If we know what to do, we should do it; if we don’t, we should admit it.
MEDITATE ON THE WORD
If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate. It means to think of something over and over. Meditation on God’s Word is one of the major ways you can find deliverance from worrying. Just as we once formed a habit of worrying (meditating on the problem), we can form a new habit of meditating on God’s Word. Take portions of Scripture that comfort you, and roll them over and over in your mind. Do it on purpose!
As soon as you are facing a difficult situation that tempts you to worry, begin to confess and meditate on Scripture. In this way, you do warfare with the enemy of your soul (Satan).
When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.
FEAR
Worry cannot exist without fear. We can fear things into existence. Fear looks into the future and imagines the worst that can happen. “Fear hath torment,” according to 1 John 4:18 (KJV). Anyone who has experienced fear can say a loud Amen to that statement. Fear definitely torments!
Having revelation on God’s love for us and placing our faith in that love is the only antidote for fear. We can relax and live free from worry and fear when we know that God is good and that He loves us. He loves us with a perfect, full, and complete love. He loves us unconditionally, which means there are never days—not even moments—when God does not love us. Knowing this helps us feel better about ourselves, and it also delivers us from tormenting negative emotions such as worry and fear.
God is on our side, and no matter what happens, He has promised never to leave us or forsake us. He said, “Fear not, for I am with you.” Meditate on this Scripture until it becomes a reality in your life: “There is no fear in love [dread does not exist], but full-grown (complete, perfect) love turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror! For fear brings with it the thought of punishment, and [so] he who is afraid has not reached the full maturity of love [is not yet grown into love’s complete perfection]” (1 John 4:18).
God loves you, and you can live without fear because He does. He has promised to take care of you, to meet your legitimate needs. I am not promising that God will give you everything you want. There are times when we want things that God knows would not be good for us. He promises in Luke 11 that if we ask for bread, He will not give us a stone; likewise, if we ask for a stone, He will not give us a stone when what we need is bread. God will always do what is best for us, and we need to trust that. That kind of faith leads us into lives of peace that passes understanding.
KNOW GOD’S CHARACTER
God is faithful, and because faithfulness is embedded in His character, He cannot fail us or let us down. Experience with God gives us experience with His faithfulness. We have needs, and He meets them time and again. He may not always do what we would like, but He does do the right thing. He may not be early, but He is never too late.
I have seen God come through multitudes of times during the years I have been serving Him. I can truly say, God is faithful. He has given me needed strength, answers that came just in time, right friends in right places, open doors of opportunity, encouragement, needed finances, and much more. There is nothing we need that God cannot provide.
God is good. Goodness is one of His many wonderful character traits. When something is part of an individual’s character, we can expect him to respond in that way every time. God is not good only sometimes, He is good all the time. He is good to people who don’t deserve it. He helps us even when we have done dumb things, if we will just admit our mistakes and ask boldly for His help. We can always ask God for help: “If any of you is deficient in wisdom, let him ask of the giving God [Who gives] to everyone liberally and ungrudgingly, without reproaching or faultfinding, and it will be given him” (James 1:5).
What good news! God will give us wisdom when we have trials—He will show us the way out. All we need to do is ask, and He will give without finding fault with us. Amazing! We don’t have to be afraid that God will not help us because we have been weak or made mistakes.
Another one of His character traits is mercy. Mercy chooses to be good to people who, in reality, deserve punishment. His mercy is new every morning. I have always said that God makes a new batch of mercy daily because we used up all of yesterday’s supply.
Study the character of God (I have a tape series available on the subject); it will increase your faith and help you not to worry or be fearful. Remember that fear is a demon spirit Satan sends out from hell to hinder our progress. Fear stops us and even drives us backward. It causes us to shrink back. Hebrews 10:38 says, “Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him” (KJV).
The Amplified translation of that verse says if we draw back and shrink in fear, God has “no delight or pleasure” in us. This simply means that God is not delighted when, through fear, we are cheated out of what Jesus died for us to have and enjoy. We must keep going forward in God’s plan and never fall back. Satan hates progress, and more than anything, he uses fear to prevent it.
I believe fear is the master spirit Satan uses to control people. It seems that so many of our problems are rooted in fear. The only answer to fear is to face it with courage. Courage is not the absence of fear—it is going forward in the face of it. Courage overrides fear; it refuses to bow its knee to it. The only acceptable attitude toward fear is: I will not fear!
To fear is to take flight or to run away. We are truly afraid if we run from what God wants us to confront. When the Israelites were afraid of Pharaoh and his army, God told Moses to tell them to “fear not; stand still and see the salvation of the Lord” (see Exodus 14:13).
We will never see or experience God’s delivering power if we run from things in fear. Stand still, and see what God will do for you. Trust Him; give Him a chance to prove His faithfulness and goodness to you.
