Week 14 Sunday
Week 14 Sunday
Only Two Fears Are Inherent
Psalms 37:7; 55:22; 56:11
We come now to the steps of deliverance from fear. Breathe a prayer as you put your feet upon the road to complete freedom. Let the prayer be this, “O God, help me not to be afraid to face my fears. Give me strength not to evade or to cover, but to face things honestly.”
(1) Remember there are no inherent fears, except two; the rest are acquired. The two inherent fears, born with us, are fear of falling and fear of loud noises. Some psychologists examined five hundred people and found that they had about seven thousand fears. All but two of those were acquired. Five hundred people loading themselves down with 6,998 unnatural and useless fears! There is a caste in India in which the women add on each birthday four rings of heavy brass, one on each ankle and each arm. By the time they are of middle age, they walk with difficulty under this senseless burden. But this is no more senseless than weighting oneself down with inward fears: fear of failure, of the future, of growing old, of sickness, of being dependent, of the opinions of people, of death, and so on.
Most of these fears are home-grown. They come out of wrong home teaching and example—making children afraid of the dark, of bugaboos, of this, that, and the other thing. Parents who try to control their children by fears and threats often succeed too well; the children grow up controlled by the fears themselves. Where the home is released from fear, however, the children have no fear. Two parents belonging to our Ashram began singing, “I will not be afraid,” and one night they heard their little three-year-old singing in her bed in the dark, “I will not be afraid.” There was a home-grown faith.
A woman says in a letter, “All my life I have been subject to fear and tension. As a child I was afraid of everything any child ever dreamed of fearing, and I added others of my own invention. My nightly prayer was, ‘I thank you for not letting anything happen to me today!’ As I grew older, my fears become less material and more intangible. As a Christian I considered these fears and tensions my cross to bear, my thorn in the flesh, and thought it my duty to keep them under control.” You need not keep them under control; you can get rid of them. They don’t belong to you; they are unnatural.
O Christ, no fears lurked with your bosom to cripple and hinder. You had the unafraid heart. Give that to me. For I want no enemies within. Cleanse the depths. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All my fears are home-grown. I cease to rear them—from today.
Week 14 Monday
Steps to Victory over Fears
Psalms 27:14; 31:24
We come to the next steps in the conquest of fear:
(2) Talk over your fears and anxieties with someone. Carefully choose the person and go over the whole matter. I say “the whole matter,” for sometimes we bring up a marginal fear and leave the central fear untouched. We are afraid of that fear. It may be a fear around which a reticence, a hesitation to mention, has gathered. For instance, the fear of being left without a lifemate, the fear of losing the love of the mate we now have. Both of those fears are self-defeating; they help to accomplish the thing they fear. Sterilize those and other fears by bringing them up and frankly talking them through. But having talked them out with one person, do not “retail” them. To talk about them too much is to aggravate them. They become a complex. Having relaxed and allowed every fear to come to the surface, if nothing more comes to the mind, then take it for granted that your fears are all exposed. Don’t fear that you haven’t brought up all fears.
(3) Decide on a plan of action. These fears have invaded you; they are not a part of you; they are extraneous, not natural, not permanent. You allow them to come in, and you, and you alone, can decide that they shall go out. Vash Young, radio broadcaster, tells how he took a look at himself and said, “Take a look at your products. Fear, worry, impatience, anger, doubt. Your factory is a menace to yourself and a nuisance to others.”* He made a list of the qualities that seemed ever-enduring—love, courage, cheerfulness, activity, compassion, friendliness, generosity, tolerance, justice—nine magic words (incidentally, all of them Christian!). He determined to replace his old, dead, festering words with these new, living, health-giving words. Soon he was no longer, as formerly, losing his breakfast in the gutter when he thought of going to see a client. One of his secrets of victory, “I have tried it as a rule to devote less than half of my time to my own affairs.”
The point of this step is that you are now on the offensive. You are no longer being invaded; you are outgoing, positive. You are beginning to be no longer afraid of fear, for you see it for what it is—a scarecrow.
O Christ, I begin to see that my fears are my uninvited guests—guests that have taken over control. And now, by your grace and power, I am again in control. I have my feet on the Way. I am grateful. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall think no fearful thought, speak no fearful word, give way to no fearful act. I belong to faith.
*Vash Young, “My Conquest of Scarecrows,” in Reader’s Digest vols. 20–21 (1931): 11.
Week 14 Tuesday
Look in Three Directions
John 14:1; Acts 18:9-10
Now take the next step:
(4) In deciding on your plan of action, look three directions:
a) Look at your surroundings. Some psychologists are convinced that the root of any personal problems is in the environment. “By the crowd thou hast been made, and by the crowd thou shalt be saved,” is the saying of one of them. This is an exaggeration, of course, but it holds a truth. Three influences determine character: innate heredity, social heredity, and a person’s own choices. Within the framework of the innate and social heredities, there is room enough for one to choose and determine one’s own character.
But the surroundings do influence one, and greatly. An African American student whose brother was missing in action broke out with swellings on her lips and eyes. She thought it was a food allergy. But it was an allergy to worry and fear.
A woman was secretary to two brothers who were at a tension point. Every night she would have to take tablets for her indigestion. When the brothers were reconciled and the tensions eased, the secretary’s digestion returned to normal
b) Look at your past. There may be something in your past, some childhood emotional shock, some fear that has been pushed into the subconscious and the lid closed upon it. There it festers underneath. Sit relaxed with your head back, your eyes closed, and let your mind wander over your past to see if it fastens itself upon some incident. Gently bring it up, look at it; pull its sting. It can hurt you no longer. If it is some guilt buried there, bring it to the redemptive love of God. God forgives, washes it out. You are free.
c) Look at your present ideas and attitudes. Your fears may be rooted in a wrong set of ideas and attitudes now operating in you. A fine woman came to a crisis in her life when she needed God. Her idea of God had been fixed by a preacher when she was a child, so that she thought of a God throwing people into hell. When she turned to God with her fear, she could get no help, for her idea of God created fear in her. A wrong idea of God blocked the release.
