Fearless Kids
America’s youth are buckling under many pressures. They are stressed by a culture in which parental commitment is frequently sacrificed for the sake of marital happiness. The nuclear family, itself, is being questioned. They are being taught that their sexuality is subjective, and unrelated to their own bodies. They are being “affirmed” with promises of their power to “conquer the world,” even as they are laden with guilt for the actions of their ancestors and society’s systemic injustices.
It’s disorienting to live in a society that worships freedom, even as weapons proliferate, with consequent daily murders and regular mass shootings. It’s confusing to live in a society that extolls free speech, even as it calls on mobs to shame those who would exercise it.
Perhaps the most disturbing phenomenon in the lives of American youth is the ubiquity of social media. Children, even more than adults, are subject to peer pressure. Young people cannot escape the electronic, capitalist manipulations, or the electronic coercions of their peers. They are frequently tempted to share personal information and compromising photos and, as often as not, pay a dear social price for their compliances.
Young people naturally go through a process of testing the presuppositions they’ve been raised on. Their examinations of the current yard-sign slogan culture is leaving them deeply dissatisfied. The pervasive cultural ideologies are too shallow to address the depths of life’s meaning. They know something is wrong, but they cannot put their finger on what it is. Adults are telling them to look to themselves, which they are doing. Their navel-gazing is leading to solipsism, anxiety, despair and, increasingly, suicide.
Fears and anxieties are plaguing not only the young. Fear is robbing all of us of joy. It is diminishing our abilities and compounding our vulnerabilities. Our lives should be characterized by calm. But people struggle with performance anxiety, social acceptance, and are troubled about what they should do with their lives. Everyone gets sick. Everyone gets injured. People fall into addictions. There are exploiters and charlatans on every street corner and lurking in the background of every legitimate website. A polarized culture is increasingly abandoning truth for the sake of propaganda. This confusion only increases bad decision-making among the populace. Hurricanes descend from the sky. People die. The best human scenario is that we grow old and then die. Of course we’re anxious.
But perhaps there are reasons we ought not be anxious. Perhaps we should look beyond our limited experiences and the noise of our culture. Let us enter a quiet room. Let us step back, way back, to gain some perspective. Let us begin at the beginning, as recorded in a book called, “Genesis”. Chapter 1, verse 27 says, God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Created by a Person
Humans are created by a powerful Being: a Person. We are not accidents of an aimless universe. Western society seems intent on believing there is no god. It takes an incredible amount of faith to believe there is no god, but reasons multiply when facts are inconvenient. Autonomy takes offense at the existence of a god. This is, after all, the Land of the Free.
The love of autonomy is understandable; no one wants someone else making his or her decisions. But autonomous freedom is untethered, like a helium balloon that has slipped from a child’s hand. Such a freedom may be colorful, it may be exciting, but it’s not free. It must ascend until it explodes, and then return to the earth to clutter the landscape. True freedom is only possible when there is understanding and control, and where the choices made are beneficial. Being made in God’s image means we are designed to have understanding and control.
Fear begins to dissipate when we abandon dependency on our fragile selves, and embrace dependency on a benevolent, all-powerful Creator. A materialistic universe is capricious and dangerous; a benevolent, all-powerful Creator is reason for hope.
Capacities
One evidence of God’s benevolence is how wondrously we have been made. We are able to see, for example, and in color. Color has almost no practical application. Watch a black-and-white film. The lack of color distracts for a few minutes but, once engaged in the plot, we lose awareness of it. Gray shading is entirely adequate for vision. The existence of color speaks to God’s generosity. I have a poster, entitled, “Utility”. I take the title as ironic, because it pictures a beautifully crafted, open-space staircase. A person might sit awhile, admiring that staircase, as if studying a famous painting. Or, perhaps, walk up and down it a few times, to test its strength, and to caress its smooth bannister bends. Utility like this, enhanced by beauty, is typical of the natural world, and it is evident in how God has made humans.
Adding beauty to function is an inclination passed along to humans. C.S. Lewis said, “Man is a poetical animal and touches nothing that he does not adorn.” Through this nature we share with God, we experience him continuously. Similarly, our tendency to be refreshed by nature is evidence of our unity with Him.
