The Four Fears

Dannah Gresh: Why is it so hard to give up control? Here's Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We're afraid that if we surrender everything to God that would include our health, our material possessions, our family, our reputation, our career plans, all our rights, our future; we're afraid if we surrender all of that to Him, God might take us up on it.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Surrender: The Heart God Controls, for May 31, 2022. I'm Dannah Gresh.

Maybe you have been in a church service where you were asked to surrender everything to God. It's easy to respond to that call by raising a hand or singing a song; but when you think about it, surrender, true surrender, is a big deal. Here's Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth in a series called "Surrender, Facing our Fears."

Nancy: I can remember some of the songs that we sang in church when I was a little girl and I sang them with all my heart at the time. But as I got older and I started to think about some of the words of those songs that we were singing, I realized that it was kind of scary to be saying some of these things or singing some of these things.

For example, All to Jesus, I surrender, all to Him I freely give. I surrender all. I mean, the words came out real quickly but then when I started thinking about what that might mean, well, sometimes that was a little scary.

I think of that song, one of the verses says, I'll do what you want me to do, dear Lord; I'll go where you want me to go. And it talks about all of the different places where God might send us. And it was really easy to sing as a six year old; it was another thing as a sixteen year old to think of what that might mean.

And then I think of this song, I've heard it sung in church as a solo a number of times, and I always wondered how the soloist could sing this. It seemed a little scary to me when they would say, So whatever it takes for my will to break, that's what I'll be willing to do.

Or we stand and sing, Have Thine own way, Lord; have Thine own way. Thou art the Potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make me after Thy will. (Thy will, not mine.) While I am waiting, yielded and still.

Wow, scary to say those things, to say that I accept the will of God for my life, whatever it is, whatever it means, whatever the cost. It's one thing to sing or say those things in church. It's not so easy to make choices according to the will of God when we end up in a position where we have to find out if that is what we really mean, if we really are willing for God to take us up on those songs, those prayers.

Because you see, full surrender to Christ forces us to face the possibility or the reality of giving up some of the things that we consider most precious, some of the things we consider most important in life.

Our natural tendency is to hold on tightly—to try and protect and preserve those things we think we can't live without. So we're afraid that if we surrender everything, I mean really everything to God, not if we just say it but if we do it, that would include our health, our material possessions, our family, our reputation, our career plans, all our rights, our future. We are afraid if we surrender all of that to him, God might take us up on it. He might actually ask for it.

And then we have visions of God stripping us of the things that we most enjoy or the things that we most need or maybe sending us out to serve Him in the most remote part of the earth. If I really surrendered to God, God's going to ask me to do something that's just intolerable or unbearable. He's going to ask me to give up the thing or the person I love the most.

I think that a lot of our fears about relinquishing total control of our lives to God fall into four categories. And that is what we want to talk about over the next several days. Those four categories are: provision, pleasure, protection, and personal relationships.

Provision: If I surrender everything to God, will I have what I need? What if my husband loses his job? Maybe you are the single or the sole provider for your family, what if I lose my job? Can we afford to have more children? How will we pay for their education? What if the economy goes under, what will happen to our investments? What if my husband dies, will I have enough to live on? What if God asks us to give our savings to the church or to a needy family? What if God calls us to go into vocational full-time Christian service, how will we be supported? How will our bills be paid?

Provision—will I have what I need? That's a fear we have.

A second fear is in this category of pleasure. Will I be happy if I surrender myself fully to the will of God? If I fully surrender to God, will I be miserable? Will I be able to do the things I enjoy? What if God asks me to give up my career or my favorite hobby or my best friend or the foods I really like? Might God make me stay in this difficult marriage? Will I be fulfilled if I obey God, if I surrender my life fully to Him? Those are pleasure questions. Will I be happy?

Provision—will I have what I need?
Pleasure—will I be happy?

Here's the third category, protection: Will I and those I love be safe? Will I be safe, will my children be safe? Will my husband be safe? What if my child is born with a mental or a physical disability? What if someone abuses my children? What if I have an accident and I am maimed for life? What if I get cancer? What if somebody breaks into our house? What if God chooses to take my husband or my children? What if my child gets deployed in the armed forces or the mission field? Will he be safe?

Protection—will I be safe (and maybe for a mom, the harder question is) will those I love be safe?

And then there is this issue of personal relationships. Provision, pleasure, protection, and then personal relationships: will my relational needs be met if I fully surrender myself to God? If I let go, if I relinquish control of my life, will my relational needs be met? What if the Lord wants me to be single all of my life? How can I live without sex or romance?

