Turning Unhealthy Fear Upside Down

Dannah Gresh: Wouldn’t you love to just never be afraid at all? Mary Kassian says . . .

Mary Kassian: Not so fast. Your goal is not to get rid of fear. Your goal is to respond to fear the right way—to turn fear on its head with the greater fear, the fear that will calm all your fears.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for October 29, 2021. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Could you describe yourself as confident and strong and courageous when you need to be? I know I’d sure like to grow in these areas, and you probably would, too. Well, thankfully God gives us the guidance we need in that area, and every other area as well, in His Word.

For the past couple of days here on Revive Our Hearts, we’ve had the joy of listening in on a conversation between author and speaker Mary Kassian and the cohost of this program, Dannah Gresh.

Mary’s newest book is called, The Right Kind of Confident. The subtitle, which I love, is, The Remarkable Grit of a God-Fearing Woman.

On Wednesday, we learned about true confidence as opposed to the sort of self-centered confidence that the world promotes. Yesterday, Mary explained the difference between wrong kinds of fear and—maybe this surprises you to hear it—the right kind of fear, which, of course, is the healthy fear of the Lord.

If you missed either of those programs, make sure you go back and listen. You can do that on the Revive Our Heartsapp, or on our website at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Now today, Mary helps us turn our unhealthy fear upside down. She’ll explain what she means by that. Now, here’s Dannah to get the conversation started.

Dannah: Well, Mary, yesterday we gave . . . well, I guess I gave, (but you didn’t stop me), some homework for our listeners. And I’m wondering, Do you think they did it?

Mary: Well, I hope each listener took the opportunity to think through those confidence scales That first confidence scale, how confident do you feel? On a scale of 1 to 10, if you were to turn your button, would it be high level of confidence, 8, 9, 10? Or would you be feeling a low level of confidence, at about maybe 1 or 2?

But the second question was: Where would you place yourself on the confidence scale if you were to rate your reliance on the Lord, your trust in the Lord, your confidence in the Lord? Would that be closer to a 10? Or would be that be closer to the lower end of the scale?

Dannah: If you showed up on the lower end of the scale, you are in the exact right place today, because, Mary, help us turn the wrong kind of fear into confidence. Help us turn our fear upside down.

Mary: Well, the Bible challenges us to do just that, to stop putting our confidence in the wrong place and to start putting our confidence in the right place. The right kind of fear will give us the right kind of confidence. In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence.

Dannah: Well, one person who had the wrong kind of confidence in the first part of his life, but then was able to switch over to having the right kind of confidence as he aged and grew, was Moses. You write about him in your book, Mary.

Mary: Yes. Moses was the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter. So the great Pharaoh of Egypt was his grandfather. He was raised in the palace, and Scripture tells us he was a great military leader. He had everything. He had riches. He had all sorts of education, a great education, and he was able to kind of rise up through the ranks.

History tells us that his mother had her eye on a very powerful position for Moses in Egypt and that he had all the prestige and power and influence and riches—everything. And so Moses was probably a pretty kind of confident guy.

Dannah: Do you think he would have shown up pretty well in that first scale?

Mary: I think he would have shown up, yes. “I’ve got it together. I’ve got what it takes.”

Dannah: In the early part of his life.

Mary: In the early part of his life.

And what’s interesting also, as Scripture unpacks his story, it says in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 24, he appeared to be like feisty Moses. He got to the place where he said, “No. I’m not going to be called your son. I relate more to being Hebrew.”

And so one day he went out to the Hebrew people, and he saw a Hebrew slave being abused, and, for those of you who are familiar with the story, he took matters into his own hands. He murdered the Egyptian who was abusing the Hebrew slave, and hid his body.

But then, when the Hebrews heard about it, they said, “Huh! Moses! Who are you? Who do you think you are?”

And when his grandfather, the Egyptian Pharaoh heard about it, he issued an edict to put Moses to death.

All of a sudden, everything thing that Moses trusted in—his power, his position, his authority that he had—all of his swag, all of his confidence was just gone.

