Fear and Control

Not all fear is bad. A gunman in your school, a rattle snake in the midwestern plains, an epidemic in your city. All these cause you to think differently about life, its fragility and meaning. How have we lost our sense of fear? Is it because we've been bribed out of it in the name of entertainment? When did we stop seeing monsters, bloodshed, murder, rape, incest and dismemberment as more than something at which we squint our eyes, frown and curl our upper lip? Have we become desensitized because of news, Internet and video games? I'd like to suggest that the lack of fear in a person's life is his or her pursuit of being in control: the less fear we deal with, the more we are in control. We see a murder across town and we respond with, "How sad." We remain in control. We see people in Africa euthanized for their religious beliefs and we think, "How can that happen?" We remain in control. We watch horror flicks and walk out of the theater—still in control. We drive past people asking for a hand out, judge that they are too lazy to get a job and we stay in control.

"Hey..wait," you may be thinking right now, "you were discussing fear and control and now you're talking about lazy people who need to get a job and work for a living?" I submit that our fear of God underlies all these items. When we decide there is no God or that it's not necessary to honor Him as He expects, we make ourselves God. "I'm not believing in you the way YOU want God…I will believe in you how I want." In doing that, we become desensitized to Him, His personality, His expectations...and we remain in control.

How much do you fear God? Let's lay down our unbeliefs and look at the obvious: God is. We cannot lose our fear.

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