Revive Our Hearts has a lot of single listeners who are asking these kinds of questions. Now it's one thing to be single at fourteen and it's another thing to be single at forty-four.

As some of our listeners have written and shared and they have a heart for God and a longing for God but there is this fear, if I really let go, maybe God won't let me have a husband. What if my mate never truly loves me? What if I lose my mate? What if my husband leaves me? What if my husband has an affair? What if God doesn't give us children?

If I let go and say, "Lord I surrender to You, what if God doesn't give us children, doesn't bless us with the desire of our hearts? What if my husband gets transferred and we have to move a thousand miles across the country to a place we have never been; we have to leave all our family and leave all our friends?" And there is this kind of holding back as if we could really control our lives anyway.

But there is this fear, and we have to face those fears when it comes to this issue of surrender. Fears are natural. Fears of provision: Will I have what I need? Fears about pleasure: Will I be happy? Fears about protection: Will I and those I love be safe? And fears about personal relationships: If I let God have everything, if I give Him total control, will my emotional and relational needs be met?

Some of these fears are understandable because these kinds of things do happen. And to be surrendered to the Lord is not to say that they won't happen. And so, we want to hold on tightly, the fear of letting go. How do we face those fears?

Well, we are going to talk about that over the next several sessions, but I want to just say that at the heart of the matter is this challenge. And that is, get to know God. The one who is asking you to let Him control your life. Get to know Him.

I have loved for years that verse in Psalm chapter 9, verse 10, "Those who know your name, O Lord, will put their trust in you, for you have never forsaken those who fear you." (paraphrased) You know what that means? To know God's name is to know God's character. It's to know what He's like. And to know what He's like is to be able to trust Him.

The ability to relinquish your control of your life to God is based on the assurance, the faith, the confidence that He is a trustworthy God, that He can manage the control, not just of your life but of His whole universe. He can be trusted. He sees all; He knows all; He never makes mistakes; He never fails. To trust that not only does He know what is best for this universe, and not only is He in control of the affairs of this planet, but He loves youm and He knows what is best for your life.

To have the confidence, and this is what happens as you get to know God, you realize that God will never bring anything into your life that is not good for you. It is not best for your ultimate interest, and also in the interest of His eternal kingdom, which is what really, really matters.

And all this, we won't see clearly until we look back on this life. We will know and see then what we have to take by faith now—that God is good, and that He is working all things according to the counsel of His will.

I've been meditating on that verse from Ephesians chapter 1, verse 11 recently. The plan of God, the purpose of God; He works all things. That's every circumstance that comes into my life. That's the things that annoy me, the people who annoy me, the situations that trouble me or cause me to fret. God is working all those things "according to the counsel of His will."

And we know from Romans chapter 12, verse 2, that God's will is good. It's perfect. It's acceptable.

Someone has said, and many of you have heard me quote if before, that God's will is exactly what you and I would choose if we knew what God knows. God's will is good. It's perfect. It's acceptable.

Get to know God. Get to know His character. Get to know His heart. Get to know His ways. Get to know His Word, because for every fear that you have about surrendering your life to God, for every one of those fears, God has a promise—a promise that will sustain you when you can't see the outcome and when your fears threaten to overwhelm you.

Get to know the grace of God, the grace of God that is always sufficient for every need. His grace is sufficient for you—for that mate, that child, that job, that situation, that struggle, that tension, that thing that is going on in your church, that unbearable situation—the grace of God is sufficient for you and for me for every circumstance and every situation of life. And because we have God, because we have His promises, and because we have His grace, we can cast ourselves upon Him.

We can open up our clenched fists, the fists that we used to grasp and to hold so tightly onto the things that we think we can't live without; we can let it all go. We can open our hearts to the will of God, and we can release those fears and relinquish control because we know the one who is doing the controlling, and because we know that His grace is sufficient.

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will be right back with the second half of today’s episode. She’s beginning a series called “Surrender: Facing Our Fears,” and I want to tell you about a resource that fits right in with this topic. It’s a new booklet called Facing Our Fears: Finding Him Faithful. This resource takes a deeper look at promises from God’s Word with content taken from Nancy’s book Surrender. You’ll also find exclusive bonus material, including a section of Scriptures to pray for various fears, reflection questions, and more. Let this resource help you overcome your fear with faith as you learn to surrender every part of your life to Jesus. I’ll tell you how you can get your copy at the end of today’s episode. Now, let’s get back to Nancy.

