FEAR NOT!

If someone had told me a few years ago that today I would be sharing a success strategy of hope, promise, blessing, and a future, I would never have believed it. At that time, I was in a death-trap of panic attacks, grueling pain, and hopelessness. What God revealed to me in my darkest hour is so rich, the transformation he effected in my life so powerful, I still can hardly grasp that it is real.

We all have a life story to tell, and our current life is a direct reflection of the perspective we’ve learned from our past life—i.e., our history. For example, if you are blessed to be living a life of joy, peace, and promise of a great future, then somewhere along the way you’ve learned to maintain a perspective of joy, peace, and expectancy even in the face of pain and disappointment. Maybe you learned this from a parent or grandparent. Maybe you learned it through personal experiences with Jesus Christ.

Or maybe your life is not one of such victory and joy. Maybe you are like so many of the rest of us, struggling instead with secret, not-so-desirable areas in our lives we’d rather keep hidden. Negative strongholds such as anxiety, aggression, insecurity, addictions, eating disorders, self-injuring, perfectionism, obsessive compulsion, and/or depression leave us feeling overwhelmed because we feel powerless to do anything about them.

What we fail to recognize is that these characteristics may just be the tip of our internal iceberg. What lies beneath the surface are layers of past experiences that have inflicted injury, trauma, and pain. And it is to this submerged iceberg that fear finds ways to attach itself.

Fear is the culminating, binding factor that exacerbates our negative strongholds because those strongholds are based on and birthed out of fear. Like an unwanted intruder at a masquerade ball, fear shows up in a myriad of disguises, eliciting behavior that is not our true nature or our real identity but defensive adaptations. Today’s culture of self-help and self-esteem tells us to just accept our fear-derived characteristics and learn to cope or co-exist with them. But that is not what God’s Word teaches us in the Bible.

So here is my question for you. Does fear have you pushed into a corner of doubt, dread, insecurity, depression, anxiety, addictions, and/or disorder? Have you felt so hard-kicked in the gut by trauma, distress, oppression that you find yourself lying flat on the floor, flailing around and sucking wind to get your breath back?

That was me less than five years ago. My own personal history was one giant flimsy house of cards. From the outside, my life looked great. But it was unstable at best, built on a fractured foundation of fear. The walls I’d built up for my own personal security and self-preservation were fragile, faulty, full of holes. No amount of self-help books, expensive therapy, or anti-depressants could help me. Believe me, I tried it all! Nothing and no one but God himself could help me. If God did not rescue me, I knew I would surely die.

Fear Not! Unleash the Conqueror Within was birthed from real-life traumas, failures, and need for an identity realignment that threatened my sanity, hope, destiny, and very existence. Like a bear who’d remained hibernating in her cave far past springtime, I awoke to the realization that God’s promises in his Word had been falling empty and without nourishment to the ground. Something in my life was very wrong. Angry and starving for truth, I determined that either God was a liar, or I’d been deceived into believing I was a powerless victim of circumstances.

In desperation, I put God’s Word to test. Cocooned in God’s very presence and promises, I consented to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who touched me physically and breathed life into decaying and dead hope, relationships, purpose, and destiny. Soon I began to see the ruined, hopeless circumstances in which I was living surrender to God’s sovereign promises. Little by little, I dared to believe, dared to hope, and dared to dream with God of my identity, destiny, power, and authority as an inheritance-carrying child of the Most High God through the redemption of his Son Jesus Christ.

What I discovered is that our Father God does not want us crippled with fear. That’s not the spirit he has given us. When we can understand how loved and empowered we are right now today because of God’s Spirit within us, we shatter the power of the spirit of fear and intimidation and unleash the more-than-conqueror that is inside us as God’s children. As God’s heirs. This is the best news ever. Especially for those of us who are crushed and weighed down in panic attacks, pain, or debilitating depression.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming to have arrived at a place of perfection. Not by a long shot! But when I look back today over the last few years of my life, I am amazed to see peace, joy, and a whole lot of great expectation for the future. My change in perspective occurred miraculously despite horrendous, disastrous circumstances.

God did not create the disastrous circumstances. But he did use them to offer me an opportunity for transformation. An opportunity to participate with the miraculous. Choosing to participate with the miraculous doesn’t always produce instant results. There are deep, dark valleys and refining fire we sometimes need to walk through before the transformation and miraculous can even begin. For me, that transitional valley was so long, so hard, and so painful I couldn’t see the other side. My only joy and hope in that bone-dry, scalding-hot chasm was found in worshipping my heavenly Father for his faithfulness and goodness.

But while at the time it felt that hard valley of transformation would go on and on forever, as I look back across it now in my rear-view mirror, I can see how God used