When fear knocks on the door, send faith to answer. Don’t speak your fears; speak faith. Say what God would say in your situation—say what His Word says, not what you think or feel. The book of Mark relates an account of a woman who had been bleeding for twelve long years. She heard of Jesus and believed that He could help her. “For she kept saying, If I only touch His garments, I shall be restored to health” (Mark 5:28).
The very next verse says, “And immediately her flow of blood was dried up . . . and [suddenly] she felt in her body that she was healed.” This woman received her miracle because of faith, but notice that her faith said something.
Whatever is in our hearts will come out of our mouths. Are you speaking fear or faith? Both can produce results. Faith produces positive results, and fear produces negative ones. Did the woman sense any fear? I believe she did. The Bible records that the crowds were so heavy that people pressed Jesus from all sides. I am sure the woman looked at those people and thought, How am I ever going to get to Jesus? What if I cannot press through to Him? The devil offers fearful thoughts of that nature.
But the woman made a choice: In the presence of fear telling her she wouldn’t make it, she pressed on! She did not shrink back in fear, she pressed on, and that is exactly what God wants all of us to do. She pushed forward and kept speaking her faith, and she got her miracle.
Jesus told the disciples that if they had “faith [that is living] like a grain of mustard seed,” they would say to the mountain, “Move,” and it would move. He further said that with faith, nothing would be impossible to them (see Matthew 17:20).
We see that once again Jesus told us that faith says something. I ask again, what are you saying in your situation? When trouble comes, are you able to keep a good confession?
In Matthew 21:21, we find Jesus saying basically the same thing to the same group of men. He
was reminding them that if they had faith and did not doubt, even if they said to the mountain, “Be cast into the sea,” it would be done. The mountains mentioned in these verses refer to obstacles in our way.
Imagine having that kind of power! God wants us to have power, but He also wants us to have spiritual maturity. He would not allow us to use His power for carnal, personal desires. We are His representatives on earth, and our goal should be to see His kingdom come and His will be done on earth as in heaven.
During our trials and tribulation, during the times of what Paul called “abasing,” we should hold fast our confession of faith in Jesus, wait patiently, and know that He will never fail us.
What we talk about has a lot to do with our level of personal peace. Why? Because Proverbs 18:20 teaches us that we must be satisfied with the consequences of the words we speak. The next verse adds, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and they who indulge in it shall eat the fruit of it (for death or life).”
We can encourage ourselves with our own conversation, or we can discourage ourselves. We can decrease and even eliminate our peace or increase it. I encourage you to be accountable for your words—they are powerful!
DON’T BELIEVE YOUR FEELINGS
God wants us to enjoy lives of peace. Jesus provided it, and we must aggressively pursue it and hold on to it. Second Corinthians 5:7 says that we walk by faith and not by sight; that means we do not make decisions by what we see or feel. We have to search our hearts, where faith abides, and live from there. The kingdom of God is within us, and we are to follow those inner promptings that lead to righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.
Feelings can mislead us and steal our faith more than any other single influence. The problem with feelings is that they are ever changing. We can feel one thousand ways about the same thing in thirty days. One minute we may feel like doing a thing, and the next minute we don’t.
Feelings provoke us to say things that are unwise; we talk a lot about how we feel. Do you believe the god of your feelings or the God of the Bible? This is a question we must all ask ourselves. More than anything, people who come to me for help and counsel tell me how they feel. We should be telling each other what the Word of God says, not just how we feel.
Our feelings do not convey truth to us; Satan can use them to deceive and lead us astray. Emotions are unreliable; don’t believe them. Respond with your heart, where the Spirit of God abides, and see if you then have peace. Check with your heart, not your emotions, before making decisions.
For example, I may meet individuals with whom, in the natural, I would like to form relationships. They may have gifts or talents that I think would benefit my ministry. But the more I am around them, the more uncomfortable I become in my spirit about them.
I can sense strongly if people are phony or their motives are impure. I may not have anything natural to base my knowledge on, but the inner sensing will not go away, and I do not have peace about making alliances with them. I have learned to trust those promptings of the Spirit but to distrust emotional feelings. I may want to do something in my flesh but know in my spirit it is the wrong thing to do.
I remember one woman we hired at the ministry. This woman seemed to have strong gifts of leadership, and some of our key leaders wanted to promote her. I had a sense that something was not right but could find no natural reason for my feelings. We desperately needed good leadership, so I finally relented, even against what I sensed within, and agreed to put the woman in a place of authority.
She seemed to function in that position well for a while, so I assumed I must have been wrong. But after a period of time went by, we began to have complaints of her mistreating other employees. She was always very respectful to me and other people in authority, but to those under her leadership she was a different person.
