When we fear, what does that do to our emotional and physical state? In this week’s Ask Pastor Mark, he gives eight reasons why most fear is a fraud.
Have a question you’d like answered in a potential future Ask Pastor Mark video? Send an email to [email protected].
2 Timothy 1:6-9 – For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…
Genesis 3:9-10 – But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
We were spending our family vacation tucked away in a remote cabin surrounded by barren dirt hills and jagged rocks where we could breathe fresh air, splash in a lake, and do our best to grab some family time.
But our time away was actually the most intense point of our life and ministry. Crisis-level problems hit every day. Our phones buzzed constantly. We took calls out in the car. We didn’t want our kids looking on. We didn’t want them to overhear hard conversations or be overcome with fear. We wanted them to feel like life was normal even though we were in a war.
It was one of the worst seasons of our life. We felt as if an avalanche hit us. And we experienced great fear. Some of the concern was legitimate—based on actual negative things happening in the present that we needed to deal with. Some of the concern was illegitimate—based on possible negative things in the future, many of which did not happen.
Fear is one of the major topics of the Bible. Guilty of sin and hiding from God and his wife, Adam said, “I was afraid.”
Fear can divert our life energy from investing in real people and things and wasting it on a mirage. God creates faith, and Satan counteracts that faith with his counterfeit of fear.
To order the new book from Pastor Mark & Grace Driscoll “Win Your War”, visit: https://amzn.to/2YuhoDn.
For the entire eight-week “Win Your War” sermon series from Pastor Mark, visit www.markdriscoll.org or the Mark Driscoll Ministries app.
Do you need to heal from wounds in your past before you can look forward to the future with hope and not fear? In this practical sermon from the Win Your War series, Pastor Mark describes how the way you relate to your earthly father can affect the way you see your heavenly father and how to move forward into your future with freedom, not fear.
The ability to forgive and know that you’re forgiven is life-changing. Forgiveness opens the door for repentance and reconciliation and shifts your focus from the one who hurt you to the One who can heal you. In this sermon, Pastor Mark tells what forgiveness is, why you should forgive, and what happens if you do or don’t forgive.
The Bible teaches that we can be saved and receive forgiveness for things we’ve done but what does it say about healing for things done to us? In this sermon, Pastor Mark teaches on how to move from shame and condemnation to freedom.
The way you see yourself and the way you see God changes your entire life. In this sermon, Pastor Mark teaches how both God and Satan want to define you but how our choice is ultimately between war and worship.
Proverbs 28:14 [ESV] – Blessed is the one who fears the Lord always, but whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity.
Life, like gravity, inevitably pulls you down.
What are the worst experiences of your life? Who has betrayed you the worst and hurt you the most? What has most disappointed and discouraged you? What makes you angry?
My purpose in asking these questions is not to revile you, but rather reveal you. One widely believed myth is that the circumstances of your life determine the condition of your heart. So, if you have had a hard life, you have the right to be a hardened person with a hard heart.
We all get defensive of our hearts, especially when they are hard. When our hard heart is exposed, we quickly tell the tragic tale of the circumstances which caused it. The tragic tale may be entirely accurate and true. Life has things that are unspeakably awful and woeful. Things are so bad Jesus needed to throw Himself headlong into death to break the cycle.
If you do not receive what I am going to now share, your life will not change. The worst day of your past will roll in like a dark cloud over every day of your future. But, if you receive what I will now share, your heart can be changed so that your life can be changed.
Life does not determine the condition of your heart. You determine the condition of your heart.
As a case study, consider the Lord Jesus. No one has experienced the level of hardship that He did. Yet, He did not harden His heart but instead prayed from His heart “Father” and “your will be done”. Jesus heart remained tender toward God, the man being crucified next to Him, and his mother present for the execution. And, on the cross, Jesus did not harden His heart toward you even though it was your sin He was suffering for.
The Puritan Christians long ago had a little proverb that said, “The same sun that melts the ice hardens the clay.” What is true of ice and clay is also true of hearts. If you will seek to be “pure in heart” as Jesus says, and start by bringing your heart (even if it’s hardened) to God for a spiritual heart transplant, He is sure to give you one. God does not want you to be a hardened, jaded, fearful, defensive, non-relational person who has decided that their hard heart would be a good grave to live in emotionally until they enter one physically.