We hear sounds of differing tones, textures and volumes. We can smell. We taste—another ability that is mostly extravagance. We touch, not only with our hands, but through every surface of our bodies. We have hands that lift heavy objects and thread needless. We have feet on which we move about, slowly or quickly, ascending or descending, forward or backward, or twirling, if it suits our fancy.
Human physical capacities are evidences of the purposes for which we have been made. We are saturated with purpose. Our earthly lifespans are insufficient for us to fully explore our capacities. This, too, speaks of God’s bounty, and it is a strong hint that life is meant to continue beyond our short stay on earth. There is so much to do! Our bodies know.
Humans generate language and communicate complex ideas. Humans develop better language skills by the time they’re two years old than other creatures ever develop. We learn the language of the locals. If you had chosen different parents you could be speaking fluently in any one of over 7000 languages! How did language come to us? In the beginning was the Word. We are God-like.
Humans obtain information through experience and research, and then catalog that information. Adam was given the assignment of naming the animals. That was the beginning of human knowledge cataloging. As individuals, we are no smarter than the humans who lived 5000 years ago, but our accumulated knowledge is far greater. Human activities, tools, and dwelling places look very different today than they did 5000 years ago. I am typing this essay using word processing software embedded in a laptop computer. Five thousand years ago I would have been scratching marks into clay tablets.
Humans can explore and create and imagine. Humans can sing and play musical instruments, and generate seemingly infinite songs and tunes. C.S.Lewis commented: “Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”
Humans are emotional beings. I suppose all creatures exhibit some emotion—fear, mostly, or anger at those who would threaten their young. But human emotions are more ranging, expressed through smiles, tears, through dry mouths, nervous sweating, and unsteady legs. Human emotions can be brought on by beautiful sounds or scary sounds, or beautiful scenery, or familiar smells, through memories, through speeches that resonate, and through ideas that seem important. Humans are filled with emotion at departures and arrivals, births, baptisms, graduations, marriages, and deaths. The depth of human thought is what makes us so very emotional. Sometimes it’s the shallowness of human thought that makes us so very emotional. We are passionate in our thoughts, whether our thoughts are sublime or witless. We are emotional because life matters to us. Life matters because God matters. Life matters because we matter.
We can be self-sacrificial. This makes no sense in a materialistic world, but it makes sense when people are made to be like God.
Humans are moral creatures. This doesn’t necessarily mean we are good. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed: “The line between good and evil runs right through every human heart.” But humans are at all times thinking about what is right and wrong. We are forever telling ourselves and others how to behave. We don’t always understand what is right, and we argue about it all the time (or we avoid talking about it because our differences can be upsetting). But this interest in doing what is right is innate because we are made in the image of God.
Many insist that humans are merely complex animals. G.K.Chesterton thought this idea was laughable. “If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humor or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or mutton. People talk about barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes…We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of their tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.”
Being superior to animals is not something that should fill us with pride. Humans are gifted. That means our abilities are received. We can develop them, of course, but even our opportunities are gifts, and many of our good traits come through good teachers and good parenting. We owe much to our parents but we were highly developed before they ever met us. We all emerged from our mothers’ bodies. Our parents were amazed! They held us and cried over us. And then they began to get to know us. “I wonder who this kid is,” they said to each other. “Our children are all so different!” they exclaimed. I can assure you, your parents were scared, excited, and filled with joy at the privilege of receiving you into their family. They watched with keen interest your miraculous development and are still watching the emerging you.
You are a wonder. It is a privilege for anyone to make your acquaintance. That should give you joy. You are made by God. That should remind you to be humble.
Human Relations
God assigns all this good to females and males. He assigns it to people of every tribe, race, and nation. Because of this we should not despise or mistreat any other person, even those with whom we disagree over important matters. I love the biblical story in which God had a donkey talk to Balaam as a means of opening his eyes. The person you despise may be a messenger sent to you by God.
We should regard all people with a certain awe. If we’re not callous or asleep, even the people we see daily will occasionally jolt us with a wondrous surprise. C.S.Lewis remarked: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”
We were made for relationships. God observed: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” – Genesis 2.18. This, too, is a reflection of the nature of God.
It’s fascinating to consider how our fears diminish when we shift our attentions to the needs of others, limiting our self attention. Navel-gazing makes us miserable. Serving others brings us joy. This is because we were made to be loving, social creatures.
Blessed
God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”– Genesis 1.28.
