Pastor Brandon: What are we not supposed to be afraid of?
Pastor David: I’ve never met anyone that’s ever been able to live without fear.
Fear is a natural human response to uncertainty, to unknown, to spiders and sharks and Mary without her hair done. Yeah, things of that nature. To me, courage is the ability to continue to move forward in the midst of the fear. Be not afraid is the assurance that we’re not alone in the midst of whatever this thing is that has us worried, scared, fearful, paralyzed. But, I think so often we build this notion that if you have fear, then you’re not faithful. And yet when you have fear the faithful thing is to have courage to keep moving, keep trusting, keep believing.
Pastor Mary: In the Young Adult Book Study we met last week and one of the chapters was on worry. And we were talking about this.
And the question was, these passages about “Do not fear” is, it really saying, you should never be afraid? And we agreed that it’s not saying that, but instead it’s talking about anxiety that becomes crippling, that freezes you. It’s not any one thing that you shouldn’t be afraid of but that you should have enough trust that you should continually remind yourself, as these passages do, that God is present with you. Trust that God will be God in those situations.