Grace Bible Church
Pastor Teacher
Robert R. McLaughlin
032720
God designed us to be rational creatures, here’s is why fear makes us irrational.
The major points of wisdom and the importance of how to handle our thoughts in times of pressure, especially those thoughts from fears, worries, anxiety, panic and stress.
We are warned about the importance of following the commands that are given naturally as well as spiritually. (Even here we have EP-EO.
The Doctrine of Fear.
Point 1. Definition.
Fear is used in at least three ways in the Bible.Fear is used for a mental attitude sin, characterized by panic when in a dangerous situation as well as intimidation.
Fear is a painful emotional distress aroused by impending pain, danger, disaster, evil or by illusions regarding the same.
- The third way that fear is used in the Bible is for reverence, respect, or awe.
Fear is a Christian virtue, 1Pe 2:17 Honor all men; love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.
The meaning of the word “fear” in the Bible is determined by the context in which it is used.
It can be fear of something that is real, or something imaginable.
1JO 4:18 There is no fear in virtue-love; but mature love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not matured in love.
Fear is worry, apprehension, consternation, or horror.
Consternation, not constipation, but consternation is when a person becomes paralyzed toward their problems.
Usually they run away from the problem like a frightened horse or they close their doors and hide from society.
It’s not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Fear will do it will paralyze you.
Fear is also an active feeling of dread, of which fright and terror are the more intense degrees.
The meaning of the word “fear” in the Bible is determined by the context in which it is used.
Neglect or rejection of the mystery doctrine of the Church-age and failure to utilize its fantastic problem-solving devices result in many problems, including fear.
Fear is also lack of thinking under pressure.
We are designed by God to be rational creatures, but fear makes us irrational.
Fear is an irrational and emotional sin.
Many believers have discovered that when you face your fear, most of the time you will discover that it was not really such a big threat after all.
Fear is failure to learn and apply Bible doctrine to the problems of life, and failure to learn and utilize the problem-solving devices.
Fear is made up of a whole system of sins which include worry, anxiety, insecurity, incapability of doctrinal application, and therefore inability to use the problem-solving devices.
The word worry comes from the word “to choke”, “to strangle”, and it is an extension of fear.
If you have fear, worry, anxiety or insecurity in your life, you are sinning in those areas; Rom 14:23.
Rom 14:23b “whatever is not from faith is sin.”
Fear includes all the problems of emotionalism, for fear is an emotional sin.
The Christian loser is bogged down and hindered from his advance by various categories of sins and arrogance related to fear.
PSA 56:4 In God, whose word I praise, In God I have put my trust; I shall not be afraid. What can mere man do to me?
To face your fears and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.
Fear is crippling, it shackles those who could do great things and keeps them from even attempting that which they could possibly achieve.
Fear chokes and kills dreams and creativity and the most interesting thing about fear is that it is a learned behavior.
Point 3. The Snowballing Principle of Fear.
The more things you surrender to fear, the more things you fear.
Today you may be worried about only one thing: tomorrow about two things, etc.
Soon you become so emotionally involved in fear that you have no identity.
Irrationality means loss of identity, which means the accumulation of fear until you are afraid of life.
Fear is something that, if not controlled, continues to develop in your life until you have no capacity to enjoy life and as a believer you become a loser.
PSA 53:5 “There they were in great fear where no fear had been;”
One of the motivations for becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol is fear of life, anxiety, worry, and tension.
To the extent to which you surrender to fear, the greater is your capacity for fear.
To the extent to which you surrender to fear, to that extent fear controls more and more of your life.
Increasing fear means increasing insecurity, which destroys your capacity for love, life, happiness, and blessing.
No matter how much wealth you have, or success, or prosperity, you’ll have all kinds of fears that accompany the riches and prosperity that you had no idea came along with wealth.
Where the fear is, happiness is not.
There is no way you can have true love or true happiness apart from a healthy mental attitude.
The more you increase the power of fear in your life, the greater your mind set as a loser believer and the greater your chances of failure to execute the PPOG through the mechanics of the spiritual life under equal opportunity.
The greater your chances of failure to execute the PPOG of God, the sooner you cancel your equal opportunity to glorify God.
The sooner you cancel your equal opportunity to glorify God, the sooner you live a life of total misery through the law of volitional responsibility.
Most of our problems and obstacles would melt away if, instead of shrinking in fear before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.
This is what happen to the children of Israel in when Moses told them to “stand still” and stop being afraid.
The verb to look is Qal imperfect of nasa which means that they kept staring and concentrated on Pharaoh’s army……the oncoming problem.
And by concentrating on Pharaoh’s army, the problem, they were overwhelmed by fear and they completely forgot the grace of God and the power of God and the marvelous deliverance that they had experienced.
