Break Through : Overcoming Fear And AnxietyVoorbeeld

It is amazing that even though there are so many verses in the Bible telling us not to be anxious, we still are! Statistics tell us that this is a rising trend amongst us all. One in thirteen people globally suffer from a form of anxiety disorder.* As I was pondering on this, I realized that there were three main reasons why we suffer from anxiety: fear, lack of trust and unbelief. Today we will have a look at fear. Often, we experience fear when we do not know the outcome of a particular situation or event. Interestingly, when we do know the outcome, we do not become anxious. Fear is also like a magnifying glass, making the event or situation larger than it is. When my husband, John, went through a breakdown, he was paralyzed by fear to such an extent that sometimes he could not leave the house, as the below extract from our book Breakthrough** shows: I remember one day … I was on my own and wanted to go for a walk in our local park. It was a beautiful, sunny day and as I got to the front door, this fear suddenly hit me. The voices in my head said that if I stepped out of the house something would hit me, like a boulder from the sky, and I would die. Today, as I write this, it sounds ridiculous but, at the time, the fear was real to me. Apart from that, the devil was placing a magnifying glass over everything else out there that could be perceived as dangerous ... For John the answer was to use the Word of God – every time he was assailed with fears, he proclaimed 2 Timothy 1:7 aloud. The ‘spirit of fear’ (NKJV) was not from the Lord, so he refused to accept it. Using ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (Ephesians 6:17, NASB), bit by bit he drove the fears away. We may never reach the stage of being anxiety-free, but we can start the journey. The Lord has given us His Holy Spirit and His Word; we have everything we need. When we are feeling anxious, let us stop and recognize what the fear is behind it. Fear is ‘False Evidence Appearing Real’. Let us face our fears head-on and use ‘the sword of the spirit’ and kill it.