Knowing /understating fear’s agenda is spiritual warfare 101.
Have you ever ended up in a downward cycle of one fear laid upon another and another and then caught yourself realizing you allowed the fear to stack up inside you?
Fear seeks entrance into our hearts and minds. When one fear-thought creeps in, another can slip in behind it, and then another… because the first fear-thought that is not resisted opens the door for other fear-thoughts to follow.
There are two sources of fear. One is our own unchecked, undisciplined thought life—we have not allowed the Word and Spirit of God to change, heal, and renew us; or at least, we allowed it only minimally.
The second is the enemy. Daily we are actively opposed by the enemy, and he knows the extent of our renewed mind. He can’t read our thoughts but he can read our reactions to the many thoughts he seeds and situations he creates. And he uses demons of fear, he has an army of these. BUT this is a defeated army. The only power the enemy has is what we hand to him…
If we let fear creep in, we hand the enemy power, we have done it! Fear then seeks to change our internal operating system the same way a virus can be downloaded onto a computer and then wreak havoc on the computer.
A computer virus changes the function of a computer. The virus re-codes the computer with a new agenda, like a hijacking of the computer. Now, every file on the computer can corrupted by the virus because there is a new set of instructions telling the computer how to read its own files.
Fear seeks this same effect in us. It seeks to hijack our inner life. Our inner life is our heart and mind and thinking and deciding and reasoning and memories. Our inner life can be understood as being like the internal operating system within our soul.
Fear seeks to have us read/perceive life situations according to its agenda. Fear seeks to send us new instructions to corrupt how we read/perceive situations and then decide on our behalf how we react to these situations. Fear seeks to take us away from faith, away from purity, away from love, divide us away from people, ruin friendships, and ruin our calling in God. Fear seeks ultimately to control us, to become our master.
If we let fear become our master, let fear be the foundation of our internal operating system, many of our decisions, both big and small, will be made below the conscious level; below our awareness. Fear causes the loss of right discernment and opens the door to confusion. Fear pushes a person into the self-protect, self-defense mode. So, we end up defending the decisions made by this false operating system and solidifying fear’s deceitfulness into our own hearts.
Our mind is powerful. If fear controls it, we will deploy the full power of our logical reasoning to defend it. This is the insidious deception of fear: we will justify the below conscious fear decisions and not even know we are justifying them. Now, we have opened the door to pride, fear’s twin, as we justify our decisions made in fear –even if only to ourselves, in the privacy of our own thinking…
But our thinking does not remain private. What we privately think/believe eventually manifests itself in our lives for all to see.
Fear works like yeast or leaven in our inner thought life. If we do not deal with it, and it stays unchecked in our lives, it will change the whole of our lives.
At its root, fear is a lack of faith and trust in God. A lack of trust in His loving-kindness toward us. This can be repented of (and should be). We can cry out, “Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). The man who did this in scripture was confessing, I do believe You, Jesus, but have areas that I still struggle with! And so he cried out: LORD, I BELIEVE, BUT HELP MY UNBELIEF!!!
This sincere cry for help gives Jesus the permission to come and pull out all fear and all the pride that comes with it. He is more than able to deliver, heal, and protect us.
I am praying for my church, Seashore Church, and the greater American Church that every person would allow Jesus to do this deep work. That we all would be free of fear and its effects. That we all would receive into our hearts His perfect LOVE because His LOVE casts out all fear (1Jn 4:17).
Every single fear or worry thought must be brought and subjected to His LOVE. We must determine to let His LOVE have its way in our hearts. It is His LOVE that matures and perfects our faith.
