If we look at the New Testament and the record
of the life of Jesus and we ask this question, "What negative prohibition did Jesus utter
more frequently than any other negative prohibition?" The answer is simple, because this particular
commandment was uttered so many times by Jesus that it was way ahead of whatever is in second
place. And if you're thinking now in your mind, racking
your brain trying to figure it out, let me help you by putting it on the board here. It was two words: "Fear not." In fact, Jesus says it so often, that at times
we miss the significance of it because it seems as if every time He encounters His disciples
the first thing He says to them is, "Fear not." Or, "Don't be afraid." He says it so often it becomes almost like
a greeting. Instead of, "Hello," or "Shalom," he's saying,
"Don't be afraid." And I've wondered many times why Jesus did
that so often, why He used those words so frequently. And I suspect that it has something to do
with His knowledge, His intimate knowledge and understanding of the frailty of our human
makeup, because we as a people tend to be fearful. We tend to struggle with anxiety. Now there's a word that is often misused in
our vocabulary. You'll hear somebody say, "Oh, I'm so anxious
for Christmas to come." And what they are saying, really, is that
they are eager. They are joyfully anticipating this coming
event. But what they've actually said when they said
they're anxious is that they have some kind of fear about the arrival of Christmas. And so the term anxiety is often used as a
substitute for the word eager, when in reality, the term anxiety refers to a spirit of fearfulness,
or worry, or apprehension about something that lies in the future. Everyone in the world has fear. We don't always fear the same things as other
people fear, but we all experience anxieties, and we all experience fears. I've often said as a minister that when people
go into the hospital it doesn't matter how insignificant the procedure is that they face,
there's some kind of anxiety level that must be dealt with in the patient. It's just part of human nature to have anxiety
about one's physical well-being when you enter into a place like a hospital. Anxieties can become intense and paralyzing,
that the fear level in our personalities can rise to the status of a phobia. And a phobia tends to be a kind of fear that
paralyzes us in one way or another. Recently I read a study that indicated the
ten most widely experienced phobias among American people. And listed in that ten most frequent phobias
list were things that included acrophobia, which is the fear of heights, xenophobia,
which is the fear of foreigners or people that are different from ourselves, claustrophobia,
fear of being in closely confined areas. But the number one fear on the list was the
fear of speaking in front of a group. And I looked at that and I said, "Well, I
can relate to that, because I have to do that quite frequently, and I can't imagine ever
having the experience of anticipating speaking without some kind of anxiety." You would think that somebody that speaks
as often as I do would never suffer from anxiety of public speaking, but I'll be honest with
you, there's never a time that I don't have anxiety about speaking in front of a group. It's a scary thing. And some people are so terrified by it that
they are just simply unable to do it at all. But again, we have all these different kinds
of anxieties, and these do relate to our relationship with God. Let me turn your attention to a portion of
the Sermon on the Mount where I think everybody has heard at one point or another, but we
don't spend much time talking about it, where we find in Matthew, chapter 6, beginning in
verse 25, these words from Jesus: "Therefore I say to you do not worry about
your life; what you will eat, or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you
will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more
than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither
sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add one cubit
to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow. They neither toil nor spin, and yet I say
to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field,
which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you,
oh you of little faith? Therefore, do not worry saying, "What shall
we eat?" Or "What shall we drink?" Or "What shall we wear?" For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows you need all
these things, but seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things
shall be added unto you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for
tomorrow will worry about its own things, and sufficient for the day is its own troubles." Long before I ever read the Bible for the
first time, I was familiar with this passage in scripture, because it was one of the favorite
passages of my father. And I heard him quote it again and again,
particularly at the dining room table. He would use the old version, "Be anxious
for nothing, take no thought for tomorrow, what you should eat, what you should drink,
what you should put on." The fact is, we do worry about tomorrow. And our concerns about tomorrow often provoke
a spirit of anxiety within ourselves. I think that Jesus gave this sermon to a mixed
audience of men and women, but it has particular relevance to the men who heard it. In our own culture, again, I saw a report
from a psychologist that said one of the most gripping anxieties for the average American
man, an anxiety that he rarely articulates, and when men gather together they never speak