Dannah: Everything he propped himself up against blew away—blew away like a spider web.

Mary: Exactly—like a spider web.

And so what’s interesting then is Moses ran away to Midian, and he spent forty years being a shepherd. And shepherds were the lowest of the low in those days. That was a very lowly profession. So he went from being this great ruler and great military leader and the who’s who, the upcoming in Egypt, to being no one and nothing.

When the Lord spoke to him out of the burning bush, we see that Moses had lost all his swag, and he was filled with insecurity. He was, like, “Who am I? I can’t do this. You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m no one.” You see this great confidence, and all of a sudden it was gone. And then forty years later, he’s still got a chip on his shoulder and feeling extremely insecure.

And what’s interesting about the whole story is that God doesn’t give Moses a, “Rah! Rah! You can do it, Moses!” talk, “You just need more self-confidence. You just need to get your swag back.” He doesn’t do that at all. He basically chides him, corrects him, for putting his confidence in his own ability, or lack thereof, and challenges him to take that whole process of putting confidence in himself, or in who he was, out of the picture and instead to put confidence in the Lord.

Dannah: Mary, let me just read how Moses expresses his lack of confidence after God says, “Hey, I’ve got a calling for you; I’ve got a job for you. I want you to go set My people free.”

In Exodus 3, verse 11, it says, “But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I?’”

“Who am I?” How many of us have said that in our lives?

“Who am I to teach this class? Who am I to raise this child? Who am I to do that job? Who am I?” The lack of confidence comes out.

“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

And verse 12: “And God said . . .” This is to your point that He didn’t just say, “Oh, come on, Moses. You know you’ve been a great military leader. You know you’ve had a great education. You know you know Egypt better than anyone else.” He doesn’t say that. In verse 12, “And God said, I will be with you—I will be with you—I will be with you.” (paraphrased see v. 12)

What was He doing? He was doing what you were teaching us about on our first day together: to put your confidence in the right thing. Put your confidence in God.

Mary: The Lord wanted Moses to learn to trust Him. He wanted Moses to learn to put his trust in God’s person and God’s power and God’s provision and God’s plan, to put his complete trust in the Lord rather than trusting his own ability or rather than being so worried about his lack of ability.

I think sometimes we look at our lack of ability, and we go, as you said, Dannah, “Who am I? I can’t do this. I don’t have what it takes. I don’t have the resources. I don’t have . . . I don’t have the confidence.”

And the Lord challenged Moses, and He challenges us, to say, “You don’t have to have the confidence in yourself. You don’t have to have what it takes. All you need is Me. All you need is Me. And all you need to do is put your confidence in the right place and lean on Me rather than leaning on that spider’s web that’s going to let you down.”

Dannah: But here in this moment, Moses isn’t trusting God’s provision and plan. He’s not even trusting God, it sounds like. So, Mary, we know how the story ends, but how did Moses turn it around? How did he overcome his fear to become confident in God?

Mary: It was a journey. I think that the Lord taught him. As he began to lean on God instead of leaning on all those other things in which he was putting his trust, he started to learn.

What’s interesting is we see at the end of his life that Moses is a super-confident kind of guy, but it’s not a brash kind of confidence. It’s a quiet, holy kind of confidence. It’s not a, “Look at me! I can do this! Look what I did!” But it was a, “Look at what God did! And look at who God is!”

We see at the end of the book of Exodus that here was this guy who was afraid to even speak up. We don’t know whether he had a speech impediment, but whatever reason, he was lamenting to the Lord that his tongue was slow, “I can’t do public speaking. You’ve got the wrong guy.” And the Lord challenged him with, “No. I don’t have the wrong guy. I’m the one who made your mouth, and I’m the one who’s choosing you.”

But then, at the end of Moses’ life, we see him standing up and giving this great, long oration. Several chapters in the Bible are devoted to what Moses said and where he was just giving glory to God for God’s power, God’s provision, God’s plan, and God’s enabling.

