Transcript
I said to you previously that the issue with fear is not, "Are you afraid?" God's given you the ability to be afraid. Fear can be a good thing. It can be a helpful thing. The issue with fear is, "Is your heart ruled by fear," because if your heart is ruled by fear, then it will keep you from doing the things that God has called for you to do and experiencing the things that God has called for you to experience.
Signs That Fear Rules Your Heart
So I want to talk to you about some signs that fear is ruling your heart and I've put these on my phone because I was afraid I would forget them. That's a good fear. So here's the first one: inability to decide. One of the clear signs that fear is operating in me is I just get anxious and paralyzed when it comes to making a decision. I lack the confidence to look at what's in front of me, to consider biblical principles and to step forward. That inability to decide is a clear sign that fear is ruling my heart.
Here's the second thing: making decisions to avoid something rather than to do something. I think that often the decisions that we make in fear are the ones that we live to regret. The Psalms say don't fear, it only leads to evil; that I shouldn't live an avoidant life. I should live a forward-looking, hopeful, restful, peaceful, joyful life, and it should be rest and peace and confidence, not in myself, not in my ability to control, but in God that allows me to make decisions that are forward-looking, not just avoidance decisions.
Third, too much meditation on, focus on, concern about what other people think. Fear of man is a huge issue. I think it gets ten out of ten of us. And what happens is the respect and appreciation, the acceptance of others becomes way too important to me. And what that tells me is I'm afraid of the opinion of others because I'm getting too much of my confidence, too much of my security from others. I'm trying to get horizontally what I've already been given vertically.
Next, how do I know that fears ruin my heart? Because I have a lack of rest, confidence, and security in the presence and grace of God. What fear does is fear so dominates my thinking that I, literally, at a functional level, forget the existence of God. God's not part of the story and because of that, I load life on my shoulders. Life is bigger than me and I end up being afraid. When you make decisions, do you think first about your ability or God's presence? How much of your decision is based on the presence of God?
Focusing on What You Cannot Control
Next, one of the things that fear does is it causes me to focus too much on things over which I have no control. Here's the good news. Things over which you have no control are things over which you have no control. Enjoy it. Rest in that because there is Someone who is in perfect control of all of those things. See, lack of control is not a disaster. Lack of control is a freedom. It's a freedom that God has given us this limited body of things over which we have control.
And then here's the final thing. You know this well. One of the clear signs of a heart ruled by fear is sleepless nights and distracted days. What I do at night when I lay down, I open up the package of my fear and I fumble through it again, and I do that for hours. Or I, during the day, any quiet moment, my heart immediately goes back to my fear.
What Jesus says is all of that anxiety hasn't added a single inch to your lifespan. When you spend an entire night in bed sleeplessly worrying about what is to come, in the morning, nothing has changed. It's a wasted, debilitating expenditure of spiritual energy that is a sign that something needs to change in your heart so with greater hope and greater confidence, you can face the things in this fallen world that God is calling you to face.