The first thing God did for Adam and Eve was bless them. This blessing was an expression of God’s favor. God desires human flourishing. He is for us. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I [Jesus] came that they may have life and have it abundantly. – John 10.10. God’s blessings are not merely positive thoughts; God’s blessings come with power. As we’ve noted, he has equipped us in many ways. Many problems can be resolved if we use the gifts God has given us. Our minds, for example. Much good comes from using them carefully. But the entire universe is a gift from God. Nature is full of delights. It includes air, foods, water, wood and stone for construction, precious minerals, reserves of fuel, people with whom we can labor and have loving relationships, and on and on.
More important than any of these crucial things, God gives us himself. He is interested in us. He hears our prayers and makes certain we have what we need. Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? – Matthew 6.25-26. God is quiet about his work, but he is intimately involved in the life of every person, and has been throughout the course of history.
Work Assignment
God’s first directive to Adam and Eve was to be fruitful and multiply. God is a Creator and, so, we are creators. The process of embryonic development, in spite of all we know about it, remains a mystery of shocking complexity. We were once encapsulated in a single cell that divided itself up for multi-tasking, and eventually became 40 trillion cells, each of which contains 1.5GB of data. Our mature bodies contain 60 zettabytes of information. Computational neuroscientists estimate that the storage capacity of the human brain is 100 terabytes of information. This means our bodies contain 600 million times as much information as our brains. We’re a lot smarter than we think.
Prevailing scientific theory maintains that the human body assembled itself through the processes of genetic mutation, survivability, and lots of time. I put more faith in Linus, and would sit out with him through a chill Halloween night, waiting for the Easter Beagle, before I would give credence to the science fiction of organic self-assembly.
In any case, God enabled humans to re-create, and we’ve been pretty good at it. That is, if re-creation merely means the production of more humans. But it means a great deal more. Parenting is a vocation that calls for the physical and spiritual nurturing of children. The nuclear family is the foundation on which all healthy societies rest. The fact that God made male and female in his image implies that a mother and a father together better represent God to their children than any other arrangement. The importance of marital commitment for the wellbeing of children has been confirmed in study after study. The family is one of God’s most important gifts to us. Perhaps the most critical element of family is relational commitment—a concept our society is drifting away from, to its peril. Commitment is an important part of what it means to be made in God’s image. He remains committed to the human race, and his commitment is even greater towards those who are committed to him.
Then God put Adam and Eve in charge of all creation. Humans are not the most physically powerful creatures on earth. We would lose fights with lions or bears, moose or sharks, to name a few. We’ve lost quite a few battles to mosquitos. But human knowledge has given us the upper hand. This was true even for primitive humans. But the power God invested in humans is not for the sake of exploitation. God’s assignment was stewardship. From the beginning humans were directed to care for the earth. The assignments of family and world stewardship help us know how to live, and they help us understand who we are.
Image Bearers
The first five books of the Bible, including Genesis, are attributed to Moses. Moses was raised in an Egyptian pharaoh’s court. At that time in history, the kings and pharaohs of great nations would employ emissaries to represent their interests to their vassal nations. These emissaries would typically carry an image—a little statue—of the king they represented. When an emissary spoke, the subjects were expected to respond as if he were the king whose image he carried. Image-bearers, for their part, were to faithfully represent the king.
When Moses wrote the book of Genesis, he would have been mindful of this practice. We are image-bearers. Not only are we endowed with many God-like attributes, not only are we to live responsibly in families, not only are we to care for the earth, we have been assigned the job of representing God. All these phenomena underscore our high calling, even as they help us understand who we are.
Gifts
God has made each person unique. You have been made for many important purposes, though not all of those purposes are obvious. We are always in the process of learning; we grow into our capacities. We discover as we go what our particular purposes are. Faithful attention to present responsibilities is one key way that we develop our capacities. We should also consider the joys of our hearts. They, too, are guides, given to us by God. We should take into account our circumstances and opportunities. And we should take into account the recommendations and affirmations of people we trust. Some people seem to have a sense of the map of their lives by the time they reach junior high. Some people are still wondering what they will do with their lives when they are seventy. Do not be anxious about any of this. Uncertainty is an adventure, not an affliction. Your path is unique. Elisabeth Elliot advises: “Take the next step.”
