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There was a young man once who was
out with some friend and it was late and he needed to get home very
quickly. So he decided to take a short cut through a grave yard. He
didn’t know that the grave diggers had been out that day and had dug a
very large grave, probably a little too deep, but anyway when he was
walking through the grave yard, he fell in. And he was short of stature
so he really couldn’t get out. So he’d try climb up and he’d fall back
in and try to climb up and fall back in, and he yelled and screamed for
help and finally he gave up exhausted. He sat down and decided to wait
until the morning when someone found him. Well, low and behold, another
young man in the same predicament, late getting home, cutting through
the grave yard, fell into the very same grave. Also short of stature,
could not get out. He yelled and screamed and finally gave up in
exhaustion. Meanwhile, this other young man was sitting back in the
corner just watching all this. And when he saw this other fellow
finally give up and stop yelling and screaming, he decided he would say
something, and he said, “You can’t get out.” Well he did get out.
Funny what fear does, isn’t it? Lots of motivation.
They say that opposite attract, and
in some cases they do. But sometimes opposites don’t go with each other
and in this case we’re going to talk about fear and faith. For the last
few weeks we’ve been preaching through a series of sermons called
“Achieving through Believing.” And today is the relationship between
fear and faith or how to deal with your fears in regards to our faith.
Faith is the enemy of fear and I’ll be reading to you from a passage I
referred to a few weeks ago. It’s a famous one about the Israelites at
the Red Sea. You remember the story of how the Israelites were freed by
God from the Egyptians. And when the Egyptians finally relented and let
them go, Moses led them into the desert toward the Red Sea and they got
there. But you also remember the story about how the Egyptians changed
their minds and came after the Israelites. And this is where we are in
Exodus 14:
When the King of Egypt was told that
the people had fled, Pharaoh and his officials changed their minds about
them and said, “What have we done, we have let the Israelites go and
have lost their services.” So he had his chariot made ready and took
his army with him. He took six hundred of the best chariots along with
all the other chariots of Egypt and all the officers over them. As
Pharaoh approached the Israelites looked up and there were the Egyptians
marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord.
They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that
you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by
bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to in Egypt, leave us alone?
Let us serve the Egyptians. It would have been better for us to serve
the Egyptians than to die in the desert.” Moses answered the people,
“Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance of the
Lord. The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The Lord
will fight for you. You need only be still.” Then the Lord said to
Moses, “Why are you crying out to me. Tell the Israelites to move on.
Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the
water, so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground.”
Then the Angel of the Lord that had been traveling in front of Israel’s
army withdrew and went behind them. A pillar of cloud also moved from
in front and stood behind them, coming between the armies of Egypt and
Israel. Throughout the night the cloud brought darkness to one side and
light to the other. Neither went near the other all night long. And
Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and all that night the Lord
drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land.
The waters were divided and the Israelites went through the sea on dry
ground with a wall of water on their right and on their left. And the
Egyptians pursued them and all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and
horsemen followed them into the sea. And during the last watch of the
night, the Lord looked down at the pillar of fire and clouded the
Egyptian army and through it into confusion. He made the wheels of
their chariots come off so that they had difficulty driving. And the
Egyptians said, “Let us get away from the Israelites, for the Lord is
fighting for them against Egypt.”
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Would you pray with me?
Father in Heaven, we are all afraid
of something and many things. And we pray that in this time we can see
how we need faith and courage to deal with that fear. Lord, be with
us. Use these words today to change our lives to make us more faithful,
give us greater courage to do your will. To do what you would have us
do. We pray these things in Jesus name, Amen.
We’re all afraid of something. We
all have fear. Psychologists tell us that the fear, there are two fears
actually that we’re born with. One is the fear of loud noises and the
other is the fear of falling. Some of you might remember the comedian
Steve Allen who had a psychologist on his show one time who told him
these very things. And he, without missing a beat, he said, “Well I’m
afraid of making a loud a noise when I fall.” Some of us have all kinds
of other fears like going to the dentist. There was story about a woman
who went to the dentist and, kind of as a joke to alleviate some of the
pressure she was feeling, she signed her first name, then wimp as her
middle name, and her last name. And the receptionist laughed about
that. She said, “Well I’m sure the doctor will make you feel fine.”
