Overcoming Fear There’s a lot that people are afraid of in life. Terrorism. Heights. Spiders. Confined spaces. Public speaking. Being alone. Fear is the unpleasant, powerful, and often debilitating emotion we feel when we sense or anticipate danger. When we are in a dip, fear is not a faithful friend; it’s a ferocious foe. And for some of us, fear is the name of the pit we live in. I know. I’ve been there. I was deep in the dip of fear for a long time, and I couldn’t see a way out. As a kid, I worried about everything. By second grade, I had developed a stomach ulcer. You’d think I’d just grow out of it. But you don’t grow out of fear. Fear is a spirit. If anything, you just grow older and switch fears. For me it led to panic attacks. Chest pains. Emergency hospital visits. Stomach pains that got progressively worse, to the point where I’d be doubled over, on the ground, in the fetal position for hours. There was nothing that could bring relief. It led to something called Ulcerative Colitis dropping down to a hundred and twenty-five pounds. When I say it dominated my life, I’m saying that it controlled me. It dictated the direction of my life...for my first twenty-five years. I’m thankful to report that God healed me, and I haven’t had a pain in seventeen years. Let me tell you the key to breaking out of the dip of fear. I broke fear not by trying to get more bold. It was getting more of God’s love. Focusing on and experiencing more of God’s love. Fear cannot stay where God’s love resides. I began to focus on the love of God. Sing songs about His love. Read scriptures about His love. And after a while that spirit of fear broke off my life and it can break off of yours too. Depression and fear do not have to be a life sentence. You can climb out of the dip of fear and walk in God’s freedom.

What God Wants Us to Hear the Most You aren’t the mistakes you’ve made. You aren’t the labels that have been put on you. And you aren’t the lies the Enemy has tried to sell you. You are who God says you are. You are a child of God. You are the apple of God’s eye. You are sought after. You are more than a conqueror. You are a new creation in Christ. You are the righteousness of Christ. All our identity issues are fundamental misunderstandings of who God is. Guilt issues are a misunderstanding of God’s grace. Control issues are a misunderstanding of God’s sovereignty. Anger issues are a misunderstanding of God’s mercy. Pride issues are a misunderstanding of God’s greatness. Trust issues are a misunderstanding of God’s goodness. If you struggle with any of those issues, it’s time to let God be the loudest voice in your life! God doesn’t love us because of who we are. God loves us because of who He is. When we succeed, God says, “I love you.” When we fail, God says, “I love you.” When we have faith, God says, “I love you.” When we doubt, God says, “I love you.” Love is His answer to everything. Why? Because He is love. There is nothing you can do to make Him love you any more or any less. God loves you perfectly. He loves you eternally. God wants us to hear what He’s saying, and we must heed His voice. But much more than that, He wants us to hear His heart. So He whispers softer and softer so that we have to get closer and closer. And when we finally get close enough, He envelops us in His arms and tells us that He loves us. We’ve been deafened by the voice of conformity, the voice of criticism, and the voice of condemnation, and the side effects include loneliness, shame, and anxiety. The good news? You not only bear God’s image but you know His voice. It’s His voice that knit you together in your mother’s womb. It’s His voice that ordained all your days before one of them came to be. It’s His voice that began a good work and His voice that will carry it to completion. Where is God leading you? How is God talking to you? If you can’t hear His voice, consider spending more time in His Word on a regular basis

We Love Because He First Loved Us 1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us. The most perplexing thing about God is not that He is omniscient, omnipresent or omnipotent. Since He is God, these virtues are somehow given or expected. Otherwise, He wouldn’t be known as God. The thing that is the hardest to comprehend is that though He is so powerful and almighty, He is also love! Through the tainted lenses of how we see our world, power and love don’t seem to jive. You cannot be powerful and loving at the same time. You must be either one. But our God is both. The extent of His love is fully expressed in the father’s unconditional love. Therefore, as children of God, we love because love comes from God. And we can love because He first loved us. Knowing this helps us understand that this love does not originate from us. It is not something birthed out of a desire within us, rather it is a new revelation of where this love comes from. Now that we know where this love comes from, we have a new responsibility. Because no one has seen God, loving people can become a way for people to see God, through us. So when we choose to love, others will see and experience God through us, knowing that God is living in us, and His love is made complete in us. Loving others is not an emotional decision. Rather, it is a spiritually convicted decision. It is now our duty of care as followers of Christ to show others this dimension of love. Remember, we love because He first loved us! Reflection: This love that we now have is one birthed out of the revelation of who God is. Armed with this truth, who do you want to love and how do you plan on doing that? Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. 1 John 4:7‭-‬21 NIV

