Overcoming Fear
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
A couple of weeks ago, we started a new series on how to deal with our emotions in a way that leads to the wholeness of God in our lives. As mentioned, we are going to be using the book of Psalms as a starting point for these message because it’s within the Psalms that you most clearly see the full range of emotions. This morning, we are going to look at Psalm 3 which teaches us how to overcome the most basic and fundamental human emotion: our fear.
Passage
Passage
A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.
O Lord, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me;
many are saying of my soul,
“There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah
But you, O Lord, are a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head.
I cried aloud to the Lord,
and he answered me from his holy hill. Selah
I lay down and slept;
I woke again, for the Lord sustained me.
I will not be afraid of many thousands of people
who have set themselves against me all around.
Arise, O Lord!
Save me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
Salvation belongs to the Lord;
your blessing be on your people! Selah
Main Body
Main Body
Fear in all of its forms, both healthy and unhealthy, weaves itself into the very fabric of our existence. If you think about it, all of us are born in fear, we ultimately die in fear and in between, we experience varying degrees of fear. We may never experience the same circumstance that caused David to pray this prayer but all of us can relate to the emotions and the inner turmoil that David is expressing. If we are to overcome our fears, there are three principles that we can take from this Psalm:
Identify the source of your fear
Trust in the source of your confidence
Look beyond the source of your problems
The subtitle of this Psalms reveals the situation and the source of King David’s fears. We can see that this Psalm was written in response to when he fled from Absalom his son. This is a major event in David’s life and is covered in detail in 2 Samuel chapter 13-18. In case you are not familiar with the story, like many kings of the time, David had children from multiple wives and concubines. Absalom was a son from one of his wives and he had a sister by the name of Tamar who was raped by Amnon, another son from a different concubine. In perhaps, the greatest failure of David as a father, he didn’t do anything about this situation apart from getting angry. Eventually, Absalom took matters into his own hands and killed Amnon and then fled from Jerusalem. After 3 years, David brought his son back from exile but by that time, if you could only imagine, there was great bitterness and resentment built up in the heart of Absalom. Like his father, he was a natural born leader and he began to draw people’s hearts to himself and along with some of David’s closest confidants, he conspired to take throne of Israel for himself. Man, you talk about family drama, this is another level all together.
David’s troubles go so much deeper than just having an opposing army trying to kill him. In one sense, David is used to having his life threatened by enemy armies. That is something that he has experience dealing with. But having his own son betray him, finding out that people that he has trusted for years are a part of the conspiracy against him, and hearing the murmuring that this is God’s justice and that he brought all this on himself, that’s enough to fill your heart with all sorts of fear. We see a sample of what people were saying about David in the following verse:
The Lord has avenged on you all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you have reigned, and the Lord has given the kingdom into the hand of your son Absalom. See, your evil is on you, for you are a man of blood.”
But here is the amazing thing about David and one of the characteristics that make him a man after God’s own heart. He rarely reacts out of his emotions. In this particular situation, one of his men asked David, why should we let this dead dog curse you, do you want me to take off his head? And in the middle of fleeing for his life, David’s reply is so insightful and wise:
And David said to Abishai and to all his servants, “Behold, my own son seeks my life; how much more now may this Benjaminite! Leave him alone, and let him curse, for the Lord has told him to. It may be that the Lord will look on the wrong done to me, and that the Lord will repay me with good for his cursing today.”
In the midst of so much turmoil, how is David able to remain so composed and so compassionate. At least in part, it’s because David has identified the source of his fear. You’ll notice that as we read this Psalm, there are 3 natural breaks noted by the Hebrew word “selah” which means pause and reflect on what has been said. The end of verse 2 is an interesting place to put an interlude because up to that point in the Psalm, it’s extremely negative and seemingly hopeless. My foes are everywhere and they’re saying all sorts of horrible things about me. Pause and reflect. But why pause here, shouldn’t we move onto thinking about the goodness of God? No, not until you have had time to sort out your feelings in regard to the situation that you are currently facing. And many times, you will discover that the root emotion that you are feeling is actually fear. You’ll notice the conclusion that David comes to after a good night of rest is simply, “I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who are against me.”