She went and took her seat and waited for her name to be called. And a
few minutes later the receptionist came out and looked straight at her
and said, “Will the wimp please come forward.” And three people came
with her. Fear is natural, it is a gift, and I’m glad we have it in
some cases. Like many things in our lives, it goes past the place of
benefit to the place of paralyzing us and making us doubt God and
everything else. Fear does many things to us and in the story I read to
you we see some of those things.
The first thing that we see in this
particular story is that fear can make us skeptical. The Israelites
say, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us
to the desert to die?” You hear that? You hear the skepticism? You
hear the cynicism? You hear the doubt? The ridicule? You know so often
we ridicule what we fear. We see that in politics all the time. You
know when one party doesn’t like what the other party is doing, they
don’t necessarily talk about it in terms of content; they ridicule it.
And if they ridicule it enough, people believe it. It doesn’t matter
about the value of the idea. Its just ridicule and that’s what
happens. But in the Israelites case and sometimes in our case, we
basically react one way. I doubt it. And this is where they were.
They doubted.
The second thing is that fear cause
us to be selfish. When we are afraid, we start thinking about number
1. It becomes all about us. What have you done bringing us out of
Egypt? What have you done? So often leaders are faced with that sort
of thing when something new comes down the pipe or something that is
uncomfortable comes down the pipe the question is “what are you doing?”
Why did you do that kind of thing?” This is where Moses was. You know
when we’re afraid we often begin to play the blame game. And sometimes
accuse others and excuse ourselves. We saw so often last year in some
of those big disasters last year. You know people would freeze up and
not do anything and then they would say, “Why didn’t you rescue us? Why
didn’t you do something? It’s all your fault.” We see that in
politicians a lot as well. I’m thinking the Katrina hurricane; you know
the cries from congress were huge. “Why didn’t you do something?”
Well, they had been voting to under fund these levies for years. But of
course, the blame game, when they themselves could be blamed.
Fear causes us to be stubborn. “Did
we not say to you in Egypt, leave us alone? Let us serve the
Egyptians.” Fear causes us to resist change. We’ve all heard of the
famous seven last words of the church. What are they? We’ve never done
it that way before. In the church or in life, some changes are good.
But often we dig our heals in. We want to stay where we are because
we’re comfortable with that. We’re more comfortable with what we know
than what may be out there in the future. “Leave us alone we don’t want
to be bothered, this is going to hurt.”
Fear causes us to be short sighted.
Now here are the Israelites, they’ve been in slavery for what 400
years? And they’ve been enslaved, they’ve been abused, they’ve been
beaten, they’ve been killed and murdered, they’ve been used as
concubines, all kinds of things have happened to them. But when push
comes to shove, they say, “It would have been better for us to serve the
Egyptians than for us to die in the desert. Let’s go back, let’s
retreat, remembering the good old days.” We know the past, but often
what happens for us in the past is that we tend to make it better than
it really was. We tend to look back and say those were great days
weren’t they. I remember so many people talking about the good old days
and the good old days they were talking about didn’t have running water
or electricity. But still we romanticize what we’ve done in the past.
Here they were making this non-sensical statement that it would have
been better for them in Egypt. So many people are afraid of freedom.
As you know, I’m in the military and
I am in the reserves, but I watch some of my active duty counterparts
who, you know it’s really a nice life in some ways because everything is
taken care of for you. You live on a post or a base, you have base
shopping. Many times you have base or post housing and when you have to
move somewhere you’ve got orders to tell you to go. Many things are
taken care of for you. I’ve seen some of my active duty counterparts
when it got time for them to retire and have to go out into the real
world and face choices like where am I going to live and what kind of
job am I going to do. Some of them were terrified by it. It was hard.