Madly In Love Think of the times when you get mad; when your toddler’s food is all over the floor; when someone stubbornly makes his mind up and refuses to hear you out; or when you have to hold your anger because you know whatever comes out from your mouth will not be pleasant. That’s us. But God’s anger is different from our anger. He is slow to anger. In other words, He is patient with us. However, He does get mad. There was a moment when he walked out from silence and stopped the slavery of his own people. God sent Moses to confront Pharaoh, but Pharaoh refused to listen. In the end, Pharaoh rode out with his chariots to destroy the Israelites, only for God to destroy him in the water. God’s love is displayed in his anger towards Pharaoh. I am sure we do not want to get on the wrong side of God. His wrath is directed towards sin and how sin hurts his people. His anger flows out of His love. It is like your parents getting mad when you run out into the street with oncoming traffic. The opposite of love is not anger, but indifference. The love of the father is seen in his strong emotion. Instead of lashing out in anger, the father ran towards the prodigal son and embraced him. He waited patiently for his son to come home even though his son was a mess. If you think you’re a letdown, always remember – He is slow to anger. He is slow to be mad at you. You only have to choose to go home. Romans 2:4 (NLT) Don’t you see how wonderfully kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? Does this mean nothing to you? Can’t you see that his kindness is intended to turn you from your sin? Reflection: How has God been patient with you?

Faithfulness Through Failures Most romantic movies portray the story of young love. It creates the perfect scene where two individuals fall in love. It goes back and forth from when they fell in love, then fast forwards to the scene where they are old with kids, displaying love in its most mature stage. The trouble with this is that it only shows the beginning and the end of a romance. Everyone can experience young passionate love but not everyone can experience love that is fully grown. It is in the middle that love fights the hardest! In the process, it matures. This keeps the relationship together during difficult times. Faithfulness towards each other is bred through such challenges. God remains faithful even when humans are unfaithful. He is constantly rejected like a faithful husband of a wife who hasn't come home. He knows what she is up to. And He constantly grieves like a dad looking through an old picture of his son, remembering what it was like before his son cut himself off from the family. God never forces us back to him, yet he still lives up to His end of the bargain. He loves us the way we are, but He cares too much to leave us in a sinful state. He created us in love and His love continually reaches out to us - calling us and inviting us to stay within His love. ​​Hosea 6:6-7 (CEB) I desire faithful love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God instead of entirely burned offerings. But like Adam they broke the covenant; then they acted in bad faith against me. The issue is that we fall in love as often as we fall out of love. Because of that, we’ve not experienced love that is fully grown. When someone is faithful, you can have faith in that person. When you have faith in that person, you move towards him. God has been faithful to you, therefore you can confidently move towards Him! Reflection: Have you been unfaithful in your walk with God? What inspires you to come back to Him?

Thinking About Thinking Learning to capture our thoughts matters. Because how we think shapes how we live. Lies such as I’m helpless, I’m worthless, I’m unlovable, shape our thinking, our emotions, and the way we respond to the world around us. They trap us in their cycle of distraction and distortion and pain, preventing us from recognizing the truth we should believe. Most detrimentally, they change how we view God. Every lie we buy into about ourselves is rooted in what we believe about God. Let’s say I tend to feel worthless and invisible. And let’s say I read Ephesians 1 and learn that God because He deeply loves me, chooses me and adopts me. Even if I don’t overtly deny the validity of that premise, I still doubt it is true for me. I nod at the truth, but I never fully absorb it and let it shape my identity. Then let’s say I am married to a spouse who is typically distracted with work. I don’t feel seen in our marriage, which confirms my deep-seated fear that I am indeed worthless and invisible. So even in the most inconsequential of arguments with my husband, I feel anxious and start to spin every time he’s short with me. I can’t see all that he has on his shoulders, I can’t empathize with his stresses, and my needs exceed his ability to ever meet them. Before long we are fighting constantly, and we don’t even know why. My husband now has become the enemy in my mind and can’t ever seem to say what I need to hear or be whom I need him to be. And the spiral of my thoughts has now invaded my relationships and robbed me of joy and peace. Until I throw off the lie that God’s love isn’t for me, my emotions, decisions, behaviors, and relationships will remain twisted up in the mistaken belief that I’m worthless. When we begin to think about our thoughts, perhaps for the first time, we can stop the downward spiral. We can reset and redirect them. That’s our hope. Not that we would wrestle each and every fear, but that we would allow God to take up so much space in our thinking that our fears will shrink in comparison. Lord, I want You and Your truths to reign in my mind! Amen.

God’s love for us is not based on our performance, but it is reserved for those of us who have been adopted into His family through faith in Jesus Christ. even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us, having predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, Ephesians 1:4-5