A phony is a person who pretends to be one thing to one group of people but is quite another at other times. I know she had the ability to be respectful because she treated me well, but she abused people when she thought she could get away with it. I absolutely despise that kind of attitude.
More than anything, Jesus despised the phonies of His day. He rebuked openly and often those who behaved well when someone was watching them but who, inside, were devouring wolves. People can pretend for a while, but under pressure the real person always shows up. I realized later that I should have listened to those inner promptings. God was giving me discernment about the woman that would have prevented a lot of heartache and wasted time and money had I listened.
There are intuitive (spiritual) feelings we should respect, but most of our emotional feelings will lead us into trouble if we obey or follow them. Emotions will tell us to bow down to fear, when actually that fear will destroy us if we don’t resist it. They tell us to give up on things that God intends us to finish or to purchase things we cannot afford and don’t even need. Satan uses our emotions to wreck our lives. Not only does Satan come against us through our emotions, but he also wars against our thoughts.
Examine your thoughts and feelings carefully. Don’t follow them unless you are sure they are conveying God’s will.
LET PEACE BE YOUR UMPIRE
Paul told believers to let peace decide with finality every question that came up. We are to follow peace. If we will remember that, we will have lives we can really enjoy, not ones we just endure. I hate to see people with lifeless attitudes, people who are just going through the motions and enduring each day. I was one of those people for a long, long time, and I know from experience that we must press into peace and joy if we intend to have them. Satan definitely tries to steal the best in life. He is not enjoying himself and does not want any of us to enjoy life either.
If we would obey the teaching from Colossians 3:15, which says peace is to be the umpire in our lives, we would save ourselves unbelievable misery. We open the door for many difficulties in our lives through doing what we think or feel rather than following peace.
I’ve mentioned that, out of fear of being lonely, some people marry people whom deep down inside they don’t have peace about. I married out of fear when I was very young, and it ended in divorce a few years later. As I have mentioned in my teachings, I felt like used merchandise because of my father’s abuse. I was afraid that nobody would ever want me, so I married the first boy who showed interest in me. I think I knew it would never really work, but the fear of being lonely caused me to ignore the lack of peace I felt inside.
My first husband had lots of problems himself, and I know God was warning me that I would only get hurt more, but I took a chance. I gambled that maybe I could make a wrong decision and get right results. This, of course, was very foolish, and because of my decision I added another five years of torment and mistreatment to the ones I had already experienced. By the time my first marriage ended, I was twenty-three years old and could never remember being truly happy or having any real peace in my life.
It was not until I learned, many years later in life, to follow peace that I broke these negative patterns in my life. Peace is a wonderful thing; it leads us into many other blessings. We should be completely unwilling to do without it. As Psalm 34:14 states, crave peace, inquire for it, require it, and go after it! Don’t let worry or fear steal your peace.
DON’T LIVE IN DREAD
Dread is closely related to fear. We might say it is the forerunner to fear. I believe a lot of people dread many things and yet don’t realize what a problem it is. We dread everything from getting out of bed to going to work, doing dishes, driving in traffic, paying our bills, confronting issues, and just about any little thing we can think of.
Why do we dread something we have to do anyway? Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can enjoy every aspect of life. An unbeliever may not be able to avoid dread, but a believer in Jesus Christ can. We have supernatural strength and ability available to us. Unbelievers have to depend on their feelings, but we can go beyond feeling and live by faith.
How we appr
oach any situation makes all the difference as to whether we will enjoy it. We will, of course, be miserable if we approach driving to work in traffic with a negative, complaining attitude. It won’t do any good, because we must drive to work anyway.
It is actually extremely foolish to dread things we must do and know we will do. The main thing dread does is steal the peace and joy of life. It also drains us of energy and strength we need for the day.
God commanded the Israelites to “dread not,” nor fear their enemies (Deuteronomy 1:29). Can something like traffic be an enemy? Yes it can, if we perceive it that way. Anything that we don’t want in life, that hinders or aggravates us, we can perceive as an enemy. We are not to dread or fear anything—we are to live courageously and boldly.
Dread drains, faith energizes. Being negative drains us while being positive energizes us. Millions of people in the world today are tired. They see doctors who cannot find any real reason for their condition, so they tell them it is stress. Often we take medication for conditions that would be totally solved if we would eliminate worry, fear, and dread from our lives. If we will make a decision to approach every aspect of life, no matter what it is, with a pleasant, thankful attitude, we will see major changes for the better, even in our health.
The future is coming, no matter how much we fear or dread it. God gives us what we need for each day, but He does not give us tomorrow’s grace or wisdom today. If we use today trying to figure out tomorrow, we feel pressure because we are using what we have been allotted for today.