When We Are Fearful

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Friday, January 14. Are you wondering how to be free from the bondage of anxiety? The 41st chapter of Isaiah stands as a timeless prescription to help conquer our fears. All through the scriptures, God is admonishing us not to be afraid, not to be anxious, because as His children, we have no basis for fear. God will enable us to overcome fears and anxieties in our life, whether it is something on the spur of the moment or something that comes over a period of time. Now, many people are afraid of all different kinds of things. And you and I live in a society where fear is just a part of living today. What I want to deal with in this message is something a little bit more subjective than that. And that is, I want to deal with those fears that oftentimes we're not even aware of.

And even when we are experiencing them, we can't put our finger on why they're there or why they keep cropping up in our life and what's their origin, what's their root. So I want you to turn, if you will, to Isaiah chapter 41. Look, if you will, in this 10th verse. He says, Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you.

Surely I will help you. Surely I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Here is an awesome promise of assurance for all of us who are going through fear and anxiety. And listen to what he says. He says, Do not be afraid. But secondly, he gives us a word concerning an attitude here that oftentimes we're not aware of. He says, Do not anxiously look around you.

Now, that is one of Satan's most subtle and successful traps. And that is to get our focus off of God, looking at our circumstances and what happens. The more we look at them, the more anxious we become. Now, what I want to do is I want to deal with those root causes of fear and anxiety. Well, let's look at some of these.

And the first one is this. When you begin to look at your life and the things that cause you to have fear and anxiety, one of the primary reasons, one of those errors in our thinking that just sort of lays in there just beneath the surface is a feeling of being inadequate. That is a person who genuinely feels inadequate is going to be anxious.

For example, here's an opportunity that comes along in your job or are some opportunity that comes your way. And if you feel if you are those inadequate persons, you already no matter what and how good this is, your feeling is, Well, I'm not sure that I can handle that. Or I know it's a wonderful promotion, but I'm not sure I can do that job. And I'm not sure they'll be pleased with what I do.

And I'm not sure I'll be able to hang in there. And so what happens? Because of your feelings, your sense of inadequacy that was already there, the offer did not make you inadequate, it was already there, you begin to back off. What happens is, there's a tape going on in your mind that says to you somewhere back down and got planted. And that is you're inadequate, you can't do it, it won't work, you're not going to succeed at that don't even try. And what happens is our imagination begins to function when we get this off of this opportunity. And what happens is, instead of imagining yourself to be successful, that you can do it, it's a wonderful opportunity, and you're going to move ahead in life, your imagination plays this trick on you, it begins to play an old tape. And the old tape says, you know, you can't do that some other people can, but you can. And before long, instead of imagining yourself to be successful to achieve or to do that, you begin to imagine yourself as failing.

And then that sets up a whole domino effect. And you begin to come up with all the reasons that you don't really think it'll work and that you can do it and it won't happen that way. And so what happens is you live in anxiety and fear. A second, I think subtle reason, root cause of our fears and anxieties is this, we somehow don't believe that we can reach the standard that we've set for ourselves. And all of us have set certain standards, you have moral standards, you have standards in your work as far as your performance and so forth. And some of you are very committed to doing a very good job, no matter what, whatever it might be. And so you've set very high standards for yourself. Well, if you set standards that are unrealistic, standards that God didn't allow you to set, you set them for yourself, sometimes we set standards that are beyond our capacity.

And what we do is we look around and see what other people are achieving and what they're doing and they're saying, well, if they can do that, then I can do that. And what happens is most of us have set standards that are unrealistic, not even God would set those kind of standards on us. And so we live with the anxiety they won't be able to measure up.

Well, there's a third, I believe, root cause of these things. And that is this whole attitude of a sense of guilt. And that is if people live with a sense of guilt that somewhere along the way, they've either done something or somehow God's displeased, they live with anxiety. Well, what is the grace of God?

The grace of God is the goodness and love and mercy and kindness of God to us, not because we deserve it, but because his love for us does not pour out upon us on the basis of what we deserve, but on the basis of his character. And his character says he loves us unconditionally. And so there's that sense of guilt.

That is no way to live. But you see, these are the root causes of a lot of our fears and anxieties. And that's not all of them, but that's that's in some, let me just mention one other. And that is attitudes that we grew up with.

And let me just give you an example. One thing my mother would say to me when I was a kid growing up, now don't go out there and get hurt. Don't play in the street. Don't get run over. Don't fall down. Don't work too hard. And the message to me was don't don't don't don't don't. Now I know what her genuine loving motive was.

I want to take care of Charles because he's all I've got now. She didn't want me to get hurt. They want me to work too hard.

They want me to do this, that and the other. Don't don't play rough. Now, if you're going to play football, don't play rough.

