Win the Battle with Fear

Dannah Gresh: Do you struggle with fear? Here’s Mary Kassian.

Mary Kassian: Fear is a daunting enemy, and it is a tough beast to tame! Let me say that differently: Satan is a daunting enemy, and without God’s help an impossible beast to tame! 

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for July 10, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh, along with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Choosing Gratitude.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yesterday I was talking with a young woman I had just met. She said, “I have a lot of anxiety.” Then she said, “My mother was a terribly anxious woman.” Anxiety and fear are a big problem in our world, and they affect us in so many ways. 

My dear friend Mary Kassian has talked about this a lot. If you’ve listened to Revive Our Hearts you are familiar with Mary. She spoke on this topic at our True Woman ’22 conference. Over the next two days we’re going to listen to that message she gave to help us combat fear and live confidently as we find our true identity in Christ. 

Mary Kassian: We’re actually going to talk today about something that is much more infectious than Omicron. I’m just going to bring up a slide to show all these words; these are fear words, words that are in the fear family.

So we have words like: “despair, petrified, anxious, concerned, tense, nervous, agitated.” And then there’s “freaked and horror and on edge.” Take a look at that list of words. How many of you have felt one of those emotions in the last month? How about the last week? How about the last day? How about right now!? (laughter)

You’re just feeling a little bit panicked and on edge, your mind’s going. You got that call from home and your children are telling you that your husband is not as good at looking after them as you are! (laughter)

Or you got the call from a loved one who has all the sudden gotten some unsettling news, or you’re worried about a friend who’s sick. There are all kinds of reasons. These words are all part of the extended fear family.

So I want to ask you, what kind of circumstances in your life evoke these kinds of emotions? (And you can just call them out. I’ll repeat them, so our home audience feels engaged here.) Anybody?

• Unsaved loved ones 
• Health issues
• A new job 
• A first date
• Having children (oh, yeah!) 
• A lack of control . . . feeling out of control. 

We all feel these kinds of fears and these kinds of anxieties and trepidation. 

I think that’s a common human emotion; in fact, it’s one of the most powerful human emotions. We have seen over the last few years that fear is one of the most common and most powerful of human emotions. And there are different “flavors” to it. 

Fear can be sudden and intense, or it can be persistent and dull. It can pounce on you all of a sudden unexpectedly, or it can escort you around, trying to be your best friend. It can scream at you, or it can nag. It can make you feel on edge, or it can throw you into a full blown panic attack.

Fear comes in a whole range of shapes and sizes. It is so complex and multifaceted of an emotion that there is an online power thesaurus that actually identifies no less than 3,000 words as synonyms that are kind of attached to this fear family.

I don’t know about you, but just looking at this list is enough to make me feel a little bit anxious and uneasy! Fear is a distressing emotion, and we have all felt its icy fingers put the squeeze on our heart . . . where we have felt, uh!, just upset or agitated.

I know I am always fearful about missing my plane when I have an early morning flight, so I have a hard time sleeping the night before. It’s just an agitation and a sense of, “Oh no, oh no, oh no . . . what if, what if, what if?!”

So this afternoon we’re going to talk about how Satan leverages our emotions, and very specifically, how he leverages the emotion of fear to keep us in a state of defeat and to rob us of confidence—the type of confidence that God wants us to have—and how we can fight back against this powerful emotion, because fear is a powerful foe! 

Do you remember the story of Gideon? The Lord instructed Gideon how to defeat 135,000 Midianites, and Gideon only had 300 men. It was like a real life version of the Lord of the Rings heroes facing the big hordes of enemies at The Battle of Helm's Deep (for those of you who are Tolkien fans. Woohoo!)

The danger was so daunting that the majority of Israelites just cowered and hid in caves. So Gideon was outnumbered by a ratio of 450 to 1. But when Gideon’s men stood around the perimeter of that valley and raised their torches and blew their trumpets, the mighty [Midianite] army panicked! They turned on each other, and they fled! So what defeated the Midianite army? Fear! Fear.