So his confidence had shifted. First he was confident in himself. And then when the Lord spoke to him from the burning bush, he was insecure. The scale had flipped from a 10, “I’m so confident in myself,” to a zero, “I’m nobody. I can’t do anything.”

Dannah: “Who am I?”

Mary: Yes. And then, at the end of his life, after the Lord took him on the confidence journey, we see that Moses started to use an entirely different scale to measure his confidence. He was putting his confidence in God. His confidence was based on how strongly he trusted the Lord rather than how strongly he trusted other things.

Dannah: Yes. I think about: How many times did the Israelites behave badly? I think we probably couldn’t count them. But I’m thinking about that one time where God says, “I can’t go with you anymore.” And Moses’ confidence is now in God so thoroughly, he is planted in the confidence of God, that he is audacious. He says to God, “I will not lead these people unless You go with me. I can’t do it without You, God. You are my confidence. You are everything.”

He was a completely different man. He’s on the right confidence scale now though. He’s on the God-confidence scale. He’s saying, “If God is not with me, I can’t go. I can’t do it.”

Mary: Exactly. And that’s the whole thing. That’s how we turn fear upside down. That’s how we begin to address all the things that we’re scared of, all the things that cause us insecurities.

Maybe it’s our appearance. Maybe we weren’t gifted with the type of beauty we would like to have. Maybe the nose is the wrong shape. Maybe we woke up, and it’s a really bad hair day. We’ve all had that as women, for sure.

Dannah: We sure do put our confidence in flimsy things. Don’t we?

Mary: We put our confidence in those things. Or maybe we’ve had this major facial breakout or something. Our complexion is bad. Or something that causes us to have a lack of confidence.

Maybe it’s just a fear of what other people think.

Or maybe we have experienced failure. We thought we could do something, and then we couldn’t. And we just have this fear of failure.

Or maybe we’ve lived our whole lives hearing the message, “You can’t do this. You’re no one. You’re no good.”

I think the way that we need to take all those fears to the Lord and turn fear upside down by introducing the greater fear. The fear of the Lord will calm all those other fears. That’s how we turn fear upside down.

We start putting those fears down where they belong and putting the fear of the Lord up where it belongs—over the top of all those other fears to calm all those other fears. Because when we shift the focus of our trust from trusting in the spider’s web to trusting in the rock, solid source of who God is, and we shift our fear from being afraid of all those other things—what people think of us, how we look, how much money we have, how successful we are, how we compare to other people—when we shift our fears from there to the fear of the Lord and introduce the fear of the Lord into that equation, then what happened to Moses will happen to us.

We’ll see fear turned up on its head, and we will see our confidence grow stronger and stronger. But not confidence in self. Confidence in the Lord, which is the only confidence that is a strong confidence that will not let us down.

Dannah: So, make this practical for us because, “Put your confidence in the Lord,” that’s a big category. Right? Can you break that down into a couple of steps of how can we build our confidence? Practically, how do we move to that place where our confidence is in the power and magnificence of God?

Mary: The first thing we need to do is we need to understand that confidence is not about how we feel. Confidence is about where we put our trust. And that’s a very important point because we tend to base our meter on how confident we are in terms of how confident we feel. I think that the world tempts us to do that because they want us to chase that feeling, chase that feeling of confidence by putting our confidence in the wrong place.

So the first thing you need to do, dear sister who’s listening to this, is you need to understand that your feeling is not the most important thing. The most important thing is your choice of where you choose to put your confidence.

I think that the world teaches us that it is possible to get rid of fear, and if we get rid of feelings of fear and just move forward boldly, then we’re a confident woman. But the Bible seems to indicate that fear is something we have to deal with on an ongoing basis.

So your goal isn’t to get rid of fear. Your goal is to respond to fear in the right way. So fear is really an invitation to respond to the Lord the right way.

Dannah: I like that. That’s good. Say that again. That’s worth re-hearing.

Mary: Absolutely.

Fear is an invitation to respond to the Lord the right way.

