Overcoming Fears

How many of you remember three-legged races?  I imagine most of us participated or watched at some point.  Do you remember being strapped to another person and trying your best to find a walking rhythm?  I remember falling a lot as that rhythm abandoned me almost every time.  Even when you found it and you started making headway, you would get overconfident and find yourself very quickly rolling on the ground with another human tied to you.

As fun as those moments were, I do not believe that we want to try and go through life like that.  However, when we hang on to our failures and our fears, that is pretty much what it looks like.  God is calling us to run the race for the high calling of being in Christ.  We try and run for Him, but find that race difficult because of the things that we have bound to us emotionally and spiritually.

We make excuses about why we cannot do what God is asking us to do.  We feel guilt and shame over our failures and then fail to step up to the call.  We allow fear to paralyze us so that when God says to move, we freeze. 

This is so common that it is almost normal in Christian life.  Here’s the thing.  God has not given us a spirit of fear!  God does not count our mistakes against us!

He is a God of forgiveness and redemption.  It is not our abilities that He seeks, but our willingness to trust Him to be all that we need. 

God does not care about yesterday. He is focused on today and tomorrow.   If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, your yesterday is covered by His blood.  In other words, you are forgiven and granted gifts and abilities by His Spirit to move forward.

He invites us to lay our fears and failures down at His altar and then trust Him to lead us into the next place.  It is an amazing feeling to be set free, and it is offered to everyone.  Will you take Him up on it, or do you want to keep running through life tied up like a three-legged race?

In Him,

Pastor Scott