A Liberating Truth About Fear

“Fear has very few gradations and it has a ceiling... This is why we’re able to teach ourselves to confidently give a speech to 10,000 or make life or death decisions in the battlefield. Fear is fear, and once we learn to work with it, we can scale the stakes.”

—Seth Godin

Fear can literally be smashed by a persistent, never say die, attitude. When we refuse fear the power it insistently foists over us, we learn we can overcome it.

And all of the above is proven by the fact that we experience fear without scale. Fear is fear and it matters little the actual fright before us. We experience fear to a similar level despite the scariness of our situation. There are relatively few exceptions to this.

We can teach ourselves to endure the fear, and therefore overcome it.

When Fear Cannot Overcome Us

This is the realisation of the Gospel way. When we understand what Jesus is saying, that he has already overcome the world—i.e. all stimuli for fear—in John 16:33, we comprehend that, with fear, we have both the reason and need to overcome.

If there was no presence of fear there would be no need of courage to combat the fear.

So the presence of fear means that God gives us overcoming power. And when we test this power, finding it true, we find that fear cannot overcome us, unless we let it.

But overcoming fear is not attacking it, but subsuming it by working with it; we accept it, don’t judge it, but work with it.

Even when there is evidence that fear is affecting us it cannot overcome us unless we give into it. We already have the victory by virtue of the fact we are there battling through the fear. When we feel such fear, yet we go on stoically and undeterred, not cowered down, demoralised, nor denying the reality, we refuse to be overcome or intimidated by this evil present before us.

When we can conceive of the fact that fear cannot overcome us we understand the basis of victory.

Wherever we have experienced fear and have not been overcome God has affirmed us as capable of resisting all the evil that Satan, through our limited flesh, might throw at us.

Just about every reason for feeling hopeless in life is challenged when we understand this truth: fear cannot overcome us beyond our minds. The battleground for courage begins in the mind and is steadied by the heart.

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Fear is overcome by this simple truth: where we go on past the fear, working with it in our persistence, we learn we can do anything life throws at us.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.