No other way to play but rough. And so. So but that's the way she felt. And then, of course, what she would say to me now, you don't want to fail God. You don't want to fail God. You just want to be obedient to him.

You don't want you don't want to fail God. Now, those were messages I got on the tape recorder and I got a lot of others, but I got those. And so what did that do for me? Because you see, if that came from my mother, it was law. It wasn't a question of whether I wanted it on the recorder or not.

It got on there. It was like being in a sound room with everything with the tapes running. And you can put all kinds of sound that the tapes going to take it. This little tape in this little mind of mine was hearing all these things. I didn't ask to be told those things. It was something that I was told. I caught some things and I was taught some things. Every single one of us has been taught and we have caught a lot.

We didn't ask for too young to understand what in the world was going on, but it was going on. And so the tape was playing. One of the tapes that went on was, you know, when you don't have much, the tape that goes off is you don't have much much. Be careful what you have. Be very careful because you may lose it. If you lose it, you may not get it back. One wonderful thing is what balanced that tape off is still watching my mom give when she had almost nothing to give.

And somehow that balanced it. But she would say, you don't want to get in debt and you don't want to waste your money. And she would make me give an account for my money, which was a good idea.

And the very idea of going into debt was absolutely a horrifying thing. It would never have been done no matter what you had or didn't have. You just didn't do it. And then, of course, when she said you don't want to fail God, then what's the tape that goes off? Watch out. Watch out. Be sure you're being obedient. Be careful. Don't sin against God. Don't be doing anything you don't want to be doing. Jesus comes.

And so what happens? I grew up with this tape going off and these tapes are don't take any risk. Watch out for God. Be careful what you have.

All of these things. Tape goes on and on. Now you got one. You've got a tape recorder going too.

And I've seen some of you sort of wench a little bit when I start talking about the tape recorder because you have one going on. It is these kind of subtle lessons that we learn in life and the recorder goes on. This is why, for example, some people no matter, no matter what they do and how much they achieve and how well they are respected and recognized, they will never be able to enjoy their accomplishments and achievements in life because somebody back there told them you will never amount to anything. You're not going to make it in life. You're not going to succeed.

You don't have what it takes. I'm saying to you that oftentimes laying down inside of us, there are those thought processes that go on that something comes along that sparks this sense of sudden anxiety. But suppose I don't have enough and suppose it gives out and supposed to get old and suppose and there's just not enough out there and suppose this and suppose we have an accident.

You can suppose a thousand things. You can't live in that kind of anxiety and fear and enjoy life. What I want you to see is this. There's a way to deal with this.

But if you don't realize you've got a tape going and you don't identify it, then it's not going to work. So let's look for just a moment at what are the consequences of these fears and anxiety, these thought processes that are just laying in there under the surface, just waiting to be ignited by some circumstance and it erupts in fear and anxiety. Well, there are several consequences. For example, when a person is living with that, oftentimes their judgment is clouded and they don't make wise decisions because they have clouded judgment.

Why? Because permeating all of their rationalization, their reasoning is fear and anxiety. But suppose this and suppose that.

But if this and what if? Secondly, those persons oftentimes are not as productive as they could be for the simple reason that their minds are so clouded and they are indecisive and they are not productive because of fear of failure. Which brings me to another problem and that's procrastination.

See, a person who's procrastinator is a person who waits till they think they can do it perfectly before they try. And so because they fear failure so badly and the feelings of not measuring up to what is expected of them and the feelings of the possibility of rejection because they don't measure up absolutely paralyzes them. You see, fear and anxiety are devastating to our work, devastating to our relationships. If you're living in anxieties and fears in life, every time you get on your knees to cry out to God, what's the tape going?

The tape's going to start. You don't deserve it. Why should God answer your prayer? Look at your life.

You don't measure up. And what happens? You get up and you think, why doesn't God answer my prayer? Because you keep listening to the tape, which has the root causes of our anxieties and our fears. We need to get rid of the tape recorder, get rid of it. So there are devastating effects of fear and anxiety in our life.

They're devastating. Now, how do we overcome these fears and anxieties in our life? Well, the first thing is very important. Recognize that it is there. Don't deny that you're anxious. Not just recognize that you're fearful or anxious, but identify it. What is it? You say, well, how do you do that?

Well, here's the best way to do it. The next time you feel anxious or afraid about something, ask yourself the question, stop and ask yourself now what's going on? What's going on around me? What do I think ignited this, this sense of, is it something I heard?

Was it a telephone call? Or is it something I saw? What, what's ignited this?

Is it something that's just been growing? What, what's going on around me so that I can identify the thing that caused me to feel anxious or fearful? If I can identify it, then I can get back to the root. If I don't identify it, I'll just keep having the same old problem.