David said, “When I am afraid, I will trust in You” (Ps. 56:3).

So don’t go chasing the feeling or chasing the idea that you can get rid of fear in your life. You can’t get rid of fear in your life. Satan is a fearmonger. He will throw fear at you. He will throw situations at you. We live in a broken, fallen world—a world in which there are many legitimate things to fear, a world where things don’t go the way we would like them to go, a world in which things are broken. We see sickness and dying and pain and suffering. There is much to fear.

So your goal is not to get rid of fear. Your goal is to respond to fear the right way, to turn fear on its head with the greater fear, the fear that will calm all your fears.

“When I am afraid,” that’s what David said . . . and David sure had a lot to fear in his life and a lot in his situation. He had people trying to kill him. He had family conflict. He had friends who betrayed him, relationships that broke down. And then all sorts of fears from the bad choices that he made that came back to haunt him. Yet, he said, “When I am afraid, I will trust in You.”

So fear, first of all, is an invitation to trust.

There’s a situation for me just even in the past few weeks, and we talked about this a couple of days ago. My dad was in COVID isolation ward, and there were several hours when I just thought, We’re going to lose him here. I was holding his hand and playing him hymns on my iPhone, “When I am afraid, I will trust in You.”

So whenever that fear crops up—and it does crop up; it crops up in my heart, too. But I counsel my heart with truth. I counsel my heart with Scripture. I counsel my heart with the greatness of who God is. That is how I calm that fear.

It’s an invitation, whenever I feel anxious. How often during COVID have we all felt that anxiety and that, “Oh, no! What’s going to happen? This situation is so hard.” That’s an invitation to bring truth into the picture and to bring the fear of the Lord into the picture and to have that great fear and that great awe and that great wonder of who God is to calm all those lesser fears.

Dannah: Yes. I remember a time, Mary, when I wrote my first book. A friend said, “Okay, now you have to take speaking engagements.” Well, I’m an extreme introvert, and at that point my life had never been on stage. I would never have gotten behind this mic. I can’t tell you the fear that gripped me. I told this friend, “I will never speak in front of a live audience—ever. That will never happen.”

And this person said, “Oh, that sounds like an opportunity for you to trust God.” That’s what this person said to me. “It sounds like you don’t trust God. If you get an invitation to speak, you need to think of that as an opportunity, an invitation to trust God. It’s not really an invitation to speak.”

I drug myself for two years from stage to stage, terrified, but saying, “I’m so in over my head, but this is still under Christ’s feet. I can’t do this in my weakness, but He is strong when I am weak.” I would just bathe myself in the Scriptures that would come to my mind. I would go in afraid. I would come out afraid. I don’t face it anymore because I kept putting my trust in God. I kept bathing my mind in the truth of the Word. It’s not about me. I wasn’t reading, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” verses. No, no, no, no. I was reading verses about how amazing and strong God is.

Mary: Absolutely.

I think of that story of the disciples in the boat on the Sea of Galilee and there was a massive storm, and Jesus was sleeping in the stern. They were going to be overcome by this storm, and they were really afraid.

Dannah: They were scaredy cats. They were, like, drama kings. They were terrified.

Mary: Well, I actually think it must have been a pretty bad storm to scare them because they were seasoned fishermen.

Dannah: Exactly.

Mary: So it must have been really, really violent. Here is Jesus just sleeping in the boat, not getting as panicked as they were. They woke Him up, and He calmed the storm. And then Scripture says that “they feared greatly.” They were even more afraid of who Jesus revealed Himself to be than they were of that great storm because all of a sudden their eyes were opened to His power.

And here’s what Jesus asked them, and it’s an interesting question. He asked them, “Why were you afraid?”

That’s an interesting question because it’s like, “Well, isn’t it obvious why we were afraid? We were going to die! This was a bad storm. There’s water coming over the edge. Our boat is about to top. We’re going to drown, and You’re not helping bail. You’re not helping anything. You’re just all calm, and we are terrified.”

And Jesus says, “Why were you afraid?”

