Living Fearless
We’re in a climate where people are truly down and discouraged.
It feels like we're all in a pit and we don't know why. We don't know how to get out of it either. And so, I'm prayerful that this would be a season where we follow God together and want to run the races that God has for us again.
It saddens me that so many people feel like they're on the side of the road right now when I believe these are the most important days to be alive.
One lesson we’ve learned through all this is how quickly we can lose it all and how quickly everything can change. We're different in ways that we can't truly see or understand now.
We need to deeply think about how we want to live. Are we going to live shut down by fear? Are we going to be afraid of the next bad thing that'll happen? That's a miserable way to live, and we don't have to live that way as believers.
We don't have to be shut down by every fear that comes our way.
We know that the enemy is scheming against us. Granted, not everything bad that happens to us is the devil. There's a lot about life that is just hard and a lot about us that's sinful. However, if the enemy is scheming against us, it's important to step back and figure out what those schemes are.
The enemy is still making us all believe things that are causing paralysis, division, and fear in the church. I want to see us living with reckless abandon, and that takes fearlessness. That takes us obeying God’s will in all areas of our lives.
There's just a lot of darkness, doubt, and fear in the world. This is because most people don’t believe in and know God. We are filling our minds with negativity until the fear is growing and our view of God is shrinking. But it’s the fear that needs to shrink. What God is leading you to do will be clear to you if you're not afraid. It gets confusing, vague, and fearful when we are constantly listening to fearful messages.
We've got to fight back and know that we don't have to be discouraged. It's actually not hopeless. It’s an ideal time for the church to rise and make a difference. Yes, there is brokenness and division in the church, but the church is just people. If you look at all the division in the church or hurt that the church is causing, it's just people that are dealing with their business.
We need to be healthy, whole people.
As we do the work in our lives to be healthy, whole, and right with God and other people, we get to be unleashed to reconcile. However, it's hard to play our roles in the world if we're completely consumed with anger, hurt, or fear. If we're just shut down in fear, then we're not going to get healthy. We'll not get whole, so we can't help anybody else be healthy.
Through discipleship, we can run the race that God set before us, not the one we want to run.
We can throw off the sin and burden that so easily entangle us, and we fix our eyes on Jesus. All my life, I always thought that would happen in a specific order. I’ve since realized that it's all happening at the same time.
As we run our races and fix our eyes on Jesus, the sin and burden go away. And so, a huge part of us living into wholeness, health, freedom, and the identity God has given us as His children is to run our race.
Paul says, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.” There was this fearlessness, even about death for him. He decided to live surrendered and for the glory of God. And something about living into that story also unleashes and unlocks the race that you were built to run.
Many people are stuck in fear because they’re focused on what’s only the first step to God’s gifts for us.
When you get fixated on your fear, you become stuck in one place when God has a whole adventure for you. So, don't overanalyze things to the point where you are completely shut down over a small thing in light of eternity. We are losing perspective and are focused on all the wrong things. As a result, we are living afraid.
God tells us not to be afraid. He knows we will be, and He's got grace for that. But there is a story that He is inviting us to. There's a day that He has planned for us, but we are missing all of it because we are so afraid of something bad happening.
Listening to Jamie Winship’s interview this summer made me want to not miss what God has for me. It made me not want to sacrifice the story that God is building for me to protect myself, to be comfortable, or for life to be easy.
I want what He wants for me, and I don't want to miss a single minute of it.
And I hope you feel the same way.
