POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON - Nothing to Fear
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It is good to know as spiritual people that God never tricks us, but instead always treats us to better than expected results. Better than anticipated answers to prayer.
With an awareness of God with us, there is never anything to fear.
Most fears in life are pretend fears.
Fear in life is the darkroom where negatives are developed.
Marie Curie said, rightly, “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
An elementary school teacher, in California, was trying to help her children deal with their fears after a big earthquake. She had them draw pictures portraying their impressions or feelings. Most showed scenes of destruction. But one youngster’s picture was puzzling. It showed pointed objects sticking up above blue water. Asked to explain, the little girl said, “Oh, those are the after-sharks.” When you are afraid, the water is filled with “after-sharks.”
One woman said, “I dread going to the dentist. Once, to ease my tension, I listed my middle name as ‘Wimp.'” The receptionist read it, laughed and assured me that many patients felt the same way.
Half an hour later, the receptionist came into the waiting room. Looking directly at me, she said, smiling, “The doctor will now see the wimp.” Three other people got up with me.
Do you remember yourself as a child around this time of year?
Many people in this room are baby boomers.
There are many wonderful childhood memories we all have.
One 65-year-old man said*, “I will never forget my childhood bedtime ritual in the 1950’s.”
“Every night I would climb the stairs and go down the hallway to my bedroom.
Now, usually, I had to do this with my parents, because I just knew something lived under the bed; something lived in the closet. And it was there, waiting to get me. I was an only child, so every night, we’d go through the same thing. We would check all the rooms and make sure this monster did not come and attack me at night. We would check under the bed and in the closet. And after we had gone through this ritual that lasted as long as it possibly could, I asked my parents to leave the light on in the hallway. Eventually, after calling downstairs several more times for some excuse to get my parents up to my room again, I would finally fall asleep.
“Morning would come and it was like a victory, because I had made it through the night. The monster did not get me. I ran down those stairs, stepped on the old brown carpeting with my pajamas that had feet in them. My pajamas would always have some sort of animal on the feet, so when I walked, it looked like two animals were going along in my old cotton pajamas. This is the way it was in Ohio, at that time, with children.
“I would go downstairs and sit in front of this big, blonde-wood Motorola television set. It was about as big as this lectern, and it had a screen about as big as one of your hymnals. It would flicker while I would watch whatever there was to watch on television, during those early days of black and white TV.
“I was proud BECAUSE I MADE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT.”
In our Bible:
“A community leader came to see Zachariah, hoping to find peace of mind, and ease for his burden. The man was troubled by a repetitive dream that he did not understand.
“Zachariah, in my dream, I have traveled a long distance and am finally arriving at a great city. But, at the entrance to the city, I am met by a tall soldier who says that I must answer two questions before I am admitted. Will you help me?”
Zachariah nodded.
“The first question the soldier asks is, ‘What supports the walls of the city?'”
“That is easy,” said Jacob. “Fear supports the walls of the city.”
“But what supports the fear?” asked the man in his second question.
“The walls,” answered Jacob. “The fears we cannot climb become our walls.”
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Many times, we have gotten into situations where we would like to hide, in order TO NOT FACE OUR FEARS. Many times, we have gotten ourselves into a corner and we do not know how to get out. We, seriously, do not know, in human mind, how to get ourselves out of a fearful problem. Many times, we have gotten into situations in our personal lives, our homes, our work, our business, our career, where it appears in our eyes, like a ghost house.
It is good, that we, as humans, can have a time of conquering our base fears.
First, we can have an event in your life that scares you.
What is that? It could be a change. There is an unknown ahead of you and you do not know how to get across the bridge to where you want to go. Or it could be that you are alone? You feel alone. You feel separated from God and from other people, and you do not know how to get back into the flow again, you are in a experience and you’re filled with fear.
GOD IS WITH YOU, HELPING YOU TO GET THROUGH YOUR YOUR NIGHT!
Second, fear goes into Thanksgiving. That is when we realize, again, that God is here and God is with us.
Then, third, we go to a new birth.
Never walk alone, accept the help that is available directly to you from God and Jesus Christ.
If the fear you are dealing with today is allowed to proceed to the realization of God in your own spiritual thanksgiving, you will have new birth. You will have a new life. You will get beyond your fear. You will get beyond where you are today, and you will have a whole new experience of being, that will be better than anything you have ever dealt with.
You may wonder how you are going to get past your fear. Well, let us talk about that.
Go to God in prayer, and ask for the help. Realize you are not doing it alone. Then, while you are in the experience, you will be so thankful because you will realize you are not doing it alone, then, you have a new spiritual birth.
In that new birth, you can go beyond anywhere you thought you could go every time with God’s help.
Some people prefer to stay in the fear experience of their lives. You may know people who stayed in their fears. They opt for that; it is their choice. They opt to stay in a fearful situation inside of themselves and never go beyond that. And some people even stay in the thanksgiving of the past, where they are thankful ONLY for things of the past. They can see that clearly, but they cannot seem to be thankful for today, the present.
It is those people who go beyond, who go from the fear, to God, to the new birth of awareness of God protection who are TOTALLY ALIVE.
