If fear settles into your thinking, you will no longer want to face anything; you will become a coward. You will be afraid to get up in the morning, afraid to go to work, to make vital decisions, afraid of everything and everyone. If you allow it to go that far, fear will take control of your life.

Several years ago I took a survey of some churches I visited. I would mention different things and ask people to raise their hands when I named what they feared.

I was shocked to realize how much the body of Christ lived in fear: fear of divorce, of cancer, of AIDS, of suicide, of insanity, of being murdered, of thieves, of attack, of financial disaster, demons, vertigo and so on.
Those in ministry had different fears: fear of rejection, of failure, of lack of money, of trust, of being abandoned, and even of success!

If you don’t regularly inject God’s Word into your mind, strongholds of fear will set in and overwhelm you. You won’t even want to get out of bed. “You will say to yourself: quickly, a sleeping pill! And you will fall asleep to wake up later and take another pill”

This is why the Word tells us: “For God has not given us a spirit of timidity (fearful; American translation), but of power and of love and of wisdom.” I wish to draw your attention to this last term “wisdom” (a confirmed thought: translation of the King James Bible). It comes from the Greek word sophronismos (so-phro-nis-mos).

It is a compound word, the first part of this word meaning “salvation” or “deliverance”, the second “intelligence or thought”. When these two words are found together, they express something very important.

They tell us what God gave us during our encounter with Jesus Christ: a new thought! The Greek term for “a strengthened thought” (wisdom) – sophronismos literally means “a saved or delivered thought.” In a humorous way, I call it “salvation of the brain” or “a freed head”, but in reality, it is a good translation.

The thought we receive at the new birth is free from all fear! A thought “delivered, a brain saved”. Fear, circumstances, should no longer affect us, because our thinking is freed from these fears and these fleeting bonds.

Hebrews 2:15 tells us that Jesus “came to deliver all those who, through fear of death, were held in bondage all their lives (in fear, King James Bible translation).” This is part of our Christian heritage! Freedom is ours! Jesus came to free us from fear!

He left us in exchange a firm thought, indifferent to fear! This ability to walk with firm thinking depends totally on you, just like it did for Timothy. We can easily allow ourselves to be overcome by fear, or we can follow Paul’s advice to “…rekindle the gift of God which you have received…” The choice is up to us!
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This text is an extract from the book “Living in the Combat Zone” written by Rick Renner

We invite you to read the following article “Time to Dig Deep“.