Thomas Nelson

The typical wife also fails to realize that her self-image often rests on what she believes her husband thinks of her.

The problem, though, is that many of us in the postmodern incarnation of the body of Christ don’t actually believe that our Father can handle the bullies that harass us. We’ve forgotten who our Dad is, so we’re spending our lives trying to run faster or fight harder, when decisive deliverance has been waiting in our Father’s shadow all along.

the fall of 2007, I had left everyone and everything I’d ever known to join For Today. I became the front man for this unheard-of metal band from western Iowa because I thought it would give me the chance to share the gospel with people who needed to hear it. I was right.

All I knew was that I could not speak or stand. Only by keeping still and lying facedown did I feel I might be safe; I feared that if I moved, I may die. This was not a presence that coddles or excites; it was a presence that rips, ravages, and burns. I felt, not wonder or awe, but plain fear.

I kept quiet. I felt too raw, too stunned, too vulnerable to speak, as if in doing so I might somehow trivialize or taint what had happened. It was too pure, too powerful, too precious, too everything to begin to try to put into words. So I kept it all to myself.

My experience in pursuit of the fear of the Lord has been a lot like that dream. Yahweh’s utter holiness is a relentless and intensely unstoppable force, and it will completely consume anything left outside of the shelter of my dream—a shelter I now know as “Christ.” There is only one place that our lives are safe from the consuming fire of God’s holy presence, and that is the place of abiding. Seated and hidden in Christ.

Fear drives some people to stand up and try to break out and others to sit down and try to fit in. Fear can make you either uptight or uninterested. You sweat over every exam, determined to get an A, or you skate through school half-heartedly because you don’t want to risk failure. Different manifestations, same fear.

the last couple of generations, the big lie that the church has bought into is what we call the “prosperity gospel,” the idea that God’s primary purpose for His followers is for them to be wealthy and comfortable, and if we will just pray the right prayers in the right way, He will have to cough up blessings, like a divine ATM. The prosperity gospel teaches that the evidence of God’s hand on a person or a ministry is the financial wealth with which they’ve been entrusted.

troubling fear in the back of their minds tells them, It can’t go on like this forever. It’s got to come crashing down at some stage. All good things come to an end. They are well aware that God is working in them significantly, but they are plagued by a fear that He’s going to suddenly pull the rug out from under them as a surprise “character-building” exercise.

When it comes down to it, most fear is of the unknown. It’s about uncertainty, of not being in control. That is what keeps so many of us from stepping out and trusting God. We aren’t sure He is going to come through. If we’re honest, we believe in God, but we don’t really believe God.