For many people, if they see two holes in the ground and one hole is filled with snakes and the other hole is dark, they will jump in the hole that is filled with snakes, because, at least, they know what to expect. It’s true. It is sad. It is human nature. If you are this way in ANY area of your life, realize this is time to ask God for help.
You can go beyond fears with God’s help, to courage, strength, and protection. You can jump in the other hole called unknown and you can know it’s going to be okay because God is with you.
As we move, we are all moving into the unknown future. We will not have fear of the unknown if we know that God is going ahead of us, and preparing the good that will await us there. No longer will we build the bridge before we see the creek. We won’t try to say, “Oh, I’m going to hit this obstacle and I need this kind of bridge,” and all of a sudden, we’ve constructed a bridge in our minds, that is like the Golden Gate Bridge – over a creek. We have no need for a bridge of that type or magnitude. Possibly, we could just wade across the creek.
My scripture today is from Luke 11:14. I want to share it with you because it talks about getting rid of the scary things that are inside of you and me.
“Now Jesus was casting out a demon that was mute.”
Imagine, for a minute, that I am Jesus and you have a demon inside of you. That demon could be a lot of things, MAYBE a bad habit, a sickness, a feeling that you cannot accomplish what you need to do, a feeling that nobody loves you.
“When the demon had gone out, the one who had been mute, spoke, and the crowds were amazed.
But some of them said, ‘He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.’ Others, to test him, kept demanding from him a sign from heaven. But he knew what they were thinking and said to them, ‘every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls on house. If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?'”
The word Satan, in first century Christianity means “inner tester.” Let us say someone has a serious alcohol problem. It is tearing his life apart. What Jesus is saying is this person can’t go into a bar, get a drink with a friend of his, who has a problem just as bad as his, and talk together and get rid of their habit? No. Satan cannot cast out Satan. It can’t happen.
Jesus said, “Now, if I cast out the demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your exorcists cast them out? Therefore, they will be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.
When a strong man, fully armed, guards his castle, his property is safe. But when one stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his plunder. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”
What Jesus is saying here is that we need to go from our personal Halloweens to an experience of God and have true new birth in awareness.
If I have a fear inside of me, I can’t get rid of that fear with another fear.
I have to get rid of it WITH God.
I can say, “By the authority of God with me, RIGHT NOW, through the power of the spoken word, I’m NOT going to have this fear in my life, anymore. I refuse it. I evict you from my thinking by the authority of God.”
I then solve my problem from a higher level of mind than I created it. I wipe out the fear that is inside of me by a higher level of spiritual faith than that which was in me when I created the fear. It works every time. I go from my inner, imagined fears to safety of the real God in thanksgiving. I realize something has happened and I have new birth of conscious awareness.
All of us have been, or are right now, or will someday be, in something that we consider “a hellish experience.”
But it is how we deal with an experience more than the experience itself that is important.
Acknowledge in that moment, while you’re there, or as soon as possible, you can gather in all your thoughts and acknowledge God. Otherwise, you are scattered to the winds and are defenseless.
We accept the leading of God to the NEW life in God.
We Overcome.
Daily worship in the spiritual cathedral inside of you.
There comes a time when I have to empty out myself and all that baggage I have packed for so many years, and accept a new infilling of God-strength.
I enter into a new consciousness. I jump into new belief with great vigor.
It is natural for you to be healthy. It is natural for you to have well-being. It is natural for you to have a foundation of spirituality when you are going through the scary things of life. It is natural for you to have joy and a smile on your face. This he is your own personal gift of God given to you as your birthright. Anything else is unnatural.
God bless you!
PRAYER / MEDITATION____________________________
I invite you to join me in a special prayer time, that all of the world’s populations will have the privilege of joining in – a prayer that knows God IS WITH US right now.
Join me in a prayer that realizes that God is not far off, but right here, present, with us, and inside of us.
Prepare with a moment of silence in prayer …
Dear God, You are with me, surrounding me this moment. I come to You, and lay before You, on the altar of my being, the fears that are present in my mind; my beliefs that are in error about myself – about who I am, and about what I can become.
I come today to realize, with Your mind, working through mine, that I am more than just flesh and bones. God, today I consent to a spiritual infilling of Your Whole Spirit.
I consent to a feeling of well-being.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
Dear God, I know I have the potential to become more than my present human fears.
But in order to do so, I have to empty myself. Therefore, in this moment, I am here to empty myself. I am emptying myself now of all fear and all anger inside of me. I ask that any anger that may have been held for years, stored in compartments of my mind, that I am not even aware of, can be emptied now – spiritually cleaned out, refreshed, renewed, revitalized, and regenerated by You, dear, wonderful God.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
The presence of God is with me NOW. The presence of God is causing a quickening in my mind and body. The presence of God is working gently, evenly, continuously, effortlessly throughout my being and my life.
Dear God, I give you – me, my life, all the little details I am involved in. I have been in a maze, but now I see.
Now, in the silence of prayer, I straighten out that maze and make my crooked ways straight.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
There is a peace inside of me. It’s only the beginning, but it is growing; it is inside of me.
There is a well-being that is created by God, the Creator, inside of me. There is a harmony that is in perfect balance inside of me and through me, touching my life. It is happening now. Every thought inside of my mind is under the dominion of God’s perfect Divine mind.
I say, thank You God.
In the name and through the power of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
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