of. They talk about sports, they talk about business,
they talk about all of these things, but they don't open up and reveal the fears that they
have, thinking it's basically unmanly, or something of that sort. And this gripping anxiety that the psychologists
have uncovered for the American man is the fear of failure to provide for his own household. That is, this is a problem specifically to
married men, and those who have children. Because the moment a man says, "I do," in
front of a minister of a justice of the peace, he has now taken upon himself, at least in
our cultural understanding, the burden of caring, not only for himself, but also for
his wife and for the family. And even though we've now changed so much
of the cultural structures where many women are in the workplace and so on, still that
age-old expectation of the male to be the one who is to be the provider and the protector
of the family is still deeply rooted in the male psyche in our nation, and I suspect in
many other nations as well. Another phenomenon that's reported to use
from the secular world of medicine is the strange ratio of the experience of nightmares;
that men have twice as many nightmares as women. I wonder why: that men would have more nightmares
than women. And again, the consensus is that it's rooted
in this particular fear or anxiety that the man carries around with him. I'm sure women have their own distinctive
sets of anxieties and worries that they have to be concerned about, and also related to
the care of their offspring, of their homes, and all of the rest. But when Jesus focuses His attention on this
problem of anxiety, he's talking about the basic necessities of human life, and the concerns
and anxieties that we bring to bear on these provisions. "Will I be able to feed my family tomorrow? Will I be able to clothe my family tomorrow? How am I going to accomplish all of these
things?" And Jesus says, "Take no thought for tomorrow." Now, he's not saying, "Don't be provident." He's not saying, "Don't be prudent." For elsewhere in the scriptures we are told
that the man who fails to provide for his household is worse than an infidel, and that
we are supposed to be wise, and prudent, and disciplined in making provisions for our family. So Jesus is not giving a prohibition here
against careful planning and against provisions. He's making a prohibition against our spiritual
attitudes with respect to these endeavors and these responsibilities. He's not saying, "Don't take any thought for
tomorrow," in terms of being diligent to provide for tomorrow. He's saying, "Don't worry about tomorrow. You do what you have to do, but at the same
time, tomorrow is in the hands of God." And it really is our fear of the future more
than anything else that drives anxieties, and fears, and worries. We don't worry ever about what happened yesterday. We don't have to worry about what happened
yesterday, because yesterday is over. We may worry about the consequences of what
happened yesterday and how they will work out today or tomorrow. But once the moment has passed, our anxiety
about it passes with it. And so we can understand at this point that
the focal point of our worries, and the focal point of anxiety is always the future. It's always about what has not yet taken place. I used to play a lot of golf, and I hit balls
in some bad places. And I can remember one time being faced with
a horrible situation where I had out of bounds on one side, water on the other side, and
trees in front of me, and it just seemed like there was no safe way to proceed. And I took my shot, it hit the trees, bounced
off the trees, into the water, and I was in big trouble. But I smiled at that time, and my golf partner
says, "How can you be happy?" And I said, "Because it's over. And the one thing I know is I never will have
to hit that shot again as long as I live. I may have to hit one like it, but not that
same one. It's gone." There's nothing to fear when it's over. It's beforehand that we are gripped by anxiety,
because we don't know how difficult, or painful, or troublesome the problems that we face tomorrow
will be. Now, when Jesus says to those who are gathered
not to be anxious, not to be worry, and He says you can't add any size to your body by
worrying about it, worry doesn't solve any problem, and then He rebukes them for being
of little faith, now why does He do that when it is our nature to be concerned about things
that could happen to us, and that many things that can happen to us and will happen to us
are worthy of fear? Because there are fearful things out there. There are painful things that we may experience. And not all of our worries go unrealized. We can remember David saying, "The thing I
feared the most has come upon me." And yet, at the same time, the pain of that
thing that he feared the most is something that hurt him for many, many years before
it actually happened, which, we've been told that the coward dies one thousand times, but
the courageous person, only once. But the coward goes through the experience
by worrying about it, and being frightened about it many, many times before the actual
occurrence comes. I can't think of too many things in my life
that have happened to me, bad things that have happened to me, that actually were worse
than what I thought they would be. There are some. There were times when I went to the dentist's
office where I didn't anticipate a whole lot of pain, where the pain was worse than I had
anticipated. We've all been through that. But most of the time when we worry about things,