Is there any hardness in your heart? What specifically can you do to bring this into a sacred meeting with God so that your heart can be healed and your life can be changed? Is there any person you would trust as wise counsel to have this conversation with?
If you’re a Christian but hear voices that seem like they’re from the devil and not of God, what does it mean and how should you handle it?
Have a question you’d like answered in a potential future Ask Pastor Mark video? Send an email to [email protected].
To preorder Pastor Mark & Grace’s new book “Win Your War” on spiritual warfare, visit https://bit.ly/34ehK18.
The young person who came up for prayer after church some years ago was seeking prayer for anxiety they were facing as they had a lot of life decisions to make – including which state they would live in and which college they would attend.
Decisions like this are understandably stressful. There are so many variables and expenses that it can be difficult to know what decision to make. Every one of us has been here in the past and will be here again in the future.
But what concerned me about my conversation with this young person was a pattern that emerged as we talked. No matter what possible decision we began discussing they would say “what if” and they would sprint into a nearly apocalyptic scenario where everything failed and their life was ruined. Since the conversation was going nowhere, at one point I stopped and asked, “do you ever look at the next season of your life and ask what if God has a great path for you and will be present with you and provide for you?” They paused, thought about it, and admitted they never really looked at the future with faith, only with fear. You’ve done this, right? You may be doing it right now.
To be sure, life has risks but God’s people are to live by faith and not fear. Proverbs 12:25 [ESV] says, “Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down…” If you’ve ever tried swimming while carrying dumbells, then you know what anxiety does to life. Perhaps anxiety is most pronounced at night, robbing us of sleep, Proverbs 3:24 [NLT] says that by faith, “You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep sound. Here are three facts about fear:
1. Fear of tomorrow robs you of both today and tomorrow
2. Fear turns us into false prophets where we predict a doom that never comes
3. Fear is sometimes most gripping for trauma victims and high control people
Perhaps the most common fear of all, is fear of man. Proverbs 29:25 [NLT] says, “Fearing people is a dangerous trap, but trusting the Lord means safety”. Those are the options, fear in the future or faith in the God who rules over the future. When someone becomes too big in our lives, God gets too small. When someone’s opinion matters too much, it is hard to hear the voice of God. And, when your decisions are based upon trying to control their actions rather than simply doing what is right in the sight of God, you know that fear has settled in and has started pushing faith out.
Is there anyone or anything you have more fear regarding than faith in God for that person or situation? How can you meet with God and be honest about this in conversational prayer?
Proverbs 30:12 [ESV] – There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth.
There was a young woman in our ministry many years ago who. Growing up, she was abused and, as a teenager, acted out living a self-destructive lifestyle. But, in college she met Jesus and became a godly young woman making good life choices, with one exception. She kept picking bad guys as boyfriends. These relationships were short lived as each guy was selfish, foolish, and godless.
When we sat down to talk, I asked her how she interpreted what was happening and how she should respond. She said that she did not feel she deserved a godly man in her life as she was “damaged goods”. She went on to explain that things done to her and by her, starting at a young age, had made her dirty, guilty, and undeserving. She actually thought that, by bringing pain into her life, she was showing God how sorry she was in hopes that He would forgive her.
How about you? Is there any area of your life where you feel guilty, dirty, or undeserving? Be honest with God and yourself. At some points along life’s path, every self-aware person with a functioning conscience feels this way and responds in one of two ways:
1. We deny that they are dirty or assert that they were dirty but cleaned up the mess of their life.
2. We rightly accept that we are dirty, and wrongly assume that this state is unchangeable, fixed, and our identity.
In the Bible, there are around a dozen different words used to speak of this experience, such as defilement, uncleanness, and filth. Emotionally, this causes shame, and an effort to cover up what has happened and who we truly are. The connection between sin (that we have committed, and that others have committed against us) is an old one. Before sin, our first parents Adam and Eve “felt no shame”. Once they sinned, shame caused them to hide from God and one another, and cover their shame with fig leaves. This remains a family trait for all humanity.
The good news is that, on the cross, Jesus took care of both your sin problem and your shame problem. Hebrews 12:2 [ESV] welcomes you to continually be, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
You probably knew that Jesus died for your sin. Did you also know that He died for your shame, and that today He is not ashamed of you, but is there to help you? Throughout the Bible, this explains why God’s people often wear white to worship. We all need to be reminded that we are not defined by what is done to us or by us, but only what Jesus has done for us.