And then there’s the story of the Syrian rout that we find in 2 Kings chapter 7. There was a king called King Ben-Hadad. He had mustered his entire army to besiege Samaria, which was the capital city of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Historians estimate that he brought along about a quarter million warriors!—which is like a small city of warriors. But when the rumors spread throughout his camp that an alliance of Hittites and Egyptian mercenaries had come to the aid of Israel, the entire army up and fled right in the middle of the night and left everything behind!

They left their horses. They left their tents. They left all their personal belongings, donkeys, food, clothing, weapons, silver, gold . . . everything. And when some homeless people came by the next day looking for handouts, they found the whole camp abandoned! 

So what defeated the Syrian army? Fear. And the rumor that sparked the panic wasn’t even true! The Old Testament indicates that the Lord often used fear as a catalyst to compel the enemies of Israel to self-destruct. 

Massive, powerful enemies were conquered and vanquished—incapacitated—not by the power of weapons and chariots, but by the power of fear. So these great armies were not overcome by an external enemy, they were defeated by the enemy within!

It was fear—widespread fear—that ushered in the 1929 Wall Street crash and became the overriding emotional driver behind the Great Depression. Hmm, have we seen fear be the overriding emotional driver in our day and age? 

President Roosevelt recognized that the downward spiral would not end until people stopped being driven by fear. He famously instructed Americans in his Inauguration Speech in 1933, that “the only thing you have to fear is fear itself.” That’s right.

You see, fear can hold an entire nation in its grip. Indeed, fear can hold the whole entire world in its grip, as we’ve seen through COVID. So, how do we deal with this powerful emotion? I’d like you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 91.

Psalm 91 is one of the psalms that scholars lump together in a category called Psalms of Confidence. Isn’t that a great category? And this particular psalm is sometimes called The Soldier’s Psalm because it emphasizes the confidence a warrior can have in the Lord’s protection during times of battle and conflict.

This psalm provides the antidote to fear. This is one of the most beautiful and comforting passages in the whole entire Bible. I’m going to read it, Psalm 91 (and if you have your Bibles, please crack them open and you can follow along): 

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
   will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
   my God, in whom I trust.”

For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler
   and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his pinions
   and under his wings you will find refuge;
   his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.

You will not fear the terror of the night,
   nor the arrow that flies by day,
nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
   nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.

A thousand may fall at your side,
   ten thousand at your right hand,
   but it will not come near you.
You will only look with your eyes
   and see the recompense of the wicked.

Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place—
   the Most High, who is my refuge—
no evil shall be allowed to befall you,
   no plague come near your tent.

For he will command his angels concerning you
   to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
   lest you strike your foot against a stone.
You will tread on the lion and the adder;
   the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot

“Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;
   I will protect him, because he knows my name.
When he calls to me, I will answer him;
   I will be with him in trouble;
   I will rescue him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him
   and show him my salvation.” 

Isn’t that a beautiful psalm? The Confidence Psalm.

How can you win the battle with fear, how can you become a more confident woman? Well, I’m going to give you a few tips here in this workshop, a few insights that hopefully will help! And the first is that fear is your enemy.

Now, I know that that may sound like an obvious kind of statement, but I think it’s important to emphasize this. Whenever you face a battle, whenever you’re feeling anxious or afraid, whenever you’re feeling nervous about something—whether it’s a job interview or the test results from the doctor or the outcome of the treatment for a loved one, whatever situation—I think it’s important to understand that when you face battles like this you’re not just fighting against a threatening or dangerous circumstance. You’re fighting against the emotion that’s wrapped up in that circumstance.

Whenever you are fighting the circumstance, you are also fighting the fear that’s wrapped up in that circumstance. You are fighting against fear. And, arguably, the fear is often bigger than the circumstance you are fighting. Fighting the fear is the primary challenge.

Psalm 91 lists ten different circumstances, ten types of common threats and dangers. These are threats and dangers that soldiers might face on a military campaign, but they are also dangers that people commonly face in day-to-day life, whether physically or allegorically. So, let’s have a look. 