The discipline of self-awareness is so critical to building emotional health because you can’t deal with unhealthy expressions of your emotions unless you first identify them. And this is especially true for a root emotion like fear. As we all learned in basic biology, fear doesn’t stay in its original form, it branches off in two directions: fight or flight. Depending on your personality and temperament, we tend to deal with our fears according to one of these two branches that often hides what we are truly feeling. For example, someone might be afraid of people but instead of identifying that fear, they only recognize their desire to withdraw, to remain isolated, to stay quiet in a discussion. These are flight responses rooted in the fear of people but it can be excused as a personality trait like being an introvert or simply a case of shyness. Social anxiety seems to be a growing problem but no matter how introverted you may be, we were never meant to live with a constant fear of people. On the flip side, a person who has the same fear of people may be more aggressive in terms of temperament and when that fear is triggered, it automatically results in anger, ramping up the intensity of the conversation, or by verbally attacking others. A person who naturally has a fight response to certain situations in life may never even know that they are actually responding out of fear and they will be perpetually stuck in this response cycle until they deal with their root fears.
During the early stages of Covid, it seemed that no one was wiling to state the obvious. I’m afraid of getting sick, afraid of dying, afraid of for my loved ones. Instead it was under all this subterfuge of caring for the vulnerable, being socially responsible, being informed about the science. These may be partly true but few people were willing to simply say I’m afraid and out of that lack of awareness, we witnessed one unhealthy response after another.
In his book on Soul Care, Dr. Rob Reimer points out this invaluable principle.
“Self-awareness is the gateway to freedom. It does not guarantee it, but you can’t get there without it. If you are going to get free from your fears, you must begin by identifying your fears.”
Being emotionally whole doesn’t mean that you’re life is perfect or that you will avoid all relational conflict in the future. That is an impossible task since we are all broken people and you cannot control the actions of others. However, emotional wholeness does mean that when the inevitable storms of life come, it will not break you and you’ll still be able to remain strong because of your confidence in the Lord.
This is why it is so important to not only identify your fears but to pray them through to the second point, which is understanding the source of your confidence. Verse 3 carries one of the most important themes of the Old Testament and it has its origins in the life of Abraham, the father of our faith. In Genesis 15:1, God tells Abraham “Fear not, I am your shield; your reward shall be great.” And the thing that Abraham is fearful of is dying without an heir, which would make the purpose of his life meaningless. The promise of God is that our lives will ultimately have a meaning and a purpose and that there is nothing to fear. In this chapter, Abraham is given a sign to prove God’s faithfulness to this promise. He tells Abraham to cut various animals in half and place them on two sides. And the tradition in Ancient Middle Eastern culture is when two parties entered into a binding covenant, they would walk together between the two halves of the slaughtered animals as an oath that whoever broke the covenant would be punished in the same way. (It’s gruesome and graphic but it certainly gets the point across)
The amazing thing about this story is that once the sun goes down, God causes Abraham to fall asleep and His presence passes through the slaughtered animals alone. This is the way God reveals in the OT that the punishment for a broken covenant would fall only upon Himself. Psalm 3 is a remarkable parallel of the 15th chapter of Genesis. The purpose and the significance of David’s life is dependent on him being the king of Israel. The promise of God to David is very clear, the throne of Israel will be given to you and to your descendents for all eternity. In losing the throne to Absalom, the very purpose and significance of David’s life is under attack. In that place where the very meaning of your life is threatened, the only thing a person can do is to cry out to the Lord in prayer.
As David cries out to the Lord, the place from which God answers Him is significant. David hears the voice of God from the holy hill, the temple where sacrifices are made and where the presence of God dwells. As David hears God’s answer to his prayers, his confidence in God’s salvation is restored and despite all the turbulence all around him, he is able to fall asleep just as Abraham fell asleep. You can call this resting in the Lord! (And P. Sam will actually talk about this very subject at our retreat this weekend.)