Because if they would have understood and recognized who was in their boat, they would have realized that fearing Him, fearing the Lord and putting their trust in Him, would have calmed their other fears.

Regardless of the outcome—we can’t control the outcome.
Regardless of the paths that we walk.
Regardless of whether my dad dies in the I.C.U.
Regardless of whether I face my marriage, doing my best to make it work, and it’s just getting worse.
Regardless of whether my prodigal child comes back tomorrow like I want him to.

Regardless of the outcome, I can trust the person riding in my boat—the Savior. I can trust Jesus. And when I fear Him, then I don’t need to be afraid of other things. Or, rather, even the fear that I feel of other things begins to be put into perspective. It just calms it. It calms the other fears.

When I am feeling afraid, it’s an invitation to go to Jesus and to say, “Jesus, You are in my boat, and I trust You. You’re the Savior who calms storms. You’re the Savior who sees us through to the other side. You’re the Savior that walks on water. You are the Savior whose word just can make everything peaceful. Please come and calm my heart today. Calm my fears. Help me fear You more than I fear this circumstance.”

Nancy: In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence. Wow! It’s so important for us to hold on to that truth from Proverbs 14. That’s what Mary Kassian has been helping us to see—the right kind of confidence.

We’ve been listening to a really great conversation between Mary Kassian and Dannah Gresh. It’s based on some themes that are found in Mary’s newest book, The Right Kind of Confident: The Remarkable Grit of a God-Fearing Woman.

I said it earlier this week, and I want to say it again: In this day of such confusion and disbelief and opposition to the ways of God, we need an army of God-fearing women who have that remarkable grit, women who are the right kind of confident.

Mary will be back in just a moment to close today’s program in prayer, but first let me say that this week we’d love to send you a copy of Mary’s book. It will help you get a deeper understanding of this super-important subject. And what could be more important than learning to fear the Lord and to be confident in Him?

This book is our way of saying “thank you” when you make a donation of any amount to help support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts.

To make a donation, you can visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1–800–569–5959. Be sure and ask for Mary’s book, The Right Kind of Confident, when you get in touch with us.

Mary, as we close, I want to take a moment to just thank you for your friendship, your encouragement, your prayers, the huge blessing you’ve been to me and to Revive Our Hearts over all these years.

I’m so grateful for the joy of having coauthored a couple of books with you, True Woman 101, and True Woman 201. I know the long hours and the hard work that you’ve poured into writing books like this newest one, and my prayer is that God would use this message to strengthen the hearts of His women to give us the right kind of confidence.

Thank you for being such a friend to Revive Our Hearts and for the challenge that you and Dannah have brought to all of us through this conversation this week.

And now, Mary, I want to ask if you would pray a blessing over each listener, each person who’s heard this conversation this week, that the Lord would develop in each of us the right kind of confidence based on a healthy, holy fear of the Lord.

And as Mary prays over us, if it’s at all possible, would you just take a moment and stop what you’re doing—maybe even just pull over to the side of the road if you can, put down that project that you’re working on. Could you just stop and join us in asking God to do this good work in your heart?

Here’s Mary.

Mary: Heavenly Father, I thank You that You are our confidence, that we don’t need to put confidence in our own meager resources or abilities or fear when we don’t have the ability when we’re staring down at our inabilities.

Father, I pray for the woman listening today who is just having a bad confidence struggle. The fears and insecurities are sweeping over her like the water was sweeping into the boat of the disciples that stormy night, and she thinks she’s going under. She doesn’t think she’s going to make it. It’s just too overwhelming and too scary.

Would You remind her this moment of who is riding in her boat? Remind her that You are greater and more powerful and mightier and more beautiful and wondrous and sovereign. Remind her that when she puts her fear in You, when she puts her trust in You, that You will turn fear upside down on its head, and You’ll begin to diminish all the other fears that threaten to overwhelm her heart.

I pray that You will give her a great calm in this moment. In the mighty name of Jesus, amen.

Helping you turn your fear upside down, Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth calls you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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