Here's Pastor Alan Wright with Today's Blessing: A Biblical Faith-Filled Vision. for your life. I bless you to be as Ephraim. Ephraim, the name that means twice fruitful. God blessed your earliest ancestors to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion, Genesis 1:28.
And his will is not changed. He's likewise destined you, as Jesus said in John 15, to bear much fruit. You're a sower. a spiritual farmer. whose harvest will come in due season.
and so I bless the seed that you have in the ground. May all your good, hard work sprout and grow. into sweet fruit that contains more seed. and I bless the seed you have in your hand. The good intentions and investments of your life that you're now scattering.
Remember. The smallest seed can grow. And to the greatest, most fruitful, Tree. Pastor, author, and Bible teacher Alan Wright. That's a fear that just needs to be healed.
and it's going to get healed. by the truth. And it's going to be a truth that's going to be part of you. This is the way I think of this. At Romans 10, 17, when Paul says faith comes from hearing, in hearing through the Word of Christ, what is the Word of Christ?
The word of Christ is truth. Jesus said in John 14:6, I'm the way and the truth and the life. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt.
Excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, The Untroubled Heart, as presented at Ronilda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Allen Wright Ministries.
So, as you listen to today's teaching, today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Just contact us at pastorallen.org. That's pastoralan.org. or call 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860.
More on this later in the program. But right now. Let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Pastor Alan Wright. Three separate texts I want to give you as we come into today's message.
That I've called the five levels of facing fear. And the first is John 8:31. Though Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, If you abide in my word, you're truly my disciples. and you will know the truth. and the truth will set you free.
In John 14, 6, Jesus said to him, I am the way. and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. And Paul's words in Romans 10, 17, faith comes from hearing. and hearing Through the word of God.
of Christ.
Okay, family, are you ready for some good news? The truth will set you free.
So, if you need to be more free, you don't need more willpower. You don't need just more effort. Any more? Truth. We're talking about freedom from anxiety and this series we call The Untroubled Heart.
And so today we get really practical with this. How is it that we do get free from anxiety? And I want to show you a principle. And lead you into the gospel again, wherein There can be a kind of revelation that brings so much Truth that the fears that accompany the lies finally have to go. Go away.
Well, I don't think I've ever publicly admitted the silliest fear that I ever had. The truth about fears is that we all have them, and so some of them would seem really silly to somebody else. But the thing about it is that if it's yours, then it feels very real to you. And I had this fear for years, and it was troublesome to me. It made me feel like that the future was bleak, and it was very, very real to me.
And I never talked to anybody about it. I assumed that other people had the same fear, so there was no real reason to talk to anybody about it. But it's 100% true, and I'm going to share it, I think, for the first time publicly: silliest fear I ever had. When I was a child, I was afraid. That because of the coming overpopulation crisis.
that I wouldn't have a place to have a house and raise a family in the future. That there literally would not be a little plot of land on which I could live. I literally thought like that the world, the whole world was going to look something like this. This is what I had in my mind, I thought, because Somewhere in elementary school, I don't know if we saw a film about the coming crisis or the teachers had started talking about it. I don't know what it was, but I just had in my mind, because they were like, overpopulation is going to be the whole big problem, you know.
And I just thought that this is what the world was going to look like. And so it was a very sad thing to think of how the future. I just wasn't going to be able to have a house anywhere because there would be no room to have it. And I believed this for a pretty long time throughout my elementary school years. As I was looking back over this silliest fear anybody ever had, I was like, where did that come from?
And so I had to go back and research it. And sure enough, the year that I started first grade. Paul Ehrlich wrote a book called The Population Bomb. that warned of catastrophic consequences of population growth. The book was a worldwide bestseller, sold over 3 million copies, was translated into multiple languages, and was considered authoritative.
And so I think the teachers and everybody had all assumed it was true, and they were teaching it to us in school. In that book, he wrote things like, the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Or he wrote this, a cancer is an uncontrolled growth of cells. The population explosion is an uncontrolled growth of people.
In both cases, the end result is death. It's a lot for a second grader to take in. And I took it in. And now, you know what I do with that? Fear?
I've done what I do now. I laugh about it. It's just comical, isn't it? Because we do have some overpopulation in some areas, and there's some, but it didn't turn out that that was actually true. And so the fear I don't have a fear of not having a place.
I don't have that fear. I got a bigger fear of the deer wandering up and eating my tomato plants and my pansies. You know?
So what I want you to see is how a single wrong belief Could lead to a really great fear. And that if you want the fear gone, The best way to heal it is not simply to try to manage it. but to dig down and find out What was the wrong belief That We took in. John Mark Comer has written a book called Live No Lies. I like that title because it's like the lies that we believe, it's not just a mental activity.
We live them. We take them in. and they become part of us. And I think this, as we get more today into the nuts and bolts, of how we actually can be cured of anxieties. We come now to, I think, some of the most practical ways that it can happen.
As we today just talk about what I would call five different levels of the way we've tried to face fear and why all of them in the end are somewhat superficial except for this, where we uncover the lies underneath our fears.