It’s hard to change for all of us. And sometimes it’s better to, at
least seemingly in our thinking, to live in the past. So often a fear
of the future keeps us living in the past. I told you a couple weeks
ago how I found it so significant that the pillar of fire of the Lord
was leading them out into the desert, He turned around and got in
between them and the Egyptians. To me there is a little symbolism here
in terms of our past pursing us sometimes. Our past pursues us with all
kinds of ideas and hang-ups and sometimes they’re good, sometimes
they’re bad. But the Lord got in between them and their past so they
could face the future. I think sometimes our prayer needs to be, “Lord,
deliver me from our past.” You know the past is a wonderful thing. We
should celebrate it, and we should remember it, but we must never live
in it. Yet, it’s comfortable to do that sometimes. This is what the
Israelites wanted to do. The pay-off for us when we do that is that we
know what it is even when it’s bad. In the future we don’t know. The
Israelites didn’t know they were going to a promise land. They were
told that, but that was an abstraction for them. They didn’t know what
that was.
So how to we change? How do we deal
with our fears? If we make a decision to deal with our fears, and maybe
take risks, it’ll be hard. Yet we have to remember that God requires us
to take risks. We don’t often think about that. We think often that
God is a God of comfort, God is going to take care of us, that God is
going to be nice to us. If you read the Bible, that isn’t the story all
the time. All most everybody listed in the Bible was required to take
risks. Sometimes the risks are their lives, their livelihood and
everything they’d known in the past. Just make a list of the people and
you’ll see that. And Jesus comes along and says, “If you want to follow
me, you have to give up your life. For he who seeks to gain his life
will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will gain it.”
There is no timidity there. It requires courage and faith to be a
Christian, to be a follower of God. Yet if we decide to do that, more
and more, there will be doubters. There will be people who are
stubborn. There will be people who are selfish. There will be people who
will say, “Stay as you are already.”
So how do we take risks? Well, in
this passage we see the verbiage very much so. Moses says, “Do not be
afraid. Let go of your fear!” You know that phrase appears over 360
times in the Bible. That’s almost one per day. We see it again and
again. “Do not fear.” And of course our answer should be ‘how do we go
about that?’ How do we not fear? And in this case to some degree it
was the Lord’s fault that they were where they were. The Lord said ‘ok
Moses take the Israelites to the ocean or to the sea. In that
geography, they got there and had the water in front of them, they had
the hills on either side, and you might call it the cul-de-sac of fear.
Here come the Egyptians. They were stuck, boxed in; they had no place
to go. As He said to Moses, “I will show my glory, and all of the
Egyptians and you will know that I am God.” It was the Lord’s purpose
to put them there. I want to say that sometimes the Lord will bring you
and me to a place where we are boxed in. We have no other place to go,
except to trust God. If you are facing your own personal Red Sea right
now, congratulations. God is there with you. Very often you and I will
not trust God unless we get into trouble. Only then do we begin to
trust God. So the Israelites were there. Basically the way they were
going to learn to deal with their fear was to trust God, to trust who
was in control. That is the lesson you and I have to learn daily. Do
you know what I think one of the values of coming to church every Sunday
is? One of the values is coming to learn that very thing. During the
week we have the tendency to forget who is in control. Worship is this
act by which we remember that we’re not the point. God is in control.
We have to remember, ‘where God guides, God provides.’
The second thing we have to do is
look up. Moses said to the Israelites, “Do not be afraid, stand firm
and you will see the deliverance of the Lord. What me, look up.” I’ve
told this story may times. I love to tell it. Sometimes I don’t
remember the stories I have told you. I’ll tell it to you again.
Several years ago, in the army, I decided that I really needed to go to
airborne school. That means jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. I
was able to go, and I went. I finally got to jump week, you do five
jumps. The first two were pretty easy for me. It was like the
rollercoaster ride that I always wanted. But I got to the third one and
suddenly realized what I was actually doing. When you’re a chaplain in
the army they usually put you first. You’re sort of the good luck
charm. In this particular case, that was the case. It was in a C130.
