A Saturday's Message: Fear

Today Pastor Ulf Ekman came to my church again, and he preached an amazing.. no, stupendous message ( I realized I use amazing, superb too much. Need to increase my vocabulary.) on fear.

Yeah, usually we talk about faith in church, but pastor decided to talk about fear and how we can face it head on. And really, it's not your traditional way of facing your fear.

He talked about where the fear was rooted in, and how we could fight it by destroying the roots that lead to fear.

Let me put a few insights from the sermon here, hopefully they flow. Ha..

All of us have a tendency to want to control our lives in an attempt to feel secure, but the thing is life is not like that, there's always something that will jump up, something that you cannot control.

We cannot escape circumstances and we will conquer them in Jesus, and in reality, there is a devil, and his main weapon of attack is fear. Most people live in fear on a daily basis.

Must clarify here. When we say we live by fear on a daily basis, it doesn't mean we're afraid at every instance, but rather, the actions that we do are driven by a deep seated fear.

A girlfriend calling every night to make sure her boyfriend is 'fine'. But in reality, she wants to check on him if he's up to anything else. The phone call could have been motivated by love, where she just wants to know if he had an okay day, but its really not about the action, but about the motivation.

But what really spoke to me was the part about where fear was rooted.

It is when we are selfish that fear can enter our hearts. We're afraid we don't have enough, we're afraid that we may not reach the status 'God has given to us' in our life, we're afraid that our future won't be bright enough. We're afraid that we cannot have enough in our lives to be happy.

We use these things as excuses to give less than we should to others, our money, our time, our effort.

All these things about me, myself and I, bring fear in our hearts. But it is when we don't look to ourselves, but look to God, look to meeting the needs of others that faith arises in our hearts. Faith that all the things we need will be added to us( Matt 6:33).

Amazing insights, let me just finish with one more which I think is great:

God's grace is unmerited.

It is the problem of us, because we have this deep seated need to be praised, to be exalted, that it somehow make out God's grace to be one that needs to be earned. And that's religion. And we really have a hard time accepting true grace, that its really not about what you have done, but what Jesus had done on the cross.

In our hearts, we only need to know that, we're accepted in the beloved. =)