So sometimes with a sermon we'll take a longer text, go through it line by line or paragraph by paragraph, and sometimes we just want to take a verse. or just one statement like this of Jesus, the truth will set you free. And I want us to think deeply about how powerful that truth is to us.
So I started thinking about this many years ago, and I continue. to think about this. Remain convinced that there are probably about five levels of the way in which, through my observation and in my own life and a pastoral ministry, that I've seen that we tend to try to deal with our fears. And the first level I would just call hiding our fears. And I use that just to say the kind of things that we do to try to push it out of our mind and essentially pretend that it's not there.
And the problem with that is that if we are not acknowledging an anxiety that is there, then it's hard to Ever approach the kind of healing that we need when we're in denial of something. Brene Brown has said: we can choose courage or we can choose comfort. But we can't have both, not at the same time. That's Alan Wright. and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series.
Do you ever feel like your heart just can't rest? Like no matter how much you try, peace always seems just out of reach?
So many of us wrestle with anxious what-ifs. leaving our hearts restless and unsettled. But Jesus offers us something the world cannot give. His own peace. The calm of his very heart.
This month's featured resource from Pastor Alan is the Untroubled Heart, a powerful digital bundle including audio messages and a digital study guide. In this series, Pastor Alan unpacks Jesus' promise from John 14, 27. I leave you peace. My peace I give you. I do not give it to you as the world does.
So don't let your hearts be troubled or afraid. With practical insight and biblical encouragement, You'll discover how to quiet anxious thoughts and rest in Christ's peace that endures. When you give today to support Allen Wright Ministries, we'll send you the Untroubled Heart digital bundle as our thanks. The gospel is shared when you give to Allen Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.
When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-500. Five four four 4860. That's 877.
Five four four four four four four four four four four four four. 4860. or come to our website. PastorAllen.org. Today's teaching now continues.
Here once again. is Alan Wright. I think that's so powerful because in our attempts to pretend that we don't have a problem, we are giving ourselves a kind of false comfort and we won't be able to ever be instilled with the kind of courage that can actually conquer a problem. Scott Peck, in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled, began by saying life is difficult. And that until we can accept that and accept that there are problems that we have to face and that we shouldn't just spend our energy trying to go around them or pretend they're not there, we can't really become mature and emotionally healthy.
He wrote this, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that the problems demand from us. And he makes this statement, most mental illness is some form of an attempt. to avoid legitimate suffering. I think that's right.
So the lowest level, the least effective and lowest level that we try to deal with fear is we try to pretend like we don't have it. We try to just push it to the side, not even acknowledge it. And I think sometimes we do this in ways that it's squirting out of us. And this is, it's not just that we repress it, it also can be the way that it kind of manifests. And here's some of the ways I think about it.
And one might be in the statement, like, you're my problem. That when we Get into those anxiety-producing times, there's something in us that wants to shift it instead of saying, Okay, I'm anxious. And I need to bring this anxiety to God and bring my whole self to God. We have this tendency to shift. It's like the people of God who were brought out of their bondage in Egypt.
And they go into the wilderness, and next thing you know, they're having a hard time because they don't have the food they want, and they get anxious. And what they do, instead of saying, we're anxious, let's come before God, let's come for the comfort of the Holy Spirit and the reassurances that His Word brings us, instead they turn everything towards Moses and said, You did this to us. Why did you bring us out here? We'd be better off in Egypt. And so, you know, watch that in your own soul.
And when it happens to you, that oftentimes when somebody's saying, you're the problem, it's like the Pharisees that said, Jesus, you're the problem. They really were anxious about losing their own power. And so acknowledging anxiety is a way of helping us get away from all of the shifting of that anxiety by the pointing a finger towards others. Or sometimes I think we can hide our anxieties by saying, I'm not. Afraid.
I'm just angry, and I deserve to be angry about this. I think a lot of anger is actually fear.
So, like, for example, let's imagine there's a mom of a teenage girl, and the teenage girl is going to go out one night, and she comes down from her room, and she's dressed just what the mom thinks is inappropriately, is too provocatively dressed. And maybe it is, and maybe they need to have a discussion about that. But the mom is really mad. And then they have a big brouhaha over it like that. But what if the mom is actually really not so mad as she is anxious?
because she doesn't want her daughter to recapitulate some of the mistakes that she made in her own teenage years. Our anxiety often gets masked as anger. Or maybe it's, I'm not afraid, I'm just superior, I'm just better than you. This is like the root of prejudice and racism.
So, like, Ku Klux Klan, with all of their hate, I don't really think they had a hate issue. I think it's an anxiety issue, afraid of losing control, afraid of feeling inferior. Or we can hide our anger by like, I'm not afraid, I'm just tough. You know, I'm just not one of those emotional people. You know, like the man who's got a really callous, tough exterior and never shows emotion because it feels like it's a sign of weakness.
And I worry about that because um Sometimes what looks like toughness is a fear of intimacy. Or maybe we're hiding our anxiety by just saying, I'm not afraid. I'm just trying to get people in line. I'm just trying to get control so that maybe the nagging wife is not so much a mean person as she is a fearful person. Afraid of being unloved, afraid of being left without anyone caring for her.
