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Grace Outlet SDA Church

Dee Casper

There’s No Thief Like Fear

God in heaven, I thank you for this privilege to come into your presence just now in prayer.

Lord, I pray that your Holy Spirit would be in this place, that you'd minister to each of our needs, and as we address a topic that is crippling many people, Lord, I pray that you would give me wisdom, clarity, and discernment on how to best make the use of the time given.

Speak to us now, I pray, and I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

What I'd like to share with you now this morning is a message entitled, There's No Thief Like Fear.

So, the reason why I'm passionate about this topic is I do traveling ministry, so I travel quite a bit and largely invest in young people, right?

College, high school age young people, but I'll speak in churches and conferences and stuff too.

And I find that many of our people are wrestling tenaciously in the area of fear.

People are wrestling with analysis, they're wrestling with analysis paralysis when it comes to making decisions about relationships, about jobs, about other things.

We're just so afraid to do the wrong thing that we sometimes can't do anything.

So in 2 Timothy 1, verse 7, it says that, God has not given us a spirit of fear.

So that means that that fear that we're wrestling with is not something that God wanted to be in our experience, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

This is what God wants to give us, and this is what should come through His Spirit, not fear.

It robs us of the ability to love, right?

To love God and love others, and to be loved by God and others.

And it robs us of the ability to be able to think for ourselves and make sound decisions.

Fear literally alters the way that we do the essentials of life.

God doesn't want us to have an experience that looks like that.

So, fear can lead us to make bad decisions.

The people of the Gadarenes, when Jesus cast the demons out of the demoniac, there's thousands of them, and they end up going into the pigs and the pigs run off the edge of the cliff and plummet, The people from the town are so freaked out by this, when they see the power of Jesus, that they literally tell the guy, get out of here, man.

Just imagine, the Lord of glory, the savior of the world is in your town, setting people free and the response is, get out of here, man, because they were afraid, right?

Basically the entire life of King Saul from his first fall until he dies is filled with fear and bad decisions.

Elijah calls down fire from heaven and soon after this he's running for his life from the wrath of an infuriated woman.

He makes bad decisions as a result of fear.

God chases him down, thankfully, and brings him back.

So, fear can lead us to make not good decisions.

So, if God hasn't given us this spirit of fear and doesn't want us to have that type of experience, then what's the solution?

What's God wanting to do to deal with this?

I believe the answer is found in 1 John chapter 4.

It says in 1 John chapter 4, beginning of verse 16, that we have known and believed the love that God has for us.

I believe this is what God wants your experience to be.

Not just to know about it, not just to believe it, He wants us to be in experiential knowledge of His love.

God is not looking for mere academic ascension to His love.

He wants it to permeate and transform your life.

So, He says, we've known and believed the love that God has for us.

Because God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

And love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment.

Many people in our movement are horrified of the judgment, even though we believe in it.

We're horrified of the investigative judgment.

We're horrified at what's going to happen because God randomly, and in our own minds seemingly arbitrarily, is going to open a book and look at me in that moment and decide, do I like them, do I not like them?

That's actually not the way the judgment works.

The way the judgment works is that God opens the book of life and He looks to see what decision you have made.

He's not thinking about what He's going to do.

So then we should be finding something that would motivate us to make good decisions now.

So, He doesn't want us to have fear in the judgment, but have boldness in the day of judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world.

He continues in verse 18, There is how much fear in love?

There is no fear in love, but what does perfect love do?

When we encounter the perfect love of God, it literally purges fear from the soul.

We're afraid of getting hurt, and this specifically is referring to an end time judgment in that sense.

But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.

They've not had that experience that God would like for them to have in a full sense.

That doesn't mean they don't have a love for God in their hearts, but God wants to continue to lavish His love upon them, to set them free from the stronghold of fear.

And so what is it then that leads us to have love for God?

This is from a commentary in the Old Testament called from Eternity Past.

Paul says in Romans 8 that we're literally adopted into the family, right?

We were in a foreign condition, we've not lived in harmony with the principles of heaven, and yet God in His great mercy pursues us, loves us, and when we say yes to Jesus in that moment, we're adopted into the royal family.

We become joint heirs with Christ because of the goodness of God and Thousands would turn with content from selfish aims and pleasures that had hitherto engrossed them They would learn to hate sin not merely from a hope of reward or fear of punishment, but from a sense of its inherent baseness.

When we truly understand the love of God, we find the right motives for following Him.

So then love is the only pure and true power that should motivate us in our experience and in our decision-making.

And the only way to find that love is to first encounter God's love for us.

Again, we love Him because he first loved us.

So fear robs us of love for God and love for others because we're afraid of being hurt, we're afraid of being disappointed, we're afraid of being rejected or let down.

What we desperately need then is a life-course altering encounter with God's perfectly selfless love to be fully known and fully loved.

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There’s No Thief Like Fear

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