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by Martha Kilpatrick and hosted by John Enslow
(M) John you just told me this is our 26th Podcast, and it just amazes me. And most of these have been about fear, so you know every time I think, surely we are done with this subject, but another aspect of it came up this week. So we’ll be looking at that one too. But I want to promise there will be an end to this. It must be real important to the Lord. It must be a major human and Christian problem.
(J) It’s really the thing that Christ didn’t tolerate in His own disciples; it’s really the one thing. They could have ambition, they could call fire down from heaven and He never would really chasten them for that. But fear He had a problem with that.
(M) Fear is a symptom according to the Lord’s parable; it’s not the problem. When you’re an adult with fears, and when you’re a mature Christian with fears, you’ve been given a talent and the Lord considers it the excuse. Julie sent me a quote from Thomas A’Kempis who said many wonderful things, and many wrong things. He wrote “The Imitation of Christ”, which I don’t even like the title, since Christ can’t be imitated. He wrote, “If you are at peace with yourself, you will be able to help others to become peaceable. An excitable person distorts things, and easily believes the worst.” Oh, that’s incredible; I see that, I’ve never heard it or thought it put in exactly those words, but it is absolutely true. A person who is prone to fear, whose base is fear, will assume things about you that are ludicrous. And they will inflict you with their own hysteria, and they will believe the very worst possible scenario. And sometimes I will be amazed at that, where did that come from. It’s almost diabolical. He goes on to say, “If you’re at peace, you will not be suspicious of others. If you are agitated, and discontented, you will not trust anyone. You will not be able to remain quiet yourself, and you will not let anyone else rest either”. Amazing, it’s a life experience and I know that one well. Ok, you have fear, and then you judge by fear, but you make everybody else enter that fear too. You inflict it on them.
(J) And you know people that are in fear and hysterics are really spinning it to bring other people into it with them, so that they can feel secure in their fear.
(M) It’s contagious in other words. And it’s not just contagious, it’s debilitating. If you don’t learn to live in your own beliefs and own faiths around people who are agitated and hysterical, they are very destructive of your soul and peace. He says, “The person who knows how to suffer will enjoy the most peace”. Well, what you fear you serve, and what you serve you worship, and what you worship is your God, and what is your God, you will die for. So fear is an indication of what you worship, yourself. And I went into the fact that worry is self-love. But we learned something this week, and you and I discussed it John. I looked back over my now many years, with the Lord, and I realized that there’s a whole range about fear that I haven’t touched in these podcasts. A whole process that He took me through about fear. And that was, he took me back to my childhood fears. And most parents, well, all parents are guilty at some point, of using fear on their children to get, to control them. What was it you heard recently?
(J) Oh, my goodness, what was that?
(M) A mother said to the child, ‘if you don’t behave I’m going to get the doctor’ to ah?
(J) Give you a shot, or something like that, or, was it about the seat belt? I believe the lady said to her child ‘put your seat belt on or the police will come and take your mother away from you’. It was either that or the shot, if you don’t act right, I’ll take you to the hospital and get you a shot.