I'm just talking about some of the ways that. We superficially, unconsciously refuse to acknowledge our anxieties. Archibald Hart, a Christian psychologist, has written a book called The Anxiety Cure. It's an older book. But I highly recommend this.
If you're struggling with anxiety, it's one of my favorite books where he deals with some of the science of what goes on chemically in your body. And he was one of the pioneers in understanding about how stress hormones are affecting us. But he's It's very important early on, he says that when you are anxious, the first and best thing to do is acknowledge it. He writes this, don't fight your feelings of panic. Instead, work at resisting them.
There's a difference. Fighting your panic systems is likely, system symptoms is likely to make them worse. It increases the fight-or-flight response that's responsible for the anxiety. Brene Brown says this: when we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don't go away. Instead, they own us.
They define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending. I love that. To rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think: yes, this is what happened. But I will choose how the story ends.
So Let's be done with the kind of denial It acts like that none of us, you know, we don't really have anxiety. We recognize it. We see this is what that is. And it's a one amount of Principle kind of nuts and bolts encouragement to you if you have when you have highly anxious times Pause long enough, take a deep breath, and go, okay, what am I feeling?
Okay, this is, I'm anxious. What am I anxious about? and begin to think of it like that. The second level that's inadequate of the way we try to face fear, I think, is what I'd call hushing the fear. That's to just try to do something.
Take something.
Something act some activity. that will just quiet the fear. Like, you know, if you go down to Calabash and order a shrimp platter, it's going to come with hush puppies. And hush puppies got their name because the sailors would take little bits of cornmeal fry and throw it to their dogs to get them to be quiet. Hush puppy, hush, hush.
And so I think this is one of the ways that we try to think we're going to deal with our anxiety is we just want it to hush and we'll give it almost anything to make it hush. And, you know, it could be substance. My substance, the choice, is Ben and Jerry's ice cream. I don't know what yours. You know, it is.
It could be almost any kind of substance. And here's the thing: there's nothing wrong with a good small portion of Ben and Jerry's ice cream or a Gary Deli Hot Fudge Sunday, which is even better. But you can't do this all the time and you can't do it very often. It won't be good for you, right? It will make you actually feel a little better for sugar will make you feel better a little bit for a minute, and then you won't.
And of course, there are other substances, right, that are even more destructive. Are there activities, or things that we look at, or things? These are way, there's hush puppies. It's just like, instead of actually getting healing for the anxiety, it's like we're throwing something at it. Alan Wright, and today's good news message: the five levels of facing fear.
It's from our series, The Untroubled Heart, and Pastor Alan is back with us here in just a few moments with a closing thought. Stick with us. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's Daily Blessing.
It's free, and just to click away at pastoralen.org. Do you ever feel like your heart just can't rest? Like no matter how much you try, peace always seems just out of reach.
So many of us wrestle with anxious what-ifs. leaving our hearts restless and unsettled. But Jesus offers us something the world cannot give. His own peace. The calm of his very heart.
This month's featured resource from Pastor Alan is the Untroubled Heart, a powerful digital bundle including audio messages and a digital study guide. In this series, Pastor Alan unpacks Jesus' promise from John 14:27. I leave you peace. My peace I give you. I do not give it to you as the world does.
So don't let your hearts be troubled or afraid. With practical insight and biblical encouragement, You'll discover how to quiet anxious thoughts and rest in Christ's peace that endures. When you give today to support Alan Wright Ministries, we'll send you the Untroubled Heart digital bundle as our thanks. The gospel is shared when you give to Allen Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support.
When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Allen Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-500. Five four four 4860. That's 877.
Five four four four four four four four four four four four four. 4860. or come to our website. PastorAlan.org. Tyke here now with Pastor Alan Wright in the studio and putting a bookmark on the five levels of facing fear.
What's our takeaway from this teaching, Pastor?
Well, just maybe give a spoiler alert here about where we'll be also tomorrow, but I think that there are like levels at which we we're all trying to deal with fear. We don't want it. We hate it. And the first level hiding our fear. This is where we're kind of covering it up.
This is. This is the denying, uh hushing our fears is like I'm just using an alliteration here to try to be memorable, but this is where, like, I think of a hush puppy. You know, they used to throw those little scraps down to the puppies, and that's how we got our hush puppies in North Carolina seafood restaurants. Yeah.
Well, like, I'm afraid, hush, covered up with a substance or an activity or something. That's or handling a fear. That's where you just learn to try to cope with it, which is better to cope with it than not. Sure. But it's not the ultimate.
Or sometimes people even harness. fear and like use it and ride it and try to Use that fear to motivate them, but that's not God's plan either. Instead, what God's plan is the healing of our fear.
So I hope you'll be back with us tomorrow. We'll get to that. How does God heal our fear? That's His plan for us, the deepest level of transformation. Thanks for listening today.
Visit us online at pastorallen.org or call 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at pastorallen.org. That's pastorallan.org.
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