Nancy: When I was a kid, I used to love to visit wax museums. Have you ever been in a wax museum? They really are a lot of fun. They have these historical figures or famous celebrities or whatever, but they are figures in wax and the figures look amazingly real.

I mean, from a distance, you kind of step back and say, "That looks so real." But, of course, they aren't real. And, actually, it must be kind of a nice thing to just be in a wax museum. I mean, no problems, but it is because they aren't real people.

Sometimes when we read the Scripture, I think that we think of Bible characters as if they were those fake figures in a wax museum. We admire their faith and their spiritual feats but we forget that they were real people who had to deal with real-life issues and real problems.

Take Abraham and Sarah for example. We think of them as superheroes, people of great faith, and they were. But they had to face many of the same issues and fears that we struggle with.

Over and over again in order to move forward in their relationship with God, Abraham and Sarah were called to make a fresh surrender to God. Just after they had surrendered one thing it seemed like God would come and ask them for something else. And to make those surrenders required that they relinquish control of their own lives, that they step out on a limb, and that they trust a God they could not see.

Now think about the background of Abraham and Sarah. They grew up in a pagan, idolatrous environment where there was absolutely nothing to inspire or nurture faith. I mean, no study Bibles, no praise and worship CDs, no churches, no Christian fellowship, nothing.

And when an unseen, unknown God spoke and told Abram, as he was known at the time, to venture out and to leave behind everything that was familiar and comfortable, he and his wife were faced with a choice: to stay or to go.

And in making that choice they had to consider the cost of surrender. They had to face, I'm sure, some very real fears, the same fears we face. How will our family's needs be met? God hadn't told them the answer to that question. It's the fear of provision.

They had to face the fear of losing pleasure. Will we be happy in this unseen, unknown thing that God is calling us to pursue? Will we like this, or will we be miserable?

And then, will we be safe? They didn't have maps and atlases to tell them how to get there and what was going to be there when they got there. They didn't know. What will we face? What will be the enemies, what adversaries will we face? It's the fear of protection.

Then this issue of personal relationships: You want us to leave all our friends and all our relatives and go where? The fear of losing personal relationships.

Now, Scripture doesn't tell us to what extent, if any, Abram and Sarah wrestled with their decision. But this I know: They were not figures in a wax museum. They had emotions; they had feelings. They had fears. Faith isn't really faith unless it steps over the fears and runs into the face of those fears. What we do know is that they went.

Genesis 12, verse 1 tells us about God's call to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household." Four verses later we read, "So Abram left as the Lord had told him."

By the way, even though Abram is the only one named in that verse, don't forget, Sarah went with him. She had not even heard what Abram had heard. Our God spoke directly to Abram, and Sarah had to trust that her husband was following a God she had never seen and had never met. What incredible faith, not just on Abram's part, but also on the part of his wife.

So with no further explanation, with no idea of how they were going or what they were going to do when they got there, they risked everything. They cast themselve into the arms of Providence, and they went. God said, "Go," and they went. You know what they were doing? They were choosing friendship with God over all human relationships, over all earthly attachments and over all visible security.

Now, God had given Abraham and Sarah some grand promises. He had told them that He would take them to a fruitful land, that they would have more offspring than they could count. But keep in mind as you read the Book of Genesis that for more than twenty-five years, they didn't have one shred of visible evidence that God's promises would be fulfilled. So they had the promises and then they had this long, long waiting period.

Acts chapter 7 talks about this period of Abraham and Sarah's lives and tells us that the reality could have really shaken their faith. Acts 7, verse 5 says, "They had no inheritance and they had no child." Now, God had promised a land and God had promised a child but for twenty-five years, no inheritance and no child. But they went anyway.

In spite of occasional lapses in their faith, and I'm so glad that the Scripture shares those because that really encourages me because you see how God picked them back up, they kept on going, walking in faith. So Abraham and Sarah surrendered themselves to the purposes and the plans of God with no tangible guarantee that their obedience would ever pay off.

That's what is involved in surrender to God. It's going when God says, "Go." Giving when God says, "Give." Giving up when God says, "Give up." Not being able to see the outcome of that surrender—sometimes with no visible evidence.

God says, "Keep on loving that husband."

And you say, "But, Lord, but it has been twenty-five years."

God says, "Keep on loving. Cling to me, cling to my promises, surrender when you can't see the outcome, when you can't tell that your obedience will ever pay off. Keep on doing it anyway."

