Sunday: This Fear Hits Me in the Stomach
WEEK 23
SUNDAY
THIS FEAR HITS ME IN THE STOMACH
Luke 21:25-26
We are studying the mastery of fear. The early disciples had it, and we may have it too.
The effects of fear are apparent. They touch every portion of our beings. They throw sand in the machinery of living. This appears even in birds and animals. In India I was invited to speak at a garden party in a Nawab’s palace. He was fond of chickens and ducks. One duck, an excellent layer, was standing near a table when the Nawab’s son suddenly hit the table with a fly swatter. It so frightened the duck that she immediately laid an egg, and in five minutes laid another, and hasn’t laid one since! Her fright upset the whole rhythm of her body and made her sterile.
It can do worse. It can kill. King Ferdinand V of Spain was warned by a soothsayer that he would die in Madrigal, so he refused for twenty-one years to visit his own palace there. He became ill in a small village and, learning that its name was Madrigalejo, died of fright in 1516. When “Cholera” came back from touching a city, so the story runs, someone asked him how many he had touched in that city; and he replied, “Twenty thousand, but forty thousand died.” When asked how it happened that only twenty thousand were touched and forty thousand died, Cholera replied: “The rest died of fright.”
People today are living under that same fear of death. An intelligent and cultured lady, seventy-two years of age, said to me, “I am afraid of death. This fear hits me in my stomach.” She had to have an operation because of a tied-up condition brought on by fear. I slowly read this passage to her: “He also shared the same things in the same way. He did this to destroy the one who holds the power over death—the devil—by dying. He set free those who were held in slavery their entire lives by their fear of death” (Heb 2:14-15). “And set free those who were held in slavery . . . by their fear of death”—that meant her! She walked through that verse into freedom. The lifelong bondage was broken. Her internal organs could now settle down to normalcy, no longer tied up with fear. Salvation had extended to her emotions.
O Christ, I thank you that you have met and have conquered all our fears. In you I am free from fear. Help me to stay in you and hence live without fear. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Fear has no part in the life of a Christian; therefore no fears for me.