and when they happen, they're really not as bad as we thought they would be. And I think part of that is because God gives
His grace to us in our hour of need in a way we don't really anticipate. So what this comes down to, theologically
and spiritually, is a question of the relationship between the future, our fears of the future,
and faith. Jesus said, "Why are you worried, ye of little
faith?" Our worries and anxieties really do come from
a lack of trust in the promises of God. And we all have that. We all have faith, but our faith is limited,
and sometimes our faith does not get us past the anxiety of what will happen, because we're
afraid that God will not do what He promises He will do. Or, on the other hand, we may be afraid that
He will do what He promises He will. That's what scares me about God, is that because
God calls us to live in a world that is filled with trouble, and He says in the world we
will have tribulation, and we will have affliction, and we will have suffering. That's what scares me, is that His word will
come to pass. But I have to hear, as we've already looked
at in the problem of suffering, the other side of it, where God promises His presence
and His grace to sustain us in the most difficult of human enterprises. And Jesus is saying, "You don't have very
much faith if you're gripped in anxiety. And your lack of faith is a lack of faith
in the promises of God." Where God says, "Trust me for tomorrow. Trust me with your life." And that's what it means to be a Christian,
is to trust God for your entire life. I have to trust God not only for what I eat,
and what I drink, and what I put on, but I have to trust God for how I will die, when
I will die, where I will die, and what will happen to my family and all the rest when
I die. I have to trust God for the future. And I think that the greatest cure there is,
the simple cure, but it's not as simple as it seems, it's simple to understand, but it's
difficult to apply, is that we need to immerse ourselves in the word of God, because nothing
dispels fear more quickly than the reinforcement and our understanding of the promises of God,
and the knowledge of the presence of God. But we're afraid that He won't be there when
we need Him, or that He won't do what He said that He would do. Now, as I said a few moments ago, there are
all different kinds of anxiety, and they're related, as I said, to the future. And I'm going to distinguish among three types
of fear, or worry, or anxiety that afflict us. The first is an objective, specific fear,
as I've already mentioned, such as a phobia, where we're afraid of small places, or we're
afraid of speaking, or we're afraid of dying, or we're afraid of pain, or afraid of the
dentist, afraid of cats, afraid of snakes, afraid of spiders. Those are specific fears and anxieties that
we have, and there are specific ways to deal with them, as we all know. But in distinction from that kind of fear,
there's another kind of fear that can be extremely debilitating, and this is what the existential
philosophers spoke about frequently when they talked about the experience of angst, where
they defined angst or anxiety as being a nameless fear. It's a condition that I think we've all experienced
to one degree or another, where you're pacing around, your stomach is flip-flopping, your
hands are shaking a little bit. You know that you're scared, you may be having
an anxiety attack, and you have no idea why. This has to do with being frightened in general. And again, when the philosophers analyze that,
they speak about this kind of fright, which can be so terrifying and paralyzing to us
as unspecific. We don't know why. That's why psychiatrists make money. Somebody will go to them and say, "I'm suffering
from anxiety, but I don't know what I'm afraid of." And the psychiatrist will have to probe, and
dig, and try to sort out what it is that is troubling the person. Well, there can be all kinds of hidden things
that are involved in this. I've told the story of the anxiety that I
experience when I'm waiting for a friend, or for my wife to arrive home, and she's late. And she doesn't have to be an hour late for
me to start getting nervous. If she's five minutes late, I start thinking,
I start wondering, I start worrying. "Where is she? What happened to her? Has she been in a traffic accident?" I start imagining all these things that could
be so terrible, and I get more and more anxious. And I remember once waiting for a friend to
arrive at my house, and he was not there on time, and I started pacing up and down in
front of the window in my living room, getting more and more nervous, watching down the road
to see if I could see his car coming. And in the midst of all of that, these words
came into my mind, "A watched pot does not boil." You've heard that adage many, many times. You can look at that pot and look for the
bubbles, and they'll never come as long as you're watching. You've got to get out of the room before the
water will come to a boil. And all of the sudden I had a vivid recollection
of myself as a child, where every morning my father would leave for his business in
downtown Pittsburgh, and my mother was his secretary, and so she went to work every day
with him. And my grandmother lived with us, and she
would see us off to school in the morning after my parents had gone. And every night, my father and mother would
come back home at six, and we would plan for dinner at about 6:15, and my grandmother would
be in the kitchen preparing the dinner. And about five minutes to six, I would find
