What Shall We Fear?

What is it that brings fear into your life? What challenges stand in the way of you witnessing for the Risen Christ in today’s complex world? Look around you as you go about your day to day life and you will quickly see that we live in not only a sinful world but also in a sinful society. It doesn’t take much effort at all to just want to mix in with the crowd and live our lives just like everyone else. Besides, how is my neighbor’s lifestyle my business? They are certainly entitled to live their life the way they want, with or without God. Right? We see a much different answer in Romans 6:1b-11. In his letter to the Romans, Paul reminds us that we have died to sin in our baptism in Christ. Since we have died to sin, we cannot live in it any longer. I can’t speak for your experience but I know for me that when I sin and fall short of the glory of God in my life I always seem to come face to face with the ugly side of me and don’t like what I see. The Holy Spirit abiding in me helps me to focus my attention on those times when I have fallen short and help me to see just how ugly those parts of my life really are. You see, when we are baptized in Christ, or saved if you prefer to think of it that way, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our soul and helps to guide us through life and gives us the gentle nudgings to realize the right decision to make. The very strange part of that is most of us have gotten very good at ignoring the Holy Spirit. In fact, sometimes we get so good at ignoring the holy spirit that we don’t even notice the nudgings anymore.

How about fear? It can be a very powerful emotion and can easily guide us into the wrong path in life. For most of us, when we think of the eternal life we share in Christ, we think of a time very far into the future. In fact we often think that we have a lot of time before that is going to come. It is far too easy to be distracted and scared by the threats of the present when compared to the threats of the future. How often are we faced with choices and we reach the conclusion that we will cross that bridge when we come to it? Have you ever used that statement in making decisions in your life? Oh well, I will cross that bridge when I come to it. When we are faced with an immediate threat we often choose to avoid the immediate in order to not have to deal with it.

For me it was the fear of rejection that caused me to stray. You see, I was born and raised Catholic. What that means is that I was baptized as an infant and there has never been a time in my life outside of the first couple of days that I was not covered by the grace and mercy of God through Jesus. I have never known a time when I could say I was not saved. As I was growing up, I participated in all the usual Catholic ceremonies, First Reconciliation (or First Confession), First Communion, and Confirmation. I was an alter boy and often served a morning mass before going to my classes in a Catholic elementary school. I often spent time talking to the local priest about a call to ordained ministry and felt a strong draw to that ministry. I knew up front that the requirement to remain chaste was going to be a challenge for me because I always had this strong competing desire to get married and raise a family as well. In the Catholic faith, these two are mutually exclusive and you have to make a choice of one over the other. For me though the defining moment was in 4th grade religion class. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The nun teaching the class was Sr. Batiste, and she was talking about our obligation to share the Gospel with all those in our world. She was talking about evangelism. Now I had faith and I was comfortable in that faith as long as I was with other Catholics. The whole idea of sharing that faith with others who were not Catholic or even those who did not know of God was something that scared me. What if I was labeled as a nut case? What if nobody liked me anymore because I was too picky? What if, what if, what if? Because I just could not come to terms with this idea, I decided that my time as a Catholic was over and I stopped participating in religious activities out of the fear that I would be forced into evangelism. Sure I felt the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the days that followed, but the longer I went without going to church, the softer that voice became. In my early military years, I eventually was able to completely mute the voice to the point were I didn’t even notice it anymore. I was certain at that point in my life that God had given up on me and I was destined to burn in Hell forever.

I look back on those early years today and realize how wrong I was. As I aged I started to seek God’s forgiveness for my early years and for turning my back on Him. My wife and I joined the Methodist church mainly because her background was Southern Baptist and she just could not accept some of the Theology of the Catholic Church. Eventually our pastor invited us to a weekend event called the Walk to Emmaus and thinking it was going to be like a Catholic retreat I blindly accepted. Of course, this was all in God’s plan to bring me to a point where I could find him in my life again. I went to the weekend and it was one of the most eye opening experiences of my life. Through the weekend I came to realize that God never abandoned me but I had abandoned God. The guidance of the Holy Spirit never left me but rather I stopped listening.

This is what happens to a lot of people, we just stop listening. Then we find ourselves turning to God in times of trouble asking for a way out and reach the conclusion that He is just not listening to us anymore because we don’t see the answer we expect. Well I am here to tell you today that God is listening and the really great news in all of this is that He loves you too much to just start granting wishes. There was once a movie called Bruce Almighty and whether you like the movie or not, it had an important lesson at the end. You see in the movie God decides to let Bruce run the world for a while and like most of us would do, Bruce started using this to his advantage. He was thinking only of his worldly comfort and selfishness. Before long Bruce’s world was in pitiful shape and Bruce found himself looking for God to get help in fixing his mess. Well of course God returns things to the way they should be and Bruce learns his lesson. All this is of course fiction, but the underlying message is true. If God just granted our wished, the world would be a much worse place today than it is. God loves us so much that he only wants the best for us and when we pray asking to get bailed out; God looks out for us and provides what we need when we need it. That means that no matter what, God always looks out for the best interest of his people as viewed by His Kingdom. Now this is very good news for us.

