We Must Choose God Over Personal Happiness – Part 2 Lose the Fear

15 Aug We Must Choose God Over Personal Happiness – Part 2 Lose the Fear

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

And, last week, we moved into looking at the fact that (3) We Must Choose the Undesirable, beginning with the fact that We Must Choose God Over Personal Happiness – Part 1 Trust and Obey.

We made the point last week that God asks us to live by faith… to trust and obey Him. We observed that if we believe God, we obey Him, and if we do not obey Him, it is because we do not believe Him.  Therefore, the opposite of obedience is not disobedience, but unbelief. So, our task in becoming more obedient is to focus on increasing our faith.

God asks us to be obedient to Him because He loves us, and it is in a life of obedience that He can most completely bless us.

But how do we overcome our “unbelief” and increasingly live by faith? 

This week, in Part 2 of Choosing God Over Personal Happiness, we will examine the necessity to Lose the Fear.

Fear is a major obstacle to faith

We want to work on nurturing our faith by analyzing on our fears, which are the primary obstacles to living by faith.

The thing that many of us fear the most is giving up complete control of our lives to God.

And we’re not alone.  C.S. Lewis once wrote, “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ.”

The need to live by faith in the Christian life seems so obvious that it’s almost trite. But perhaps, if you will think along with me, you can identify with this instinctive perspective.

We naturally want God to make our life on earth go better. We want to be nice and good, work hard and be smart, and as we do, call on God to bless our perfectly good plans, so that with our effort and a little help from God, our life on earth will be healthy, prosperous and happy. We can create a measure of heaven on earth. We have it all laid out in our mind like a life-treasure map. It is the common result of placing the American Dream above the Christian life.

But that plan rarely works. Things are always going wrong.

And when things begin to go wrong with that plan, our instinct for self-preservation is to begin to grab hold of things… to try to increase our control of life’s circumstances and do for ourselves what God (in His “negligence” – or so it feels) has failed to do for us.

Fear motivates us to self-protection

God, of course, takes objection to that response, and in His “severe mercy,” begins to pry our controlling fingers off the things we’re clinging to.  As He does, we are left with one of three options…

1. Live in fear of Him
2. Live in anger toward Him
3. Submit completely to Him

Of these options, fear is perhaps the most common.

Yet Scripture speaks clearly and directly to that response:

• “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid” (Hebrews 13:6).
• “Do not let your hearts be troubled, nor fearful (John 14:28).
• “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

And, Scripture gives us reason to trust, rather than fear:

• “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6).
• “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7 – NIV).
• “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7 – NIV).

Greater trust in God can drive out our fear

Life can be very hard, and as a result, can generate a lot of natural fear. Our task is to trust God completely, and in doing so, look to Him to take away our fear. Depending on how hard our life is, it can be a very spiritually advanced thing to do. It is not easy, or everyone would do it.

Paul said, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).  This verse is dense with spiritual truth, but it includes the idea that,

• When I live my daily life, I will aspire to do what Jesus would do if He were in my shoes, and
• I live with the constant perspective that when I die, I will join Jesus, face to face, and all will be well.

This perspective helps us endure the hard times of this life and to be faithfully obedient to all the Lord asks of us now, knowing that all that we long for can only ultimately be satisfied in the next life. It is heaven that we long for; it is God that we seek. Therefore, to die is gain. Very few of us embrace this perspective as fully as Paul did. Yet this is the point to which God is trying to move all of us.

God calls us to complete trust so He can completely bless us

Our greatest fear – giving up all self-control and willingly submitting fully to God – is the very doorway to the life we long for (James 4:2-4).

The Bible teaches this clearly, of course. But instinctively we resist believing it, because self-protection, self-advancement, and self-fulfillment are the core motivations of our natural self.

Romans 12:1 spells it out. “I urge you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service of worship.”

 A living sacrifice is not killed. Rather, it chooses to die.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis presents God’s radical invitation to us this way:

“Make no mistake. [God] says, ‘If you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through.’”

Lewis elaborated on this concept a bit when he said:

“Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

This is the level of surrender of a living sacrifice. Nothing held back.

Again, Lewis’s insights are profound: “[God] claims all, because He is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There’s no bargaining with Him.”

Conclusion

Life is a battle… a battle between good and evil… and in the end, good wins – and great reward and celebration follow the triumph of good over evil.

There is a thrill of victory, a capacity for joy when the battle is won, an inspiration for celebration that is greater than could ever be experienced if the battle had never been fought. Testings, sacrifice, effort are the source of true joy, gratitude and celebration.

It doesn’t work to play it safe. It isn’t the way God works. He knows where we are. It’s difficult to lie-low to try to hide from someone who is omniscient. He can find us.

When God tapped Jonah on the shoulder for a task, to preach repentance to the citizens of Nineveh, Jonah didn’t want to go, so he lit out. Tried to run from God. God found him. Jonah ended up in the belly of a whale for three days, was then spit out on the beach. It didn’t pay to try to play it safe with God.

You risk bringing on yourself the negative – a stint in the belly of a whale. But what’s more, you risk missing out on the positive – the remarkable privilege of spiritual maturation and of being used by God.

Let me close with another familiar C.S. Lewis quote:

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you know that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace!”

So, as we seek to increase our faith (our ability to trust and obey), we need to recognize that fear is our primary obstacle to complete obedience. As we choose to trust (believe) in God, instead of giving in to our fear, our obedience increases, as does our divine blessing.

Next week we’ll look at the next major choice involved in Choosing the Undesirable, which is We Must Choose Others Over Self – Part 1 Love Gives. I look forward to seeing you then.

Get a Moving from Checkers to Chess At-a-Glance-Overview: Click Here

As we have been studying these concepts for quite some time (including in some prior blog series), and I am excited to now be connecting all the “moving parts” from those posts and combining them into a “spiritual game plan” in this “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective” series.

For an overview of the game plan, so you can see at a glance where we begin and where we’re headed, I’ve created an overview/outline you can download for free: Click Here

For the full discussion of each of the steps, begin with the first post in this series, Moving from Checkers to Chess, and then continue with the following posts thereafter.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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