Destroy The Fear In Your Life

          

 Life was good for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  It was a true paradise until Satan slithered into their lives.  They went into hiding after they had offended their Creator.  "Then the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you?"  Its not like God didn't know where they were, it was a preparation question by which God was about to reveal himself to them.  Adam replied, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."  Adam and Eve then revealed the sin in their hearts by participating in a blame game.

            Fear can be paralyzing.  The sound of God's movement in the garden was incapacitating.  It was heart stopping.  John Haggai said, "For many, fear has grown like a tree until it over shadows them from morning till night."  Fear is probably the most destructive force of mankind.  Satan tempted Adam and Eve with the sin of pride and then the assaulted them with fear. 

            Fear is a leading health problem among Americans.  Fear and depression are like destructive twin sisters.  They can spawn ulcers, heart problems, liver and kidney disease in their wake.  Fear and worry are probably responsible for more deaths than all the wars combined.  "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)  If fear doesn't come from God it must originate with Satan.  Satan unleashes fear upon us and then he "prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour." (1 Peter 5:8)  A.W. Tozer said, "Fear is of the flesh and panic is of the Devil." 

            I am a Kentucky basketball fan and I recently enjoyed watching Kentucky plow to a national championship.  I noticed their intensity increased dramatically as they neared the end of each game they played.  I think Satan's activity is increasing dramatically as the endgame draws near.  "But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you!  He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short."  (Revelation 12:12)

            There are numerous verses in the Bible that admonish us to fear God.  "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Psalm 11:10)  There is not a single verse in the Bible that tells us to fear Satan.  When we have a reverential respect for the all-powerful God, our fear of Satan is erased like black marks on a dry erase board. 

            Fear is indelibly woven into the fabric of our culture.  We fear unemployment.  We fear poverty.  We fear an empty bank account.  We fear foreclosure.  Our anemic economy has generated a great fear that Medicare, Medicaid and our Social Security will one day be no longer available.  This spirit of fear is an evil spirit, it hounds us and torments us and it is born in hell.

            I was very discouraged when I looked at the bottom line on this year's tax return.   I owed the federal government a sizeable amount of money.  I owe money to the mortgage company but it doesn't give rise to any fear.  I owe money to the dentist, I owe money to the Medical Center but these debts stir in me no fear.  For some reason, owing money to the U.S. Government produced a dreadful fear in me.  I began to imagine people pulling up in my driveway in black limousines, jumping out in Colombo style overcoats to serve me papers with Barack Obama's name on them.  I painted a house during Spring Break to pay off our taxes and I'm relieved to say, "I don't owe the U.S. Government one red cent." 

            Ten years ago my wife and I left public schools to work in private Christian schools.  The move from public to private required we take a $20,000 to $30,000 combined pay cut.  We had no idea how we would pay our bills but we both felt strongly that God was calling us to teach in Christian schools where we could openly, daily proclaim the name of Christ.  I want to reveal, to the glory of God, that we have never missed a house payment, we have never missed a car payment and we've had more than enough food to eat since we decided to trust God for our needs.

            If God is asking you to do something but you just can't seem to crunch the numbers on it, don't be smothered by a spirit of fear.  I boldly and confidently write these words, "If you are doing the bidding of God who 'owns the cattle on a thousand hills', (Psalm 50:10) he will take care of you."

            Over a hundred years ago, while her husband was away for several weeks on a preaching assignment, Civilla Martin wrote these words: 

            "All you may need he will provide,

            God will take care of you;

            Nothing you ask will be denied,

            God will take care of you.

            No matter what may be the test,

            God will take care of you;

            Lean, weary one, upon His breast,

            God will take care of you."

            As a school teacher I really connected to a quote I read recently, "When you are going through something hard and wonder where God is, remember, the teacher is always quiet during the test." 

            We often become arrogant about the things we have accumulated over the years.  We think we have earned those things.  We have what we have because God gave those things to us.  "Every good and perfect gift comes from above." (James 1:17)

            My brother, Dennis, has been a missionary to Japan for over thirty years.  He and his wife are packing their belongings and preparing to return to the states as I write these words.  They have experienced some severe health problems that forced them into early retirement from the mission field.  God spoke to Dennis' heart when he was but a teen-ager about dedicating his life to the Japanese people.  Dennis obediently served God for all those years, depending on God and the goodwill of others to support his ministry.

            I asked him the other day, "Dennis, what are you going to do now?  Your retirement plan is not enough to sustain you.  You are still buying a house.  Your wife has a mountain of medical bills to pay.  What are you going to do?"  His reply went something like this, "Kevin, God has taken care of us for over thirty years.  Do you think he will now forget about us now?"