This Kingdom view is exactly what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 10:24-39:

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven."

What Jesus is talking about here is our eternal life in God’s Kingdom. He helps us to put our fears in check by remembering that this earthly existence is nothing compared to our eternal life with Him in Heaven. He reminds us that we should never fear making the right choice even it it means putting our lives at risk. Rather we should fear taking the safe path and living a life that is pleasing to the forces of evil that will eventually destroy not only our earthly body but also our eternal soul as well. The choice is never easy because of our sinful nature but when we keep things in the proper context, we find help from the Holy Spirit in times of trouble.

I am sure none of you have ever had this problem, but I have such a hard time putting my finger on a heavenly existence. I live in a world that is scientific and established truth by providing evidence and proof that things are real. With that kind of logic, it is very challenging to hold onto this promise of eternal life in some reality that we cannot touch, we cannot see and we cannot experience. I have long prayed to God asking him to reveal to me this other reality that I cannot see or feel. I wanted to share with you this morning just how God answered this prayer for me. I will try to get through this with dry eyes but there are no promises because when God touches your life you become very humbled.

All of my life my mother was considered by most to be insane. When my brother was born in the early 60’s she had a nervous breakdown and was put into a state mental institution where they treated her illness with shock treatments until she would behave properly. The problem was that she was quite determined to stay on the far side of reality and they eventually killed a lot of brain cells with the shock treatments. In her later life she required someone to constantly look after her because she could not separate reality from fiction. She would often tell us how she appreciated the trip we took her on to places that we had never visited. We all just learned to agree with her because if you argued, you were looking for a good fight.

She became convinced that smoking and heath had absolutely no link together and was a heavy smoker most of her life. She developed COPD and still refused to quit smoking since that had nothing to do with her illness. All she needed was her inhaler and she would be fine. Eventually she was dependent on oxygen full time and the fire hazard was too great with open oxygen in the house and she finally understood that she had to quit. For about the last year she was in and out of hospitals a lot because of her inability to breath. When I went to visit her last Christmas I could see that she had to struggle for every breath and I knew it would not be long. In February she was put in the hospital and the doctors said she would not likely live. I rushed to Pa. to say my good bye and when I arrived in the critical care unit she was sitting in a chair and started talking to me. Low and behold, my prayers were answered and it was a miracle. The problem with this though was that she still had the same breathing problems and was not going to be able to keep this up much longer. She also developed a very rare blood disease in which her body was destroying the red blood cells too quickly and her red blood cell count would go low and she would need a blood transfusion periodically to raise the red blood cell count. In April she was taken into the hospital again and needed a blood transfusion to continue to live. She refused the blood transfusion and the hospital staff said they could not do it without her consent. We were all upset about the idea the decision and didn’t want to let her just die. After all she was insane and how could she make that kind of a decision. I called her on the phone to talk to her about it and the very strange thing about this phone call is that she was the most sane that I have ever known her to be. We talked for about 5 minutes and everything she talked of was reality and there was no fantasy in any of it. Then she hit me with the words that would change my life forever. She said that Jesus told her that He would take care of everything and that everything would be OK. At that time I could feel the spirit in my own being start to move. At that point I realized that she really had talked to Jesus and He really was going to take care of things. After we hung up all I could do was pray and thank God for his assurance and to acknowledge that I placed it all in His hands as he knew best. My brother called me shortly afterward to say Mom signed the consent form for the transfusion. Within a few weeks she died anyway from the complications of COPS. The interesting part of all this is that Jesus was true to his word the entire time. As my brother, my sister, and I made the preparations and arrangements for her funeral there was no bickering, no fighting over Mom’s stuff. In fact we gave most of it to the Salvation Army to help others who were less fortunate. All we really kept were a few keepsakes for memories. We all faced the viewing and the funeral mass as a celebration of Mom’s passing into the arms of her savior rather than our losing her and many have commented that it was the happiest funeral they have ever been to.

What I have learned is that there is nothing in life that we should fear including death. Death is merely a door that we must eventually pass through to get to the loving arms of our Savior. We must learn to trust in God to give us the very best, even when that very best means passing through to our eternal life.

In Matthew's Gospel above, Jesus tells us that we should not be afraid of losing our mortal body but we should be afraid of losing our mortal body and our soul. This is very hard to do because we tend to live in the here and now. We have no experiential reference point for the eternal and without that it is hard to even think about the eternal let alone release our fears that are based on threats to us in the here and now.

When I was living outside of God and running I was afraid of death because I was certain that God had abandoned me. I was certain that my prospects for eternity were pretty bleak. Now I do not fear death because I have a better understanding of my forgiveness through the shed blood of Jesus. When we learn to trust God for our forgiveness and acceptance into heaven, our fear of death seems to just disappear.

As you go about your day, take some time to think about your life and what you fear. What is the source of your fears? Do you need to learn to better trust God or do you just need to let go of your fears and give them to God to handle?