8244	Forums / Main Forum / Fear & Grace	on: November 09, 2006, 07:54:19 PM
You make some very good points. I mean there are fears that all of us struggle with that are an enemy of faith. Fears that keep us feeling burdened and not trusting and resting in Christ. We  carry around in our bodies, our mind will and emotion so much corruption that some times we battle to the point of physical exhaustion. Some times we resign to being afraid. The attitude of resignation is somewhat like those of the paradigm of resting but without a real sense of being  comforted in the midst of fear. There is a sense in which being afraid blurs how we view faith and grace. When we give so much of our time to fear and worry we really are not replacing positive thoughts for negative ones but we are experiencing an emptiness , a vacuum of lifelessness, and a heavy weight of tension that puts us in its grip. Our minds are confused and the object of our desires who is Christ and that sweet light that we experience in a good respectful way , we begin to spiral down into emptiness. Our countenance becomes gloomy and we feel sense a lack of control over ourselves. This becomes a mood that we spend a lot of time battling. This syndrome is cause by many things. But really if we feel as if God has withdrawn from us and we sense that we are being dragged down by fear then we are usually reading the true state of our souls and really we are susceptible to this mood being in this world and having sin in us. Some times sin has such a grip on our minds that we really get intense in our struggle. Some times in our lives we experience the negative effects of sin and we are convinced that sin can make us change in a drastic way. And unless we struggle with the effects of sin we will never know if we have genuine faith. Our faith needs to be tested. We need to be able to be downtrodden and under the weight of the effects of sin in order to be able to experience a supernatural confidence because that kind of faith in fear is beyond our ability to pull off. And so that confidence is not something that just overtakes us when we are afraid but we must fight a battle with our minds. The point is not that we will over come by our battling, or not that we are able to get past the mood of fear by ourselves. But that we are going to experience the powerlessness of that battle and in experiencing the powerlessness we are going to know intimately His grace. By experience! We are there under the spell of fear and then we are there acknowledging our powerlessness to get through that battle in our own strength. In that battle we are not using our own methods , or positive thoughts , but we are going through a process of learning Gods awesome strength. By praying to Him and telling Him that these fears are too strong for us , we then rejoice in His strength, we begin to gain a sense of His presence in our being under the spell of fear. We must wait on Him to grant us freedom in His time. We can get help from others, but we must not be absolutely dependent on man. We must begin to work out these struggles in prayer and begin to develop a relationship with our Father totally not trusting of any man. When we put our trust in man we are going to be disappointed. We are going to teach ourselves to trust in something that is fleeting. Even princes , rulers are going to pass away and the next day they will have no power. The only power source is God. The only deliverer is God. The only one of whom we have to answer in our most deepest distresses is God. God alone is who we take refuge in. Most men will try to give us a false hope. Remember that a person hopes in only one Person as its object to be a hope that will get through the trials of life. All other hopes are finite. The source we need is infinite. It is in prayer that we fix our hope on His grace. It is in prayer that He becomes our victory. Once we taste of coming out of a distress of soul where He reveals Himself to us in the midst of the darkness of the trial of our souls and He grants us strength to get through the next day, then at some point He will speak and we will be delivered from that trial. Because He can speak into existence every thing that we are faced with, an He can cause us to go into the deepest sea of doubt, and He can command by the word of His testimony that we will be baptized with an extra portion of His grace. He can in an instant change our lives by that word. Here is where trials of distress focus on. We wait like watchmen in the night for Him to speak. We hope for a sign of His goodness in the morning. We order our request and wait in expectation. Once we hear Him speaking peace to our souls we know that voice, we know it is a part of why we have been so distressed.