Well known local bloggerist and all around smarty-pants, Miss Mary, gave me her take on fear’s effect on people, particularly believers. Fear can rob us of joy, fear of letting go of the past can keep us from enjoying our present, and fear can keep us off the path God wants us to travel. I want to look at this statement in this ‘bonus blog.’ I also want it known that this is not a bloggy collaboration between Miss Mary and myself. I am just using a single statement. I do not want her to get the idea that she can share in the royalties from this blog.

Fear can rob us of joy. Phil Weck sang a song in church on the last Sunday of April. It was called ‘Thank You’ and was about a man meeting in heaven all the people he had affected on earth and who had eventually gone to heaven because of his witness and concern. It is a powerful song. I love that song because I can think of many I want to look up in Glory and embrace and thank. But ask yourself a question; will any come up to you and thank you for your witness? When have you shared the Gospel with someone? What stories do you have to tell about sharing? If you witnessed you would have stories to tell. You cannot say that you feel it isn’t your job to witness. We have talked about this often in the last five years. “Well, I don’t want to say the wrong thing.” NEWS FLASH!!! Saying nothing is definitely the wrong thing. “I just don’t think I know the Bible well enough.” If you have accepted Christ, you share that. You share what you know. “Truth be told, I don’t want to offend anybody.” And, yet, we will share pictures of our grandbabies or talk politics with perfect strangers. What really keeps us from sharing the Gospel and having the greatest joy ever? Fear. And that fear is from Satan.

Of course, someone will say, ‘It is easy for you to say. You’re a minister.’ Yes, I am a minister. So what? There is nothing that I do that you cannot do or should not do. ‘Obviously, you don’t have fear.’ Of course I have fear. I just know where that fear comes from and I know that greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world. ‘I don’t see how sharing and witnessing can bring great joy.’ That’s proof you don’t do it on a regular basis or not at all. I have shared dozens of stories about seeing someone come to Christ and all have brought me joy. Here is another NEWS FLASH!!! If you are waiting for the Holy Spirit to make you happy and joyful, you have misread your Scripture. The Bible doesn’t say the Spirit is the joy giver. The Bible says the Spirit is the Comforter. The Bible teaches that the Spirit is the One who gives us power to witness. The Bible does not teach that we are in the Spirit when we are all emotional and happy. We are in the Spirit when we are following Him and serving the Lord and sharing His grace and holiness. The reward for being led by the Spirit is the joy that only comes from being faithful.

 Miss Mary also said fear of letting go of the past can keep us from enjoying our present. “We have never done it that way before!” Or, “We have always done it this way!” For nine years I worked with churches on the edge of collapse. They had destroyed themselves. And in every one of them, except one, I heard those two phrases. Why couldn’t they try something new? It might offend one of the old timers. It would require rethinking the standard. It would make extra work. Let me share with you something Orville Chamberlain and I talked about once. I was concerned about how he was handling the coming together of both churches into one worship center. He told me that back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, when he was a youngster in his 30s, he and another church member saw clearly that Urbana could not easily maintain two separate churches. They proposed, to both churches, the idea of coming together as one. He told me that the idea was shot down immediately by both congregations. There was one church on the west side of the road and one on the east side of the road. Period. Been that way since the 1870s. Not changing now! And yet, time demonstrated that the very small community could not maintain two congregations. It took DECADES of tiny little changes and a lot of hurt feelings to bring about what Orville saw so clearly all those years before. “WELL, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND PREACHER! YOU WEREN’T HERE!” I wasn’t here. But I do know that fear of letting go of the past wound up keeping a lot of people from enjoying what was in front of them.

Farming isn’t done the same way it was done in the 1920s. Medicine isn’t done the same way it was done in the 1930s. Communication isn’t done the same way it was done in the 1940s. Innovation is always accepted, except where fear reigns. Many farmers are still out there in their 60s and 70s and 80s, but if they still had to get a team of mules out of the barn every morning and hitch to a plow, well, those farmers would be long dead.

And then, Miss Mary said, fear can keep us off the path God wants us to travel. That Miss Mary is a piece of work, isn’t she? “What does she know? I will go anywhere the Lord wants me to go!” Except that is not always true. In fact, it is rarely true. Going down a path we don’t want to go down is a frightening thing. I don’t want to do that. And yet, when we open up our hearts to the Lord, our paths are not our own.

The Apostle Paul was excited. A relatively new Christian, he wanted to get started with witnessing on the grand scale. He knew the Lord wanted him to go to lands where the Word was needed. He made the decision to travel to the East. To go West would be to travel in the Roman Empire, and he probably didn’t want to do that. He had always lived in the Empire. He wanted something else. The East it was! Maybe he had his thoughts fixed on China! But then, in a dream, he was told to head West. The area we know as Europe. And that is where he went.

OK. We know all that. But what about the East? Did God just write the East off? I don’t think so. I think that God was inspiring someone else to go East. Maybe several others. And I think they didn’t respond. Paul traveled to Europe and set Christianity in motion there. To the East, in the Arab countries and China, there was no Christian witness. Eventually, Islam arose immediately to the East and further, in China, Japan, Korea and such places, they settled into their own religions. How would the world be different if those who were given a different path than what they wanted had actually followed the path the Lord laid out for them? But, to once again quote Miss Smarty Pants, fear can keep us off the path God wants us to travel.

Is fear robbing you of joy? People talk about being on the mountain top in Spiritual joy. And then they say you can’t stay there, but you can go again. I believe that we are just talking about an emotional burst. If we live our lives fearlessly sharing His witness, we can stay on the mountain top. Not in that welling, emotional state, but in knowledge of having done our best. Is fear of letting go of the past causing you to not enjoy your present? Life will never be the same as it was when the kids were little, when you and your friends were young or when that first kiss left you breathless. So what? Let fear go and embrace what is now. Has fear kept you off the path the Lord has for you? Walking with the Lord is not like driving down a super highway. You make an exit there and you have to go a long way until you can turn around. I always think of walking with the Lord as a walk in the woods. You go a ways and then the trail splits and you take the one way, but the other way isn’t really very far away. Pretty easy to get to, actually. Just over there. You can always get back on track with the Lord.

Maybe Miss Smarty Pants is pretty smart. We should listen to what she says. “Fear not.”