What you should not do is fill yourself with anxiety by comparing yourself to others. Teddy Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” There will always be people who are less skilled than you are, and there will always be people who are more skilled. You will often find yourself being scrutinized and graded. None of this is important. Numerous educational models have been formulated that determine “normal” developmental progress in children. (Show me a normal person.) It is okay to humor the educators, but all children learn with or without formal education. The best learning takes place at a pace comfortable to the student, and in subjects that are of interest to the student. Do not wear yourself out thinking that you must prove yourself. You may have to prove your skills at certain tasks, but you do not have to prove your self. There is no question that you have been entrusted with important gifts. There is no question about your inherent value.
You should not be overly concerned about your looks. It’s good to be clean, modest, and to the extent you can have influence, healthy. (Run & play, and get enough sleep. Be kind to others. Eat a balanced diet.) Josh Billings advised: “Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.”
There’s nothing quite like sleep. Why do we need sleep? Its inherent fragility certainly doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Sleep is a mystery. We spend a third of our lives sleeping. This seems wasteful. God never sleeps. Sleep is a daily reminder that we are not God. We need a lengthy period each day for our minds and bodies to be restored.
Each night, after our long days of dealing with issues and pushing ourselves, we can stretch out on the bed and say, “Wow, this is nice!” And in the morning when we wake we reacquaint ourselves with our surroundings and then say, “Hey, it’s another day! I’ve got things to do! People to meet! Places to go! How ‘bout a little breakfast?”
Sleep, much like the Sabbath rest God commands, is a gift. They both remind us that, though working, building, and serving are part of what it means to be human, anxiety and ambition are not. God says to us that he will provide. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. – Psalm 127.2. Kelly Kapic notes that most of us have the tendency of seeing ourselves as human doings rather than human beings. At one level, our doing is a means of proving to ourselves that we are more than our inner darkness; we can produce something of beauty and of value. The need for rest is God’s way of saying we don’t have to prove ourselves even to ourselves. The need for rest is God’s way of saying that we are more than what we do. It is of value for us to take times of refreshment with friends, family, and with the Church. It is good for us to break away from our routines and worries. It is good for us to lay in a hammock and watch butterflies. It is good for us to be. In this way God frees us from our self doubts.
Some people suffer deeply from guilt. Perhaps they did something very damaging that they can’t undo. Perhaps they failed to do something they ought to have done. First, consider this: true guilt serves the purpose of causing people to stop bad behaviors. Once the bad behaviors end, there is the making of amends, to the degree possible. At this point, guilt has done its job. If guilt continues, it is false guilt. It is a lie that no longer deserves attention.
From the times of Moses, the Jewish people have annually celebrated the Day of Atonement. On this day a lamb is sacrificed for the forgiveness of the people’s sins. Then a priest ceremonially places the sins of the people onto a scapegoat that is let free in the wilderness, carrying the sins away so that they may be forgotten. These sacrifices foreshadowed the work of Jesus, whose crucifixion served as a sin payment and as a means of eliminating even the memories of sins. I don’t know how God can forget anything. I imagine it is possible with perfect mind control. Since he can forget, he can enable us to forget. In this way God adds to our rest. His work allows us to rest even from self-condemnation.
Don’t try to redesign your body. You don’t graffiti a Da Vinci. You’re probably not the most attractive person in the world. Be thankful for that. Beautiful people suffer from the undue attentions of others, which makes it difficult for them to maintain a balanced view of their own humanity. You look fine. Be an attractive person.
Jesus is described in Isaiah, chapter 53, verse 2: He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. The entire New Testament was written about Jesus and there is not one description of his looks. We can be fairly certain he looked like a Jewish man from the region of Galilee. That’s what we’ve got. On the other hand, we know a great deal about what he said and did. In these ways he was an unmatched beauty.
There is no reason to be anxious about whether you will succeed. First of all, the World confuses success with fame, power, and money. None of these are important, and all of them, if regarded as important, are dangerous to your soul. When we love things or even people before we love God, we make decisions that are harmful to those people and to ourselves. Let the unimportant be unimportant; let the important be important.
What is important is that we use our gifts and opportunities, that we act responsibly with what God puts in our hands. It is also important for us to be mindful of priorities. All of us have numerous responsibilities in life. We must do our best to address them according to their relative importances. We can’t do everything. We were not designed to do everything. Relax. God never seems to be in a hurry. That should be a clue to us. In God’s economy there is enough time. We will be given the time we need to complete the tasks we need to complete.