            Then I began to consider why my brother was called of God to the mission field and I was not.  Perhaps it was because he was able to drown out his fears with faith in a trustworthy God.  While I was fearfully quizzing my brother concerning his next move, he was resting on the promises of a loving God.  There is no need to be fearful, was it not said of the Author of the Universe, the One who cannot lie or deceive, the One who has never broken a promise, "And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus" ? (Philippians 4:9) 

Kevin Probst - Teaches History, Government and Apologetics at the high school level in Columbus Georgia.

Would Einstein Think Us Insane?

Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity was “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  We have now completed three years under the Obama administration and no one on his staff is asking, “Are you better off now than you were three years ago?”  In February of 2009 President Obama spoke on the TODAY show.  “ … If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”  2 ½  years later Obama was singing an altogether different tune.  In November of 2011 he said, “We’re going to have an America where everybody has opportunity. And that’s going to take some time…”

Under the Obama administration the national debt has grown to $15.2 trillion.  That is more than our entire national economic output.  In 2008, 67% of American youth voted for Obama.  Today, 3 million of them are unemployed.  In a few months we will see if they satisfy Einstein’s definition of insanity.

While Americans are fed a steady stream of poppycock from the press, they may be missing the most important issue.   Millions are concerned about Iran’s ability and determination to make an atomic weapon.  Newt Gingrich recently said the greatest threat to America is an EMP (Electric Magnetic Pulse) attack.  Daily we have our fear of terrorism stoked by some isolated incident that happens in a foreign city far away.  But the real threat to our national security is our own national debt.  A nation that can’t pay its bills is a nation that is making itself vulnerable to other nations posturing as our friends.  How long can our nation claim sovereignty when its purse strings are being controlled by another?

If you’ve read this far into this article you may have already forgotten the $15.2 trillion figure.  We tend to forget quickly what we can’t understand.  What is $15.2 trillion?  What is $1 trillion for that matter?  Are there a trillion grains of sugar in a wheelbarrow?  Are there a trillion grains of sand in a dump trunk?

If you gave away a million dollars every day since the birth of Jesus Christ over 2,000 years ago you would only have given away about 75% of a trillion dollars.  A trillion dollar bills stacked on top of each other would stretch 68 thousand miles.  That would be 8 trips around the world.

But our national debt is $15.2 trillion.  How can you visualize this massive about of money?  If we had 15 trillion dollars bills and began to lay them down end to end we could stretch them from the sun to the planet Saturn!  If we began paying down the principle of our debt by submitting $100 million/day it would take us 394 years to pay it off.

Hans Lippershey invented the telescope over 400 years ago.  It wasn’t long before scientist were looking into space and attempting to approximate the number of stars they were seeing.  Some claimed to see a thousand stars, others made seemingly outrageous claims of seeing be at least 10,000 stars in space.  Today we know that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy.  100 billion represents only 1% of our national debt. 

Jerry Robinson, author of Bankruptcy of Our Nation, laments the $500 billion we must pay on interest payments.  In one year we have spend more on interest payments that we have spent on the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury, Department of Labor and the Small Business Administration COMBINED!  Since 1988 our Congress has spent over $8 trillion in interest payments which is enough to buy an elite sports car for every taxpayer in America. 

So what must be done?  President Obama presented his idea to the Washington think tank, the Brookings Institution, in December of 2009.  The nation must “spend its way out of this recession.”  Now, assuming most of us are not insane, what would you do if your family was facing a bankruptcy?  If you were about to have your home foreclosed and your car repossessed, what sort of family financial plan would you formulate?  We don’t need Dave Ramsey for this one.  We would stop spending money and start saving money so we could pay down our debt.  As practical as that seems, the federal government refuses to adopt that plan.  It seems they are leaning toward insanity when they find themselves drowning in the ocean of debt and they decide diving deeper will save them.

Jesus told a parable about a wise man.  He built his house up.  His counterpart, a foolish man, built his house on sand.  The economic morass in which we find ourselves isn’t totally the fault of the present administration.  The American economy finds itself on a sandy foundation because we stacked a pile of bad economic decisions atop each other over a period of many decades.  It resulted from politicians who were more interested in building a bridge to nowhere in order to get reelected than they were about an economy they would leave to the next generation.  It’s about going deeply into debt to live high on the hog and passing that bill onto our children.

Christ never condemned the wealthy but he had a lot to say about how we are to handle money.  He taught 38 parables and 16 of those had something to do with money.  He said, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” (Matthew 6:24)  The Apostle Paul gave good advice to his younger protégé, Timothy; “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”  Christ is condemning those who love money more than they love God.  His harsh words are for those who have set up a money idol and they've relegated God to the back burner of their lives.

The dark clouds gathering on the horizon are very discouraging.  The Psalmist gave a warning for all those who ignore God; “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.”  (Psalm 9:17)  But there is a ray of hope that pierces through that dark cloud; “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)

 http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Kevin Probst - Teaches History, Government and Apologetics at the high school level in Columbus Georgia.