Ten Different Threats and Dangers

First, the snare of the fowler. That’s like hidden traps.
That’s when you’re blindsided by something. Have you ever been blindsided by something? Have you ever blindsided in a relationship, where it was like, “Whoa! Where did that come from!?” Or blindsided by a circumstance that you weren’t expecting; something bad happened that you did not see on your radar? I mean, who had COVID on their Bingo cards? Not me. Hidden traps, blindsided.

Second, deadly pestilence. So, life-threatening diseases.
That was part of the fear of COVID: “You’re going to die! You’re all gonna die if you catch this!” It’s life-threatening. And there are times when we hear news that is not good news: the “cancer” word, or “You only have so-and-so long to live,” or “This is terminal, we can’t do anything about it.” Life-threatening diseases.

Third, the terror of the night.
Why is it that nighttime is the time that your head starts running and your thoughts start going? You wake up, and you have nighttime anxieties and attacks.

During the day you’re able to manage everything, and you just do what you need to do and you keep going. But then, when night comes, sleep leaves you. You end up just in a pile of anxiety or worry. You have to get up and take your Sleepy Time Tea or whatever it is that you take to try and get back to sleep.

Fourth, the arrow that flies by day, which is overt attacks of the enemy, when it’s obviously an enemy attacking you overtly.

Fifth, pestilence that stalks in the darkness. So that’s actually the category of pandemics and plagues and natural disasters, things that happen in the natural world.

Sixth, destruction that wastes at noonday. And that’s ongoing cumulative injury or ruin. So it’s piling up, it’s getting harder, the fear is getting bigger. 

Seventh, a thousand fall at your side. That’s tragedies experienced by those in your community. Maybe everybody’s losing their job and you’re wondering, Am I next?

Eighth, the plague that comes near your tent. So that’s something bad that happens to a loved one.

Ninth, you strike your foot against a stone. You have physical accidents or injury; you have a car accident.

Tenth, a lion or adder or serpent. And that is satanic spiritual attack. 

And that’s not an exhaustive list, but the point of this psalm is to help God’s people be confident and not fearful when facing tough situations—any kind of situation that’s tough—whether it’s needing to go and talk to someone where the relationship is strained or whether it’s going into that interview and you’re fighting against your own securities and fears of, “Oh, no. What if I don’t get this job?” or “Oh, no. What’s going to happen with my kids?” or “Is my prodigal ever going to come back?” 

So verse 5 is the key and it’s the point of the entire psalm. If you’re in the habit of making small notes in the margin of your Bible, you may want to circle that or put an arrow to it or a star. “You will not fear . . .” That’s the whole point of this psalm.

Whether you’ve been blindsided by something and feel caught in a trap, whether you’re facing a life-threatening disease, whether you’re being tormented with nighttime attacks or anxieties, whether you’re being bad-mouthed, attacked, and slandered, whether you’re in the midst of a pandemic, when you’re watching things go from bad to worse, whether businesses all around you are failing, when the price of gas is going up, when you don’t know how you are going to make ends meet and there are more expenses this month than money, whether something bad has happened to your child, whether you’re sidelined by an injury, whether you are under Satanic spiritual attack, regardless of the situation—big or small—“you will not fear.” That’s what the passage focuses upon.

And the Bible has a lot to say about fear and anxiety. There are hundreds of verses that command God’s people to, “Fear not.” And I think the reason the Lord spends so much time reassuring us that we don’t need to fear is because Satan spends so much time stoking our fears!

What is fear? Well, at root, fear is an emotion that is based on a comparison of relative strength. It’s an emotion that comes when I’m comparing myself to something and I see that it’s stronger than me. I feel fear when I’m overwhelmed by an awareness that I don’t measure up. That thing that I am facing has more capacity, more authority, more clout, more might.

So when I’m in a state of fear, I view it as extremely big and me, myself, and my capacity as extremely small.

• So I feel fear when I perceive that the threat is bigger than my ability to stop it.
• The problem is bigger than my ability to solve it.
• The situation is bigger than my ability to deal with it.
• The pain is bigger than my ability to bear it.
• The loss is bigger than my ability to recover from it.
• The expectation is bigger than my ability to live up to it.
• The demand is bigger than my ability to fill it.
• The force is bigger than my ability to match it.
• The power is bigger than my ability to control it.

And I feel scared! 