You will succeed when you follow God’s guidance. Care for people and pursue your assignments. Success will follow. While it is true that we should take our passions into account, it is also true that work is work. Work can be repetitive and boring. Don’t let that fool you into thinking your work is unimportant. Good work mostly takes place through disciplined, repetitive effort. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” A great pianist spends hours practicing scales. Being God-like requires patience.
You will become skilled in various ways, even if you don’t receive widespread recognition. Recognition is nice. It’s even of some value when your contributions prove to be helpful to others. But, otherwise, recognition is not important. Take joy in your good work, whether you are famous or unknown. God knows. In time your contributions will be recognized. Neither should you be anxious about the things you can’t seem to finish. The development God grants us on this earth carries forward to the new earth.
Do not follow the crowd. The crowd seems magnetically drawn to due south. Don’t panic if the noise of the crowd seems to be fading in the distance; it’s a good thing. If you are being shamed into an action, what you are being pressured into is likely the shameful thing that you should avoid. People who care about you will give you the space you need to be your self.
Love the truth. You will find that, in many cases, people will mistrust you and shun you when you stand on honesty. This is because they value loyalty over honesty. That is, they value your loyalty to them. Because they are okay with dishonesty, their loyalty to you is tentative. Being honest requires faith that God is really sovereign and that he will vindicate those who are honest. Just as important, to love truth is to image God, the One who is true. Commitment to truth is love for God and neighbor.
It’s important to think eternally. Life on earth is short. You may hear words of regret coming from adults as they observe how quickly the children they know are growing up. Children are wonderful. Two valuable characteristics of children come to mind. The first is that children are full of life. They do not drag their feet like old people do; they skip and jump. They feel the spring in their own bodies. Everything is new and overflowing with possibility. The other is that children are full of affection. They have not been scarred by years of questionable treatment, by apathy, or abuse. They want to hug and be hugged.
It is sad when we see these characteristics fade. But I think G.K. Chesterton was on to something when he said: “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” I do not think we will be resurrected as children. But I do think we will be young again. If our bodies are fully restored and our hearts are freed from sin, we will be like God—there will be kind of an agelessness to us. We need not fear the loss of youth.
The aging process can be dispiriting and frightening. If death is the end, these are reasonable apprehensions. However, if death is the doorway to resurrection, death has no power. We can live fearlessly even as we experience our bodies degenerating.
Being mindful of the many gifts God has given, we ought to be filled with gratitude. There is no benefit to perseverating on what we imagine we lack. There is nothing so annoying as the person with an entitlement attitude, who expects other people to make up for his or her perceived deficits. Entitlement is an illusion. Even when we are entitled, say, to protection under the law, that is only because other people have done the work of making good laws, while others make sure the laws are enforced. Our “entitlements” are gifts. According to Kelly Kapic, “If someone keeps a simple gratitude journal for a month, we can measure changes from lower blood pressure to improved immune systems, from better sleep to increased energy levels.” This seems like magic, but it is a benefit that come from imaging God rather than assuming a false place at the center of the universe.
Tests
God tests us, but not in the sense that he is trying to see whether we are good enough. God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. – Genesis 1.31. The tests God gives are designed to refine and improve us. Some of life’s most enduring lessons are the results of mistakes or bad decisions. This is not to recommend you make mistakes, but it is to encourage you that you will learn from your failures, as well as from your successes.
Winston Churchill said, “Success is going from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Churchill was a man of many accomplishments. He was the most important person in Great Britain during the early years of World War II, providing unbending encouragement to the British people who, for a time, were the only meaningful check against Nazi expansion. But Churchill experienced many set-backs in his life. Even so, he was a man of spine. He knew that self-pity only adds failures. “Get back up,” he would say. “You can do more than you think you can.”
The book of Job seems like a contest between God and Satan to see how Job will turn out, but there has never been a contest between God and Satan. God lets Satan roam to the extent that God lets Satan roam. Satan has a mighty bark, but he is a dog on a leash. Was God curious about how Job would perform? Timeless beings don’t wonder about the future. Job’s test was a demonstration. It demonstrated to Job how wonderfully he was made, and it demonstrated to him that God is trustworthy. Job’s experience was recorded for our benefit. Not many of us suffer the trials of Job, thankfully. But God does let us experience both easy times and hard. Hard times are not reason for us to doubt God. Hard times are for our strengthening and purification. I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, “They are my people”; and they will say, “The Lord is my God.” – Zechariah 13.9.
