We all have things we’re afraid of. Your list will be different than my list, but most of us can easily name things we fear the most. In general terms, we fear such things as illness, pain, death, financial ruin, personal failure and loneliness. For the sake of simplicity I’ll call those human fears.
Human fears come in lots of shapes and sizes. Have you ever wondered what they all have in common? It seems to me that every fear boils down to a ‘fear of loss’. With illness, we fear losing the certainty of our health. With pain, we fear losing our comfort. With failure, we fear losing our security and esteem. With death, we fear losing what we know about life for what we don’t know about life after death.
As humans, we spend our lives accumulating things that we value. Once we have our things, we spend our time and resources protecting those things against loss. We naturally want to hold onto our things. When we do lose something, we grieve the loss. And those losses can be actual or imagined, experienced or only threatened, individual or generational. But the grief is always real.
Grieving hurts. And the greater the loss, the more painful the grieving. I know that all too well after the devastating loss of our son, Elijah. I never used to fear losing a child. So how do I avoid the debilitating fear of losing any more of my children?
What if there was a type of fear that actually brought to us things that we otherwise are afraid of losing. What if this fear could bring us life and the enjoyment of healthy living? What if it could bring us success and the respect of those around us? And why not also throw in financial wealth and a rich family experience?
The Bible tells us, “Humility and the fear of the Lord bring wealth and honor and life” (Proverbs 22:4).
At first that doesn’t seem to make sense. But the fear of the Lord is the opposite of human fears. I like to think of the fear of the Lord as “the total surrender of everything in obedience to the Lord.” Rather than try to hold onto everything, we are supposed to let go of everything. Only then do we find that God gives us in abundance what we voluntarily surrendered.
If you think about it, those of us who already surrendered our lives to God in Christ have died to everything anyway. There is really no need to try to hold onto anything. We’ve already died to all of it. “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:2-3).
So human fear is based on avoiding loss. Our tendency is to hold onto everything. But the fear of the Lord is a celebration of loss. In the Lord we have already surrendered everything. That includes our family members. For me that includes Elijah. Ironically, surrendering to the Lord is the only way to ensure that we will actually receive everything we ever wanted. Whether now or into eternity, God promises to turn our losses into gain.
In the most positive sense, God wants us to be Losers! The next time someone calls me a Loser, I’m going to smile and say, “Thank you! I hope you are too.”
Please ‘like’ and ‘share’ this post as you find it helpful and inspiring. Thank you.
-Ken Buchanan
