Recently while logging some miles for work, I heard Adam Hamilton on the radio talking about fear. He is the pastor of Church of the Resurrection United Methodist Church in Kansas and is a prolific writer. The book he was talking about that day was his latest book, Unafraid: Living with Courage and Hope in Uncertain Times.
The part of his book that he focused on in that conversation was
Face your fears with faith.
Examine your assumptions in light of the facts.
Attack your anxieties with action.
Release your cares to God (35).
In this time of fear and anxiety, his words stuck with me. What role does our faith play in our ability to live with fear? Where do we get our facts and do we check the information we are given? What actions are we taking to lower our anxieties? And then can we release all our burdens to God?
Since my sermon for the coming week was about fear ruling the actions of the disciples, I thought this would be a good book to read. The book was a fast read for me. There were many quotes that made it into my sermon and influenced my thinking while writing the sermon. Because I was so drawn in by the FEAR acrostic, I hoped it would feature prominently into the book. Hamilton did talk about it frequently and yet I wanted him to go into more examples of how we might live this out in regular, daily situations.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the fears of life that are highlighted in every newscast and many conversations with friends and colleagues. You should read this book if you want an easy primer into how fear affects you as a human. This book is good read for anyone who wants to live more by faith and less by fear.
“Jesus preached that the essence of God’s hope and expectation for the human race was that we love God with our entire being, and that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves. He even said that we were called to love our enemy. If this ethic of love sounds too high-minded to be of much practical use, we can start by asking one very concrete question: ‘In the situation I find myself in, what is the most loving things I can do?’” (63).
In his book, Hamilton shares three principles he has learned about the fear of failure. “Most things are never as hard as your fear they will be” (86).
The second principle is “‘Successful people [however you define success] are willing to do things that unsuccessful people are unwilling to do’. Fear keeps many people and organizations from ever reaching their real potential” (86-87).
“And the third principle, which I’ve shared with many leaders over the years, I call ‘discernment by nausea’. Often when you come to a fork in the road, a decision you have to make between taking this path or another, you’ll find that one path seems easier, safer, and more convenient. More often than not, though, the other path—the one that’s harder, riskier, more inconvenient, the one that leaves you feeling a bit nauseous when you think about it—is the one you should take. Jesus used different language to comment on the same phenomenon. He noted that life tends to present us with two roads we could take. One is broad and easy, yet it leads to destruction. The other is narrow and hard, but it leads to life” (87).
“When we fear God—when we revere, respect, and stand in awe of God—we fear everything else a little less” (208).