myself standing in front of the kitchen door, looking up the street, looking for my father's
car. And if they did not come down the street by
six, I would be in a panic. I was anticipating being an orphan. "They're not coming home." Now, this was the reaction of a child who
was insecure about safety, who wanted his parents to be safe, to be alive and well,
and to come home every day from work. And my grandmother would be standing by the
stove watching me be anxious. And that's where she would say to me, "A watched
pot never boils. Go into the other room. Go play with something. They're going to be here." She knew what I was worried about. I thought, "Here I am, a grown man, and I'm
still pacing up and down in front of the window when somebody is late?" That's just one of those things where things
that occur to us as children can haunt us in many, many ways as long as we live. Because in some respects, we still are children,
and we bear the scars of the things that frightened us as children, even to this day. And I say that not to practice psychiatry
without a license, but simply to say that when you have anxieties, and you don't know
why you have those anxieties, take a look into the past. And it may help you discover why it is. But this nameless anxiety is rooted in even
a deeper fear. Again, it's the fear of the future. The existential philosophers have no optimism
about what tomorrow will bring. They're saying that what's provoking his anxiety,
according to Martin Heidegger is the experience of what he calls "geworfenheit," where he
says modern man feels as if he's been hurled or thrown into a chaotic world. He has no meaningful beginning. He's emerged from the slime, he's a grownup
germ, and he is moving as the clock ticks every moment to his annihilation. And so, we're sort of suspended between birth
and death in the context of a vortex of meaninglessness. And that's always eating away at us, according
to these pessimistic existentialists. I would look at it a little differently from
a Christian perspective, that this nameless anxiety may be more deeply rooted to what
I'm going to call the third kind of anxiety, which is what we call simply, restlessness. And this was addressed by St. Augustine. If you recall, his prayer in his book of the
confessions when he wrote, "Oh, Lord, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are
restless until they find their rest in thee." Now, restlessness is a kind of fear. Restlessness is the manifestation of a particular
type of anxiety. It's nameless, according to the existentialists
who talk about this amorphous type of angst, or anxiety. Augustine names the child. He said, "That anxiety, that restlessness
is rooted in our basic estrangement and alienation from God, because our lives are out of whack
if we are estranged from God. And being outside fellowship with God is an
intense and powerful provocation to fear. We fear not only the creator, but we fear
His creation. We begin to fear life itself, because we're
not really in fellowship with the author of life, and the Lord of all life." And the only way I know of to get over this
is what Augustine said: "Our hearts are going to stay restless until they find rest in you." This is what Jesus gave to His people. He said, "Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God. Believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. I'm going to go and prepare a place for you,
so that where I am, you will be also. So, don't be afraid of the future. Don't be afraid of tomorrow, because I'm taking
care of tomorrow; that God is the God of tomorrow. I'm leaving now, they're going to get framed." He says, "But I'm going to leave something
behind. I'm going to give you a legacy, an inheritance." And what was it? "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives. Give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled." In other words, the peace that Jesus is talking
about here is the opposite of restlessness. It is a calmness of spirit that comes when
you are in fellowship with God, and you can trust Him for tomorrow. He is the one who conquers fear. Now, at the same time as we have this negative
prohibition, "Don't be afraid." We are also called to encourage one another
as Christians. And what does it mean to encourage one another? It is helping another person to find courage. In many respects, I think one of the reasons
the nation responded so positively to the Wizard of Oz, is that we could identify with
some of the characters, not the least of which was the Cowardly Lion. The Cowardly Lion represented our fearfulness,
our anxiety. And what did he need to overcome his problem? He was looking for courage. He needed courage. And that's why we need to encourage one another,
because we all need courage. Now, let me just finish by saying this. What is the one indispensable, necessary ingredient
to have courage? What do you have to have, absolutely, before
you can have courage? It's the sine qua non of courage, a necessary
precondition for courage. You have to have it, or you can't possibly
have courage. You can have it and not have courage, but
you can't have courage without having this. Here's what it is, folks: fear. Why do I say that? Because it doesn't take any courage to do
what you're to afraid to do. Courage exists for those who have fear. To have courage is to do what you're anxious
about, to do what you're afraid to do. And that's why we need to encourage one another,
to help each other overcome the anxieties, the fears, the apprehensions that keep us
from living for God.