Even when they could not see the outcome of their faith and even when it seemed to be taking forever, what did Abraham and Sarah do, they believed God. They believed God. They staked their lives, their security, their future, everything on the fact that God was real and that He would keep His promises.

That was the foundation on which their faith rested. That's what motivated their repeated acts of surrender. It was faith in the character of God and the promises of God that enabled Abraham and Sarah to adopt an itinerant lifestyle, living in tents for over twenty-five years. And you thought your house was bad. You thought you needed something newer or nicer or more stable. You thought you had moved a lot. For twenty-five years, not just Abraham but his wife, Sarah. She was a woman of faith as much as he was a man of faith.

The lived in tents, traveled all the time, never put down roots. But it was because they saw the promises of God, they embraced those promises, and they were willing to make the sacrifices required to see those promised fulfilled.

Hebrews 11 tells us by faith they went to live in the land of promises, in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with them of the same promise and here's why. "For they were looking forward to the city which has foundations whose designer and builder is God" (v. 10).

God had promised them something permanent, something enduring, something eternal and something lasting, and they were willing to put up with that itinerant, gypsy lifestyle for all those years because they had their eyes fixed on what was ahead.

It was faith in the promises of God that helped them endure through decades of infertility and unfulfilled longings because God had promised them, "You will have a seed." And the Scripture tells us in Hebrews 11, verse 11 that Sarah considered him "faithful who had promised. "Now, there were moments when she lapsed into unbelief, and she did some very foolish things when she stopped trusting God. But for the most part over those years, she considered God as faithful, "He has promised; therefore, I know that in His time and in His way, He will fulfill His promises.

It was faith in the promises of God that enabled Abraham and Sarah to let go of that long promised, long-awaited child when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. They said, "God has promised; He is faithful; He must know what he is doing."

They knew so much less of God than we are able to know because we have their story and so many other stories in this Book. We have a God who has been tried and tested and proven and whose heart and character and faithfulness have been demonstrated over thousands of years. They didn't have any of that. But they still trusted. Over and over again, God revealed Himself and His promises to this couple.

Genesis 15, verse 1, "Don't be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward." What was God saying? And the context here, by the way, was when Abraham was facing the threat of an enemy king. God was saying, "I'm your protection. I am your provision. If you have Me you have everything You need, so, trust Me."

Those who know Your name, O LORD, will put their trust in You for You have never forsaken those who fear You." (Ps. 9:10)

So at times the call of God in our lives may require us to relinquish things or people that we can't imagine living without: material possessions, a job, a promotion, health, a mate, a child, the respect and understanding of a dear friend. In the midst of all that, it's the character of God, the promises of God, "I am your reward; I am your shield; I am your provision; I am your protection," that is what will free us from our fears and help us to step out in faith and whole-hearted surrender.

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been giving us a picture of a life free from the fears that hold us back from God's will. She’ll be back to pray in just a minute, but first, let me tell you that today's topic is close to her heart. She wrote about it in a resource called Facing Our Fears: Finding Him Faithful. I mentioned it earlier in today’s episode, and you can get your copy of this booklet when you make a gift of any amount to Revive Our Hearts.

Today is an especially important day because it’s the last day of our budget year. When you give toward our fiscal year-end need, you become a part of helping women flourish in their relationship with Jesus, helping them impact their world for Christ. If you’ve been considering making a donation of any amount, today is your last day to give toward our $775,000 goal for the month of May. If you’d like to see where we’re at with our goal, check out the progress bar on our website.

We’re so grateful for each gift given, and we continue to trust the Lord to provide exactly what we need as we look toward the next year of ministry. Your gift makes a big difference as we share the truth with women all over the world. When you make a donation at ReviveOurHearts.com today, you’ll receive a copy of Facing Our Fears. Or you can also call us at 1-800-569-5959 to make a donation and request your copy.

Tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts, we will look at the importance of having an altar in our lives. Hope you can be back with us. Now, here's Nancy. Let's pray.

Nancy: Thank You, Lord, for giving us the account of Abraham and Sarah. And thank You for this incredible couple who against hope believed in You. When all the circumstances around them said that what You said couldn't be true, they chose to believe You instead of their circumstances.

Thank You that because of their faith, we can have faith today. We are, according to the Scripture, the children of Abraham if we believe in Christ. I pray that You would help us to know You, to trust You and to be willing to step out in faith in obedience to Your direction. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants you to find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. 

All Scripture unless otherwise noted is taken from the NASB.

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