There are some of us in this room that have a very difficult time sleeping. Fear, in the form of anxiety, keep us from getting any real measure of peaceful sleep and you might be asking how does this truth put my heart to rest so that I can get a good night’s sleep? Here’s how. General human tendency is to try to save ourselves, to find our own meaning and purpose to life, to create our own sense of significance. The Psalms, the entirety of Scripture, and even human philosophy tells us that this is an impossible task. To try to find these answers on our own is to invite even more anxiety into your life.
Paul Tillich reminds us that there are three sources of anxiety that cannot be resolved by any amount of human striving, that your attempts to save yourself:
1. The anxiety of death: “The anxiety of fate and death is most basic, most universal, and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile.”
2. The anxiety of guilt: “The (anxiety of guilt) is present in every moment of moral self-awareness and can drive us toward complete self-rejection, to the feeling of being condemned – not to an eternal punishment but to the despair of having lost our destiny.”
3. The anxiety of meaninglessness: “The anxiety of meaninglessness is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of the meaning which gives meaning to all meanings.”
Harriet Lerner, who is a popular psychologist, writes about the danger of living in chronic state of anxiety:
“When anxiety is chronically high it leads to more serious outcomes such as greed, scapegoating, violence, and other forms of cruelty. In these anxious times, on both the personal and political fronts, ideas are embraced and decisions are made not on the basis of clear thinking that considers both history and the future, but rather on the basis of hearts filled with fear.”
Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down,
but a good word makes him glad.
And here is the most frightening thing about decisions that are made based on fear. They often keep us from our destiny. Think about the Israelites, on the doorsteps of the promised land, only to be turned back because of their fear of the giants in the land. They forgot what God had done for them in Egypt again and again and failed to trust Him. Their fear and inabilty to trust cost them 40 more years in the desert and their whole entire generation was not allowed to go into the land that God promised. Think about King Saul, who out of his fear of losing power and influence, decided to take matters into his own hand and prepared a sacrifice because he could’t wait for God’s timing. This decision ultimately cost his the throne of Israel. We know that God does give us second changes but at the same time, the consequence of decisions based on fear can be severe and long lasting. It’s no wonder that the command not to fear is the most repeated in the Scriptures.
This is where the salvation of Christ makes all the difference for us and how it helps us deal with these core anxieties of the human condition. Through the cross, the anxiety of guilt is forever dealt with because in Him, there is now no condemnation. Through His resurrection from the grave, the anxiety of death is conquered and we can say boldly with the apostle Paul, “Death, O where is your sting?’ And finally through obedience to His commands, we can live our lives filled with purpose and meaning.
The best summary of all of Jesus’ commands is simply “Love one another just as I have loved you.” Obedience to this command gives meaning to our lives.. And whether you are the king of Israel, a pastor, a banker, a teacher, a programmer, no matter what you do in life, love is the only thing that can give ultimate meaning to everything you do. At the end of this Psalm, we see a shift in David’s prayer, no longer is his prayer focused on himself but his attention is now on blessing God’s people. This is the final step that each of us have to take in our prayers against fear and anxiety: to shift our attention away from ourselves.
When you read the ending of the saga of David and Absalom, you see a man who is disillusioned by the very thing that was supposed to give his life meaning and he is more than willing to simply give it up. When he finds out that Absalom has been killed in the battle to regain the throne, David mourns and grieves as a father. But the thing that keeps David going is realizing that his destiny is to use the throne to be a blessing to others.
And the people stole into the city that day as people steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle.
2 Samuel 19:6–7 (ESV)
For you have made it clear today that commanders and servants are nothing to you, for today I know that if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then you would be pleased. Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants...
Conclusion
Conclusion
for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.
Power - Understanding the authority that you have and that you are a child of God
Love - Love casts out fear, overcomes fear. Christians in the Ukraine. People who went to serve in the food bank during Covid.
Self-control - One of the fruits of the Spirit that allows us to control our fears instead of being controlled by them.