The tape will keep going. So first of all, I need to recognize that I am fearful and identify what's going on, what's happening here. The second thing, very important, is my relationship to Christ. My friend, if you don't have a relationship with Jesus Christ, you're going to live with certain fears and anxieties in life because you don't have any security. The only thing that is absolutely sure in this life is Jesus Christ. He is the only thing that is certain. So if I'm going to deal with any kind of fear and anxiety in my life, I must deal with my relationship to Jesus Christ because He says, it is appointed unto man once to die and after this the judgment.

And He says, whatever man sows, he's going to reap. So I can think of a whole lot of principles that would cause me lots of anxiety and fear. And if you will face the truth, you will have a reason to be fearful and a reason to be anxious if you have rejected the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came into this world in order to save you. So to receive Him by faith as my personal Savior, knowing that my sins are forgiven, past, present, and future, I am a child of God and now kept by His grace, not by performance.

Absolutely secure. First of all, recognize the presence of fear and identify it. Secondly, your relationship to Jesus Christ, be sure that's right. What's number three? Number three is the recorder. Just jotted down the recorder. What you want to do is once you identify these anxieties that keep creeping up, what you want to do is to say, all right, that's a tape that's going off.

And when you recognize and identify what it is and you trace it back to its root, here's what you can do. You can just take that tape and pull it out and tear it to shreds. I reject that tape. I don't have to play that tape anymore. Listen, does that mean it'll never go off again? No, it means the next time it starts, you can say, I don't have to accept that.

That's just the old tape playing. I told that, forget that I told that up. I'm not listening to that, which leads me to the next step and that is the idea of rebuking it. Now there have been times when I've gotten on my knees and crying out to God about something and absolutely suddenly be overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. Now, you know, when it hits you like that, it's like a cloud.

You just smothered in it. But I discovered this. All I have to say is, Father, I want to thank you. That's not a view because you said, I've not given you the spirit of fear of anxiety. I rebuke that in the name of Jesus Christ. I reject this feeling and refuse it from this moment on. And I'm here to tell you it will absolutely disappear.

Why? Because you have taken authority over a spirit that is not from God and is straight from the devil himself. You have the power and the authority as a child of God to rebuke and reject anything that does not come from God. You do not have to accept it as your own. So what you do is you identify the tape and it starts playing, shut it down, cut it off.

You don't have to listen to it. The next step is to reach for the anchor. What is the anchor? Go back, if you will, to Isaiah chapter forty one. Now, look at this. All of us need at some time or the other those scriptural anchors we can refer to when we are facing fears and anxieties. Now listen to this. Let's say this is your anchor. You're facing some fear anxiety.

Look at this. Do not fear, for I am with you. Who's with you?

The almighty sovereign omnipotent God. He says, I'm with you. How long is he going to be with you? Every moment, every step of the way till the end of life. Do not fear, I'm with you. Do not anxiously look about you. Don't do it. Listen to this next phrase, for I am your God.

Listen, your circumstances are not your God. Don't look around. Nobody can do anything to you unless I allow it. They may have evil in mind, but I'm going to turn it in for your good.

It doesn't make any difference. He says, don't anxiously look about you. I'm your God. That's not your God. Nobody can control your life in me.

Do not anxiously look about you. I am your God. Next phrase, I will strengthen you. Surely I will help you. Now listen, whatever you are facing, just look right to your right.

There I am. I'm going to help you through this. Then he says, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. In the scriptures, that is symbolical, listen, of God's willingness to divinely intervene in your situation and circumstance. And he says, surely I'll uphold you with my righteous right hand.

Absolutely unquestionably. I am reliable and faithful. God, I'll strengthen you. I'll help you. I'll undergird you.

Whatever you need, surely I will do it. Reach for the anchor. But listen, get yourself an anchor before you begin to be fearful or afraid. But if you haven't, the next time, go back to this 41st chapter of Isaiah and say, okay, God, here's what you said.

I'm claiming it. What does he want to do? The next thing I want to say. And that is to refocus your attention because here's what happens. When I look around, I become anxious and fearful and I reach for the anchor. All of a sudden what's happened? My eye has moved from that which makes me anxious to that which makes me secure. I've refocused my attention upon my circumstances to the anchor.

And what happens immediately? My faith just goes out of the roof. Why? Because I'm reminded that he said, I'm with you. I'm your God. I'll help you strengthen you. I'll uphold you with my righteous right hand.

And what happens? It is amazing how fears and anxieties absolutely disappear in the presence of the living Word of God. Thank you for listening to When We Are Fearful. And don't forget to stop by InTouch.org slash 45 years to join us in celebrating 45 years of God's faithfulness to this ministry. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.