They concentrated on the wrong thing!
They concentrated on the problem!
They not only panicked but they began to do something which all of us have been guilty of at some time “they began to whine and complain.”
If you’re complaining, you’re concentrating on the wrong thing.
We concentrate on the circumstances of pressure rather than the principles of doctrine.
We concentrate on the disaster rather than the solution.
The point is that you have to know what to concentrate on in times of pressure.
One of the main distractions in time of pressure is mentioned in verse 10, emotion which is described by the word frightened.
They had seen the power of God in their deliverance from Egypt, but they made no application from that doctrine to this disaster.
They failed to concentrate on what they had learned and allowed fear and panic to control the soul.
They had to be stabilized in their mentality or else some of them would have turned back to the Egyptians “begging to be slaves”!
You’ll live like a slave unless you learn to become stabilized under pressure.
The Jews faced extermination from the pursuing chariot army of Pharaoh.
The Lord will fight for you while you will keep your mouth shut!
1SA 17:47 “And that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not deliver by sword or by spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and He will give you into our hands.”
ROM 8:31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
That’s the whole concept of the faith rest drill.
In grace, the Lord fights our battles!
When you are afraid of a thing, you give that thing power over you.
When you’re afraid of a person, you give that person power over you.
Fear is proof of a degenerate mind.
The greater your capacity for fear, the greater your capacity for arrogance and becoming a loser.
The combination of fear and arrogance causes many people to become mentally ill, psychotic and neurotic.
The more things that acquire the power to promote fear in your life, the more punitive suffering and selfinduced misery you bring on yourself.
The more things that acquire the power of fear in your life, the greater your capacity for fragmentation and becoming a loser in the Christian life.
As a loser, your capacity for life, love, and happiness is completely destroyed.
The greater your mindset as a loser-believer while living, the greater the intensification of your fear when dying.
Arrogance and emotional domination of the soul produce cowardice.
Fear is also irrational and irresponsible.
It creates three things: the arrogance skills, the arrogance complex of sins, and the emotional complex of sins.
Fear not only removes Bible doctrine from number one priority in the life, but fear fragments and destroys the function of your spiritual life and moves you into the eight stages of reversionism.
The last three stages of reversionism destroy all previously learned Bible doctrine and hinder any use of problem-solving devices.
Last Three Stages of Reversionism;
- Blackout of the soul.
- Scar tissue of the soul.
- Reverse process reversionism.
Fear is a key that unlocks many doors, starting with the door of arrogance — such as living in fear that you are losing your love to someone else.
From that fear comes many manifestations of arrogance.
- Jealousy. If you’re afraid of losing someone, you become jealous when they show any favoritism toward anyone else.
- Bitterness. You become bitter toward that person because they don’t give you the affection and attention you think you deserve.
- Vindictiveness. You lie in bed thinking of how to get even with others.
- Implacability. Fear of losing blessings.
- Revenge motivation. The “I’ll get even” type of thinking because of one’s fears.
And of course, if you don’t think under normal circumstances and in prosperity, you will be filled with fear during abnormal circumstances.
Fear is the mental attitude of worry, anxiety, apprehension, trepidation, and despondency.
When you have a point of doctrine, you can say as David did when facing Goliath, “The battle is the Lord’s.”
This type of thinking overcomes the problem of fear and so releases your ability to go into action, which is exactly what David did.
For the believer who lives in a state of fear, the fear increases like a disease.
As the cancer of fear increases, that individual becomes intimidated by life.
Fear eliminates a personal sense of destiny, so that the loser believer cannot overcome emotional sins like fear, worry, anxiety, guilt, denial, projection.
Fear of death will never prevent your dying, but it will prevent your living.
Fear is being overcome by the problem, becoming enmeshed in the disaster.
A personal sense of destiny is inculcated with the solution, therefore involved in the function of the problem solving-devices for the application of doctrine to experience.
2Ti 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and a sound mind.”
Arrogance produces irrational selfdeception, which in turn spawns fear, worry, anxiety, and the unhappiness of selfinduced misery.
Many women have lost their personality identity because they wanted to feel wanted and loved but ended up merely being used.
The more you develop your capacity for unhappiness, the farther away goes your chance of having any happiness in this life.
And with loss of personality identity, you fall into a total state of fear so that you begin to retreat from any form of reality, becoming psychopathic or neurotic.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Confidence comes not from always being right but from not being afraid to be wrong.
For example, under the principle of laughter, we need to remind ourselves that the Lord created laughter for all of His creation; Joh 1:3; Col 1:16-17.
It’s interesting that one of the best passages on the power over fear actually came from one of the three stooges of Job’s pseudo-friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.