Do you agree that that’s the primary underlying issue when we’re feeling fearful, when we’re feeling that emotion that we all feel—an everyday part of the fear family. It’s an emotion that we feel when we feel we don’t have enough, we don’t have what it takes.

We feel fear when we’re faced with something that is out of our control and threatens to harm us, whether it endangers our physical or our emotional or our psychological well-being, and whether that threat is real or imagined.

So what do you fear? What keeps you up at night with worry? What stresses you out? Think about for a moment. Maybe jot it down if you’re taking notes. Maybe you fear for your health or your safety or your job, your marriage, your kids.

Maybe you’re anxious about something that’s going on in your kids’ school or at church or in your community or your city. Maybe your fear is more general in nature, like the fear of failure or the fear of rejection or the fear of intimacy or the fear of commitment or the fear of something bad happening in the future.

 

Fear is one of the biggest problems in the world, and do you know what ladies? It takes an enormous toll on our well-being. You know this. It takes an enormous toll on our bodies. It can cause headaches, muscle tension, chest pain, fatigue, stomach problems, sleep problems, heart problems, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, a depressed immune system, skin breakouts, rashes. Do you know that over forty percent of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress? Stress is linked to heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver. 

It’s been estimated that up to ninety percent of all visits to physicians—to doctors, primary care physicians—are for stress-related problems. Isn’t that astonishing? And then there’s the toll that fear takes on our minds.

The impact of fear on the human brain is very powerful. It completely changes the way that we process information. When people are frightened, the parts of the brain that are responsible for thinking step into the background and the emotion steps into the foreground.

Fear clouds our brain so we can’t think straight; we become irrational. Our view of reality becomes distorted. We lose the ability to think logically and critically. We lose the ability to objectively analyze a situation and come to a sound, reasonable conclusion.

Fear also takes a terrible toll on our emotions. Besides the anxious feelings, we experience a whole host of other feelings like: helplessness and hopelessness and apathy or impatience or frustration, anger or a lack of kindness and empathy.

Fear causes mental health issues. It’s not the only reason; it is one. It’s a well-known fact that fear is a close companion to depression. Antidepressant use has soared by about 400 percent in the last few decades. 

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, prescriptions for antidepressant, anti-anxiety, and anti-insomnia medications jumped by twenty-one percent in just one month! People have become increasingly stressed and increasingly depressed in our society. 

And millennials—those between the ages of eighteen to thirty-three—are more stressed than any other generation. I want to read you how one journalist (it was a woman in this age bracket) described her battle with anxiety. She said, 

There’s no break from the feelings of fear and worry! As these feelings linger, they grow, and then morph into hopelessness and depression. The constant thoughts seep into your mind, invading your thoughts and chasing away any type of peace.

Once its claws are locked into the mind, it does not let go! It dictates your thoughts and haunts your dreams! You try to correct these thoughts and feelings, but anxiety is a tough beast to tame. It’s a silent monster sabotaging your mind, and no matter how hard you fight, it does not let go!

Have any of you felt like that? Your struggle with your head games going on, your fearfulness, your anxiety. Well, you know what? Fear is a daunting enemy, and it is a tough beast to tame! Let me say that differently: Satan is a daunting enemy, and without God’s help an impossible beast to tame! 

The Bible tells us that he prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour! “Ho! There’s someone there. Let me just stab her with a little bit of fear!” Now, it’s natural to feel scared when we’re facing threats and dangers, but Psalm 91:5 stresses that, “You will not fear!” Now, how is that even possible?

So the second thing that you need to know to win the battle with fear is that: fear is your friend. Fear is actually your friend, not just your enemy! Our modern-day concept of fear is quite one-dimensional. We view fear as a scary feeling that something bad is going to happen and that we’re going to get hurt.

That’s virtually how all dictionaries—all modern dictionaries—define fear. But the Bible has a much, much broader definition of fear. It indicates that fear can also be a good thing. Indeed, there is a type of fear that is our enemy, but there is another type of fear that is our friend.

