FACING OUR FEARS

“FACING OUR FEARS by Daniel Cole

 

Have you ever walked down a street late at night with little streetlight and people lurking ahead in the distance? This causes fear in us and that fear often makes us change direction. We turn around, going back the way that we came, thinking that the new route will be safer.

We walk away from the danger we see in front of us. This is the power of fear. It reroutes us, diverts us, like a spiritual Satnav changing our direction.

In this story of walking down a dark street, our fear worked as a survival mechanism and might have saved us from danger, but in our walk with God the enemy uses the same fear tactics to derail us from our destiny. The Bible says the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy; walking around like a lion seeking to devour its prey.

The enemy uses fear to stop us going where God has called us to go, and stop us from reaching the people God wants us to reach – friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues. It stops us from being carriers of the Good News, from being salt and light and from going into all the world making followers of Jesus.

One of the ways the enemy makes us fearful of the present is by bringing up the past – our past mistakes, our past pain, and our past failures. However, it’s like when driving a car - if we want to go somewhere, we need to spend more time looking through the windshield than the rear-view mirror.

We need to look more at where we are going rather than where we’ve been. It’s the same in life. If we are going to face the fears the enemy uses to stop us in the future, we will need to learn from the past, but not live in it. The past is a place of reference, not residence. As it has been said many times, ‘Your history does not need to dictate your destiny.’

Today is a new day, so let’s enjoy looking at the glorious future God has for us. Let’s allow God’s Spirit to lead us to ‘where our trust is without borders,’ and may we walk across those borders, wherever God has called us, in freedom from fear of the past.