In a C130 you literally have to put your hands and feet outside of the
airplane and jump. And there I was. I made a big mistake. I looked
down. In this case, sometimes they won’t let you jump until the wind is
right. Here we going around and around the field, and here I am looking
down. The more I look down, the more terrified I became. I looked at
the airborne sergeant who was sitting there right next to me and said,
“I don’t think I can do this.” I began to pray. I said, “Lord, I don’t
know if I can do this or not.” And I don’t hear God’s voice too often,
but I did in this case. The Lord said, “Look up, Dummy.” I’m not sure
about the Dummy part, but… I looked up and saw a horizon which was
perfectly still. We were going at 200 miles per hour. Its only 1000
feet down, you could see it, every little clump of grass. But then I
looked at the horizon and an amazing peace came over my mind. I just
looked up and there was that horizon perfectly still. Just about that
time two seconds later the green light went on, pat on the rear-end, and
out I went. Look up not down. Look up is your lights, look up. We
have a tendency to keep our head down, symbolically and really. When we
look up, that’s when we find peace and faith.
Third we need to launch out. Or, it
literally says, ‘tell the Israelites to move on.’ How do we get rid of
fear? Ask any psychologist or just read your Bible, we get rid of fear
by moving through it. Fear is there. We can’t just snap our fingers
and say, ‘be not afraid,’ and the emotion goes away. But so often what
we really need to do is let fear in some sense wash over us and then let
us move on. You know, one of the things I really love to do is go to
the beach. Especially when I was young, I loved to ride the waves on a
raft. I can’t surf in any form, but I love to ride them on a raft.
When I was younger I remember going out in sometimes this huge surf. If
you stand still when the surf is coming in, it’s going to beat you to
death. The waves go up, and they come down and BOOM. Before you know
it you’ve had your face driven into the sand. If you move forward into
the wave, if you walk toward the wave as it comes towards you, the wave
will wash over you. The curl doesn’t hit you smack in the face. You
get under it. Now, the water goes over you, yes, but you can move out
into the surf if you move out. If we stand still, we’ll get hurt. But
if we pluck up our courage and move forward, it will wash over us.
Easier said than done. But that’s what we have to do because faith is a
verb. Faith is taking action. How does fear show up in our lives?
Skepticism, selfishness, stubbornness, all kinds of ways. We need to
move out. We need to move on and to trust the Lord. I want to close
with a story I read. It’s a story about a young man named Dolf who was
the son of a minister. Dolf still lives with his parents even though
he’s 27 years old because he has Downs Syndrome. One day a speaker came
to his church, Dolf is kind of out-spoken, and after the man finished
his lecture, Dolf had a question. He asked, “Do you think if Jesus saw
me he would see someone who is not normal, he would see someone who has
Downs Syndrome?” When Dolf asked this question a silence came over the
church, and the speaker answered, “I believe that Jesus would see what I
see. When I look at you, I do not see someone with Downs Syndrome, I
see a wonderful, delightful child of God.” This answer pleased Dolf a
great deal. He said, “You know, I know what you mean because when I
receive communion, I see the hands of my dad giving me the bread and
when I look up, I do not see my dad, instead, I see the face of Jesus.”
This little boy or this young man had it just right. Paul says in
Romans, “We have not received the spirit of fear but the spirit of
adoption as God’s children. And Dolf had it right. He knows he’s been
adopted. Fear can be our enemy, and many of us need to make a
commitment of living boldly for Jesus Christ.
Living out our adoption as sons and
daughters of God. There is a poem that says:
Fear sees obstacles, faith sees the
way. Doubt sees dark as night, Faith sees the day. Fear dreads to take
a step, faith soars high. Doubt questions who believes, faith answers
‘I’.
Would you pray with me?
Lord we ask that you would help us
deal with fears as we all have them. Do not let our fears overwhelm us,
Lord as we look out into the world and even into our lives and all the
things that happen. Help us to trust You, the God who is in control,
the God who loves us, who has adopted us as children. We are your
children, Lord. And whatever happens, nothing can change that. Now go
with us and keep us, Lord, we pray. In the name of the Father, and Son
and the Holy Spirit, Amen
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