So do not be afraid of the chaos or the challenges that come your way. They are never pleasant, but they are for you. We know that for those who love God all things work together for good. – Romans 8.28. You may not be strong enough to overcome your challenges. A time may come when you feel utterly broken, but God is your protector and he is stronger than all your enemies. He will preserve you. He will walk with you through the fire.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he walked about in a body that retained the scars of his crucifixion. So it will be for us. Whether physical or spiritual wounds, we will carry our scars forever. Scars are evidences of healing. We will not forget our trials, because they have played a great part in our formation.
God’s tests are actually quite simple. They come in various shapes, sizes and flavors, but they boil down to one question: “What should you do?” And here is the answer. Write it down and put it in your pocket. These are open book tests: “Obey God”. Apply that answer over and over. It will save you from many a heartache. It will sometimes seem to be the wrong answer, but it will be the right answer. Applying it will remake you in good and surprising ways.
Peter, James, and John saw Jesus transfigured on a mountaintop. His face shone like the sun and his clothes became like light. Jesus spoke there with the long dead prophets, Moses and Elijah (apparently not dead, after all). Peter, James and John seemed to equate Jesus with the two prophets, but then a voice came from heaven and said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” The disciples collapsed on the ground in terror. But then Jesus said to them: “Get up,” and “Don’t be afraid.” Mark this well. God the Father, speaking from heaven, had just instructed the disciples to listen to Jesus. The first thing Jesus said to them was, “Get up,” and “Don’t be afraid.” These are the words of the Lord that we should remember every morning when we wake. Living fearlessly (not carelessly) is part of what it means to live as one made in the image of God. We can because Jesus said we can.
I say, live without fear, but this is not the full truth. You should fear God.
But you should not fear God like you might fear a wolf in your kitchen, or an impending hurricane. Fear God like you fear the rain. If you’re not dressed for it, it may give you a chill and make you sick. But without rain you would live in a desert. Fear God like you fear a power saw. It can remove fingers in a careless moment, or it can greatly help you with your tasks. Fear God like you fear the sun. It can burn you and give you cancer, but without it there would be no life on the earth. To fear God is to accept that his words are true. To turn from his instruction is to invite calamity, not because he is intent on punishing disobedience but because disobeying God is always foolishness, and foolishness leads to harm. To fear God is to recognize that he is sovereign over all creation and all history. To fear God is to recognize that his ways are true and that he alone has rightly explained the meaning of love.
Paradoxically, when we fear God we no longer need be afraid of him. The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing. – Zephaniah 3.17
Fearing God is the only way to calm our other fears.
Because we fear God we do not have to fear ideas. There are frightening ideas out there, of course, but when we shine the light of day on them they are exposed for their weaknesses. The more we investigate ideas the more it becomes clear that God is good and that God speaks truth.
Because we fear God we do not need to fear the chaos around us, or the red-faced maniacs and their demands. In time, he will either change them or he will remove them.
Because we fear God we do not have to fear our own weaknesses. God is sanctifying those who fear him. He is removing our sinful inclinations.
Because we fear God we have no need to fear our limitations. We will succeed in the ways he intends for us to succeed. We will become comfortable in our own skins. We will enjoy who we have been made to be, and we will not fret over what we are not meant to be. The works of our lives will be of great value to many people, and they will give God pleasure.
Because we fear God we need have no fear of harm or death. God is the master of life and he has promised everlasting life to all who fear him.
Because we fear God we have no need to fear loneliness, abandonment or relational apathy. Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. – 1 Corinthians 13.12. Knowledge, as used in this verse, is fundamentally relational. What we all desire most is to know others and to be known by others. What we mostly experience are relationships hedged with caution and fear. God promises that the day will come when those fears will no longer plague our relationships.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 4.6,7
God created us to be like him. This does not mean we will become omniscient or omnipotent or omnipresent. Humans cannot be these things. But it does mean that we have been made to be filled with his Holy Spirit, filled with love, and to live service-oriented, creative, interesting, joyful lives forever. And because of his commitment to us, we can live without fear. We are all designed to be fearless kids.
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