Do you truly believe that because of Jesus, you are both forgiven and made clean?
At some point, everything in your life from your dishwasher to your phone breaks. This includes your heart, which can also be broken.
Who or what has broken your heart?
The face of a person, especially the eyes, are like a window into their heart. Proverbs 15:13 [ESV] says, “A glad heart makes a cheerful face, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is crushed.” We all know the difference between the appearances of these two hearts. A cheerful heart and a crushed heart are revealed in differing faces.
How’s your heart today? Cheerful? Crushed? Something else.
Importantly, when something is going wrong in your life and breaks your heart, your energy is depleted leaving you as a shell of yourself. Proverbs 17:22 [NLT] says, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.”
There’s a difference between a bad person and a broken person. Sometimes, they both do things that are basically the same, but for different reasons. The person who is bad needs to literally break their hard heart by giving it to God. The person who is broken has seen life break their heart and they need to bring it to God for healing. If we don’t understand this difference, we can bless a bad person, and burden a broken person.
At various points along the journey, life will break your heart, and the heart of a person you are walking the path with. When this happens, the likelihood of bad decisions increases. When this happens, it’s good to think about your heart like you do your body. If your body suffers trauma that injures it, your body is then reset and sent through a rehabilitation process. If your heart suffers trauma that injures it, your heart also needs to be set by God with the help of wise counsel and given a rehabilitation process to heal up. If you do not do this when pain comes but just keep pushing forward, at some point you will break yourself badly. This means saying no to some things for a while so you can say yes to healing.
What is broken in your life and has broken your heart? How have you responded, and what changes might need to be made?
The poor guy was overwhelmed. In what felt to him like an avalanche, in just a short few months, he was diagnosed with a major health problem, lost his job, watched his car catch on fire, and saw his girlfriend dump him for another guy.
As we sat down, he seemed a bit in shock and was having trouble processing all that was happening. When asked why these things were happening and how he would respond, he would simply say, “I don’t know why this happened or what to do”.
Have you ever been there? Are you there now?
Trying to be delicate to build the guy up instead of beating the guy up, I asked him if the pain he was feeling were things that had been a long time coming. He struggled to see his life truthfully according to reality and respond wisely.
If honest, we’ve all been this guy and love someone who is this guy. He talked a lot about his pain, and a lot about other people and how they had either brought the pain or not helped him through his pain. But he was also a backslider. He had stopped walking with God, stopped taking advice from wise people in his life, slid back into bad old habits, and still expected his life to go well. Proverbs 14:14 [ESV] says, “The backslider in heart will be filled with the fruit of his ways, and a good man will be filled with the fruit of his ways.” Everything in his life was harder and nothing was better because he had been in a long season of backsliding.
The difference between wise people and other people is not that they fail, but rather wise people learn from their failure and make life changes to avoid the same failure in the future. Proverbs 23:23 [NLT] says, “Get the truth and never sell it; also get wisdom, discipline, and good judgment.” Truth is how we find reality, wisdom is how we should respond to reality, discipline is the habitual making of wise choices, and all of this is leads to good judgment.
This man, and all of us to varying degrees at varying times, overlooked two basic truths.
1. He neglected the principle of sowing and reaping that the Bible mentions often. If we do not sow today, we won’t have anything to reap in the future. A farmer can eat well every year, then take a year off and starve to death. He had stopped exercising and eating well, stopped showing up to work on time and prepared, did not do the routine maintenance on his car, and stopped putting forth real effort to invest in his romantic relationship. His entire life was one of deferred maintenance.
2. He neglected the principle of delayed gratification. When he wanted something, he simply treated himself to it, whether or not it was wise. So, he made impulsive purchases on his credit card, which stacked up until he could not afford to maintain his car. Whenever he wanted to reward himself, he sat down with ice cream and a spoon to dig until he hit the bottom of the container.
These two principles work together. If we neglect what we should do today, and do not wait for the future, we bankrupt entire parts of our life (e.g. relationships, health, finances). As we feel the pain, it is helpful to ask, “what foolish choices have I made that have made my life harder?” Although this question can be painful, if heeded, it could stop the current pain and prevent further pain in the future.
What foolish choices have made your life harder? What exactly do you need to do to make a change?