There are three types of fear that the Bible talks about. Apprehensive fear is the scary type that we’re all familiar with. There’s a second type of fear, it’s respectful fear. Respectful fear means being respectful or deferential toward someone or something that has a greater power or position. I fear when I’m careful to interact with the greater power in an appropriate way.

My dad was a construction superintendent, but at heart he was a carpenter. That’s what he was trained as in Germany. He taught all of us kids—all my brothers and me—in the garage how to handle power tools! 

So, I’m pretty good with a power saw! I am the most happy when I open up my Christmas present and it has an electrical cord and lots of power attached to it to cut or destroy or crush or do something in order to build! 

I fear my power tools: my table saw and my power saw, I fear them. But that doesn’t mean that I’m afraid of them and I don’t interact with them. It means I have a healthy respect for their power. So I’m really careful to interact with them in the right way. I wear the safety goggles. I am respectful of the power that that object wields!

Scripture indicates that this is a type of fear category. We are told in Scripture to fear rulers; we’re told to fear governing authorities and law enforcement. We are told to fear rules and regulations. Children are told to fear their parents; servants are told to fear their masters. The young are to fear the old. Congregants are to fear their pastors, and wives are to fear their husbands.

Now, this is a whole different category of fear. Wives, if you are afraid of your husband—afraid!—the type of trepidation fear, that’s not good. And if your husband is hurting you, you need to seek out help! This is not the kind of fear that the Bible is talking about.

This is a healthy respect. This relationship or this person or this thing—the rules, the parents, the authorities—they’re there for my benefit and I need to have a healthy respect to interact with that in a respectful manner. So that’s a second fear category. 

Respectful fear is different than apprehensive fear. Apprehensive fear anticipates being harmed; respectful fear generally doesn’t. It understands that the possibility of harm is mitigated by an exercise of proper respect. 

The third category of fear is reverent fear. Now, reverence is the feeling or attitude of deep respect and veneration. It’s like holding someone or something in such high esteem that you have elevated it to god-like status in your life.

Jesus informed His friends, “I tell you, friends, do not fear those who kill the body, but after that have nothing more that they can do, but I will warn you”—listen to this language—“I will warn you who to fear. Fear him whom, after he has killed, has the authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him” (see Matt. 10:28).

Who is He talking about? God the Father, yes. Now, do you think He was telling us to be afraid of God the Father? No . . . well, not really. But He’s telling us to view God as so big and so powerful that we have this respectful attitude that goes even beyond respect to reverence! 

So remember that fear is based on a comparison of relative strength. I compare myself to something and see that it is stronger than me. It is big, and I am small. Fear is a strong or overwhelming sense that someone or something is greater than I am and that it exerts a force beyond my control. It has more authority, it has more capacity, it has more clout, it has more might.

Nancy: Mary Kassian has been explaining the three different types of fear we find in the Bible. This was the first part of her message from a session at True Woman ’22. As she’s taken us through the different kinds of fear, she’s also been showing us the impact fear has on us physically, mentally, and emotionally.

She writes about this in her book call The Right Kind of Confident: The Remarkable Grit of a God-Fearing Woman. It's a great book, and you can find a link to it in today's transcript. In that book she develops further this the way we fight back against the lies of the enemy is by grounded ourselves, counseling our hearts in the truth of Christ.

Dannah: That’s right, Nancy. When we don’t know who we are in Jesus, that opens us up to a lot of confusion, heartache, dissatisfaction, and so much more. All this month at Revive Our Hearts, we’re talking about who you are in Christ—the only identity that truly matters. 

Because when you live in Christ, whose you are is who you are. That’s really good news, right? Your support of this ministry makes it possible for us to share that truth with women all over the world as they find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Jesus. 

To show you our thanks when you give a gift of any amount this month, we’d like to send you our lovely magnetic notepad. It’s printed with a message from Nancy I think you’ll find encouraging. It's something she says often. It so comforts my heart. It reads, "Anything that makes me need God is a blessing."

To get your notepad, you can give online at ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959 and ask for that notepad. 

Tomorrow Mary will be back with part two of her message. We’re going to learn about holy fear and how it gives us the confidence we need to live as women of God. I hope you’ll be back for Revive Our Hearts.

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

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless othewise noted.

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