(M) I’ve heard that in the waiting room. I’ve heard terrible things in the pediatrician’s waiting room. And even if it’s not that clear, we do use fear to control children. And beyond that there is a level of abusive fear that’s given to a child if a parent is really messed up or mentally ill. They will really control the child by fear. So the Lord took me through a process of going back and understanding and forgiving and getting free of those childhood fears that translate into adult behavior. They’re underlying a lot of our motivation. And there are still remnants of it in me. There are certain, you can give me certain situations and I will feel that fear. One of the books that addresses fear the most is Isaiah. The Lord gave me this many, many times in my walk, it’s Is. 8:11. I am going to read it from the Amplified. You see the Lord would catch me years ago in being afraid of people and wanting their approval. And in some really kind of serious situations that come to mind, and in one in particular He gave me this one. “The Lord spoke with me thus with His strong hand and warned and instructed me not to walk in the way of this people, saying,” and He’s going to expose the way of this people. “Do not call conspiracy or hard or holy, what this people will call conspiracy or hard or holy. Neither be in fear of what they fear, nor make others afraid or in dread. The Lord of hosts, regard Him as holy, and honor His holy name, by regarding Him as your only hope of safety. And let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread, lest you offend Him by your fear of man, and your distrust of Him. And He shall be a sanctuary, a sacred and indestructible asylum to those who reverently fear and trust in Him. But He will be a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to both houses of Israel.” And that scripture was His real mandate to me. And this situation I’m thinking of happened to be in business when I was an interior designer. And I learned that in any change produces fear. And fear produces anger. And anger and fear together make you attack. I learned this through business, that at some point in every big job, whether it was, there was no problem, there didn’t have to be a problem, the clients would just freak out and be afraid. And I would have to not enter that fear. I’d have to go back over my work, over my thinking, my choices, my recommendations, and I’d have to go back and not be afraid. And understand that it was strictly re-action and there was nothing real to it. Depending on how big the job was, it was kind of proportionate to the crisis that would be created simply by change. But the Lord took me over a process of years, David wrote in Psalm 34, “ This poor man cried and God heard him and delivered him from all his fears.” And you will find brothers and sisters that God’s going to go after your fears. He’s going to expose them by events of today, and He’s going to call you to resolve them with Him by the Spirit. Because they’re going to hinder you; you won’t have your destiny, you won’t even have your own identity. People who are afraid reduce their lives to a corner, where they think they’re safe. And they diminish their lives and remove every challenge, remove every opportunity, every risk. If you don’t deal with fear, it will take you over and destroy you, and it will destroy your relationships. The main thing I’ve seen this week, is that it constitutes a wall against God; that if fear is a big stronghold, it will even keep you from the solution in God. So you make your own safety in fear, and it’s a very dangerous place, it’s not safe at all. We haven’t talked about fear as a stronghold, a demonic stronghold, but if fear is lived in and not resolved as sin, not renounced and not fought and not surrendered to the Lord, it will take you over and rule you. As you’ve often told me, it has a life of it’s own.
(J) Yeah, it takes on a life of it’s own, it’s own personality. We’ve seen that in a hysterical person, a personality will come out of them and completely overshadow the person that they really are. It’s awful.
(M) So I think so many of the chastening’s of the Lord, so many of what Oswald Chambers calls, “the providential crisis”, are the Lord, trying to dissolve our fears, to deliver us as David said, from our fears, because they’re going to be the downfall.
(J) They’ll take us down. And that’s why Christ was so determined to bring those areas of fear down. Because He knew that they would take them down. The disciples would be brought down.
(M) Right. And they were amazingly fearless by the Spirit, by the new creation they were amazingly fearless.
(J) I would have given the disciples a ‘pass’ card, you know, when they were in the boat. It would have been horribly terrifying; ok, I understand your fear here because we’re in the middle of. He didn’t give them a ‘pass’ card for that.
(M) I don’t think we realize John too, that fear is belief.
(J) It’s a faith.
(M) It’s a faith in evil, it’s a faith in disaster, and it will bring about what you believe in.
(J) Do you think that people use fear? We know about what we see in Proverbs, how the sloth says, “There’s a lion in the street, there’s a lion in the street”, and really becomes ‘chicken little’ and there was no lion in the street, and we’re seeing that the personality becomes the excuse and really gives the person a way to really kind of skirt their responsibilities. It’s a convenience. So this is a stronghold that is taken on so that we can conveniently skirt our responsibilities and the work that we’re supposed to do. Because if I say ‘there’s a lion in the street’, I can’t go to work. (M) You can’t go out in the street. Well the issue I wanted to address mostly today was childhood fears, and how they affect what you believe. The Lord has to change, first He has to find the fear, and then He has to change how you view it, and change your beliefs about it, and about Him. I have been in the healing of memories for many years, and one of the things He did in my life was go into the place of fears for me. After my mother died I was very, very alone, and very young, and He actually entered the place of one of my greatest fears. And that was being in that house by myself. And the Lord just showed me that He was there, that there was nothing to fear. It was all my imagination.
(J) And He showed you where He was in that with you?
(M) He showed me that He was there. And when I saw that He was there, that transformed not just the experience, but me. His presence, just His presence, transformed that. And my fear went ‘poof’.
(J) And the pain of it.
(M) The extreme pain of it; of feeling not just alone, but abandoned.
(J) The truth did set you free, the truth that He was there.
(M) The truth, the Man the truth.
