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Proverbs 26: 13 The sluggard says,
“There is a lion in the road, a fierce lion roaming the streets!” (NIV)
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Fear can haunt us and paralyze us. Or fear can trigger us to flee to the one whose “perfect love drives out all fear.”* |
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About the time that my boys were preparing to go on a
mission trip to Honduras, I read a newspaper article about some violent
incident that had occurred somewhere in that country. I was already a little
uneasy about letting my teen-agers go off to a foreign country, but then the
thought came to me: the parent of a Honduran youth might not want her child to
come to the US if she read about some of the things that happen here.
Life is dangerous everywhere. We might scoff at the lazy
bums of the world whose imaginations have conjured up an excuse to avoid
industrious or constructive activity, but the fact is, there really are lions
roaming the streets. It is not just the sluggard’s convenient delusion.
The Bible has a lot to say about facing fear – the Book of
Job and the Psalms in the Old Testament offer comforting words; and I John 4:
18 is the New Testament go-to verse for the fearful: “There is no fear in love.
But perfect love drives out fear . . .” But God’s word has much more to say
about fearing God than about any
other type of fear. Read Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the Book of Acts. In
Luke 12: 5, Jesus delivers the ultimate warning: Fear him who has the power to throw you into hell. Doesn’t that put
your other fears into proper perspective?
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Hell . . . is God’s idea. It is God, not the devil, who holds the power to cast body and soul into Hell. It is at the juxtaposition of these two facets, both the love and wrath of God the Almighty, that we find the cross of Christ.* |
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