Human Beings are not all that complicated, and that’s news for a lot of people. They’d like to think of themselves as incredibly unique and multi-faceted individuals. It sounds eccentric and interesting, but there’s not much to that. God makes it plain to us that our identity is in Christ, and we can’t do anything outside of Christ that will have any lasting value or effect. God tells us in Acts 17:28(NIV), “For in him we live and move and have our being.” He alone determined the places and times of our births. He knows the number of hairs on our heads, and our very reason for being on this earth has been established and made possible only by His divine power, intelligence, appointment, and grace. With everything that we do in life, it will always bring us back to the choice of whether to own who we are in Christ or deny it.
1Thessalonians 5:23(NLT) tells us, “Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.” This verse informs us that humans are three-part beings. We have a #1) human spirit, a #2) human soul, and a #3) human body, which houses our human spirit and soul. The human spirit should not be confused with God’s indwelling Holy Spirit. They are different and distinct. The Holy Spirit is God’s Spirit, and as a gift to us, God sends His Holy Spirit to come and live inside our human spirit once we have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord. Romans 8:16(NLT) declares, “For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children.”
The Holy Spirit is God’s seed, and when God places His seed in us, again, we become His children. 2Corinthians 5:17(NLT) tells us, “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” This new life is one where you and I put off some of the things we used to do, think, feel, and say before we accepted Christ. We have to do this because those things don’t mesh with the new reality Christ has made possible for us. Since he’s open the door to a wealth of new blessings, we should have a new way of thinking, believing, speaking, and behaving that measures up to our Christ identity. Then, what we express on the outside will match who Christ has made us on the inside.
Many of our prior actions were rooted in fear, and fear doesn’t belong to God and His Kingdom. 2Timothy 1:7(NKJV) tells us, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” This scripture is for our learning and living. One of the reasons that our Heavenly Father has given it to us is so that we can discern when our thoughts, feelings, actions, and words are of Christ and when they aren’t. When they aren’t, we’re not walking in God’s truth in some area of our lives. Instead, we’ve allowed our old ways to creep in. God tells us in Ephesians 4:23 that the remedy for handling those back-door bandits is to renew our minds to what He says in His Word.
Faith and fear are both very potent realities, because operating by either of them is going to yield results, but only faith in God will yield the kind of results we desire for our lives. It’s also important to distinguish between a healthy and unhealthy fear. A healthy fear instinct can help us preserve our lives by warning us of danger. It informs us to stay away from things that might hurt or harm us. An unhealthy fear is anxiety and worry about situations and circumstances that haven’t taken place, yet we’re fearful that in the future they will. Fear can be thought of as believing something or someone above what God has said in His Word. It’s the place in our brains and hearts where our love for God and our faith in Him is not yet dominant. We then, must make our faith in God dominant by being humble, and by giving ourselves and Him time to help us walk through the process of changing our thoughts and feelings.
1Peter 2:24-25(NLT) tells us, “24 He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed. 25Once you were like sheep who wandered away. But now you have turned to your Shepherd, the Guardian of your souls.” Once we receive Jesus Christ as our personal Savior and make him Lord over our lives, we receive all the blessings that he died on the cross to give us. We died on the cross with Christ, and we rose with him when he got up from the dead. By his wounds, we have been healed and made whole in every area of life, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. It’s our responsibility as new creations in Christ to put on that healing in our minds and hearts, and then begin to walk in it.
You might think, “That’s easier said than done.” Sometimes it is. Fear becomes embedded within because, quite frankly, it’s been hanging around a long time without us confronting it with the love and power of God. It isn’t uncommon that as we engage this process of changing the way we think so that worry, doubt, insecurity, and other types of fear no longer have a place to stay in us, we might find it more challenging than we thought. God has not left us alone to deal with this on our own. He’s placed His Spirit within us, and we need to lean on the Holy Spirit’s help as we are persistent in prayer and meditate on God’s Word.
As time progresses, the Holy Spirit will give us revelation about the truth of God’s healing, and He will also bring us clarity through others who speak the truth and through the situations that we encounter as well. He can use the many aspects of life to help us rise to greater levels of understanding. Our responsibility is to partner with him through our faith and patience as he does this work. It may not be readily apparent to us what the Spirit is doing, but we can be confident that as we continue to pray, our faith will increase, and fear will continue to diminish. ∎
Holy Bible, New Living Translation copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
“Handling Deeply Embedded Fear”, written by Reverend Fran Mack. Edits by Kim Times and K. Stephens for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2023. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.
God, I take my hands off of it. I have done what I can. I know you will handle the rest. Continue to teach me to trust you in all my battles.