How Can God Say "Fear Not"?

I found this article a few days ago by Maurine Proctor that explains so much of what I have been feeling this week.
"...Fear debilitates. It paralyzes. It is a tool of the Adversary, and perhaps his prime one. Just as surely as sin blocks the comfort of the Spirit, so does fear. Fear is primordial; it overtakes us, we can fall into its sickening embrace before we know it. We may feel it as a clutching darkness or a pain that drains the goodness out of our day. Or it may simply be a sense that our nerves have been drawn taut like wires.

Fear can be experienced as dread about some imagined outcome. It can merely be the sense that we are worried that bad things will happen, that we will miss the opportunity that could change our lives. It can be a sense that we will fail or that we will be exposed and find out things about ourselves and our weaknesses we do not want to know. We are fearful for our children’s physical and spiritual safety, for the commotion in our world, for the economy that is eating away our financial security like acid.

Worry and fear ... indicate that we have hit a snag in our spiritual development and that the Lord is inviting us to know Him better.

Let’s face it. It can be terrifying to live day by day in a world where what we value can be snatched from us. Some of us are called upon to do obviously hard things-- wash the windows of skyscrapers, fight fires, do brain surgery—things that obviously call for nerve and courage. But it feels just as hard, and sometimes frightening to most of us, to raise a child who might go astray, or tackle the job we think we have no aptitude for, or live with the rejection or disappointment we didn’t expect. Sometimes we are frightened that we will just never be happy.

Fear, in any of its forms, is not of the Lord. He does not give us the spirit of fear. He may warn us at times, but this is not in the spirit of fear. Be certain, when you are in its clutches, that fear is always a tool of the Adversary, meant to dim your light and divide you from God.

God did not put us in this insecure, fallen world to be frosted in fear, glazed in anxiety, but, instead to come to know Him and his power. Yes, we are in some kinds of bondage here, but He allows it so He can demonstrate that He is the Deliverer.

When we drop the notion that we have to control every aspect of our world to work out “just so” for us, and instead put ourselves in His hands, our fear begins to evaporate.

When we begin to seek to know Him with all of our hearts, refusing to be tossed around by the trivial or the threatening, fear begins to dissolve. The material world, where our fears lie, loses its power over us. Yes, we live here and must respond to its demands, but it is not our source of security.

We aren’t insecure in this fallen world; we only think we are. How could there be a more secure place to be than in His hands? God has prepared this journey for us, has foreseen every eventuality, and if we seek him with all of our hearts, he doesn’t just show us the way. He is the way. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” He tells us (John 14:6).

The Red Sea will part. It may not be on our time table or in our way, but that’s acceptable because we know that He is doing something important with us and for us that we cannot do for ourselves. He is about the work of transforming us, expanding our understandings, shifting our paradigms.

Our call is to be steady. Charging God foolishly because we are frightened demonstrates that we have not yet come to understand who He is and the nature of the covenant that binds us to him if we give him all our hearts."
Read the whole article here.


I am still fighting this battle. I find it so difficult to be steady. God continues to tutor, train, and comfort me... and I continue to let the fear envelop me during my vulnerable moments. I can be trying so hard to be patient and faithful, but almost inevitably comes moments like tonight when I turn off the lights and the darkness seems to unleash a wall of emotions that I can't keep back... no matter how unwanted they are.

I will just have to spend more time in the light, because I refuse to stop fighting.