O Christ, cleanse away from me all wrong ideas about the Lord, and life, and the future. You are cleansing away my wrong ideas and attitudes by the wholesome sanity of your love. You are sterilizing all my fears. I am being released. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My soul, set no sail to fear. Lift my full sail to faith, and sail the seas with God.
Week 14 Wednesday
Look for Wrong Ideas
John 14:27; 16:33
A wrong notion of God can produce fear. A Jewish high-school girl said that, though her home life was happy, she was filled with a dread of routine, the routine of going to school and being “grooved.” She could not sleep on Sunday night, for Monday began the cramping. This fear was rooted in the idea she had of God as an impersonal Fate who fates us. That wrong idea of God made life all awry, a pitilessly grooved thing. She was afraid of it. Her idea of God needed to be changed to a Father who wills nothing but the best.
Your maladies may be rooted in a wrong idea about yourself. Psychologist David Seabury reportedly said that 98 percent of our troubles are imaginary. A famous Chicago psychiatrist says that of people who imagine they are going insane only one in a hundred actually is. A girl, a fine musician and beautiful, left college because of worry and excessive fatigue. Her inability to relax caused a breakdown. She thought she had intestinal trouble. She surrendered her fears to Christ, and her relaxation was so complete that she accepted a proposal of marriage. She is now living a happy, useful life as a minister’s wife.
In looking at your ideas and attitudes, you may find that you are magnifying your fears, looking at them through a magnifying glass.
Worry is an old man with bended head,
Carrying a load of feathers he thinks is lead.*
And when he thought they were lead, then they felt like lead. Paul speaks about “the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2), sloughing off all fears.
(5) After having looked at your fears, don’t think too much about them; think faith. Fear feeds on itself. The more you think about it, the more you have. “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7 KJV). Your habitual thinking becomes you. Ideas are actions in the making. Whatever you hold in your mind will pass into your acts, automatically. For ideas are not passive; they are active. Show me a person who thinks negative, fearful thoughts and I will show you a failure. Show me a person who thinks positive thoughts—thoughts of faith—and I will show you a success. One is paralysis; the other is power.
O Christ, you affirmed life in the face of life’s direst calamities. You talked faith in the face of failure. Help me to affirm your affirmations and to believe your beliefs. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall think faith, act faith, be faith—and spread faith.
*Attributed to Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983), whose family helped Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust during World War II.
Week 14 Thursday
Don’t Fight Your Fears; Surrender Them
John 6:20-21; 12:15
We continue our steps in the conquest of fear:
(6) Don’t fight your fears; surrender them to God. If you fight your fears, your mind will be upon those fears, and it cannot be repeated too often that “whatever gets your attention gets you.” If your fears get your attention, even though it be a fighting attention, they will get you. A struggle will ensue between the imagination and the will, and in any such struggle the imagination always wins. You must not fight your fears, but surrender them into the hands of God.
(7) When worry comes to the door, don’t give it the best seat and entertain it. Gently close the door and say, “I have surrendered you into the hands of God. You have no place or part with me anymore. I’m free from you.” A high-school girl was afraid of a certain teacher. This made her work so unsatisfactory in her other classes that the authorities were about to give consent for her to change schools. She heard my message, went home to her mother, and said, “Mother, the message was for me. I’ve surrendered my fear to God. I’m no longer afraid of that class, and I don’t want to be moved.” God had her fear; she wasn’t struggling with it, or entertaining it; it was gone.
(8) Learn the art of prayer, for fears dissolve in an atmosphere of prayer. A missionary in Japan lived in inward fear of earthquakes in that land of earthquakes. She became sick at the stomach and had heart palpitations at the thought of going to Tokyo. It had never occurred to her to turn her fears over to God. She surrendered them into God’s hands and lo, they were gone. She said she actually looked forward to going through earthquake experiences just to prove her freedom to herself, though she needed no proof. She went through several and did not even know they had happened.
An African American singer was asked to sing at a university church to a white congregation on the Day of Prayer. She was filled with fear. She read Abundant Living and surrendered her fear to God in prayer. “I felt like singing my head off after I got rid of my fears through surrender of them.” One woman, trembling with fear, found release through repeating the Lord’s Prayer.
O Christ, these fears of mine I’ve held within my heart, and now I’m turning them over to you. I cannot master them; but you can. From this time on, they are in your hands and off mine. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: In an atmosphere of prayer my fears are not solved so much as dissolved.
Week 14 Friday
Keep Your Sense of Humor
Psalm 4:8; Isaiah 54:10
We continue our steps to freedom from fear:
(9) Look at the facts precisely and see them in the total setting. The thing or things you fear may have come out of focus; they occupy the center when they should be on the margin. God is now at the center of your life, therefore fear is on the margin. Your fears are now being dissolved in the great fact of God. This marginal thing has no right to determine your life. God determines it.
(10) Remember that nothing that happens to you can ever be as bad as the fear itself. The words of Michel de Montaigne are relevant, “Who feareth to suffer, suffereth already because he feareth.”* And the words of Francis of Sales to a fearful friend, “Fear is a greater pain than pain itself.”** It is absolutely true that nothing that can happen to you will be as bad as the fear itself. In the words attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Never set a sail to fear”; it will drive you on the rocks. But you can use the winds of adversity and calamity to drive you to your goal.
(11) Keep your sense of humor. When you get too tense and begin to take yourself and your troubles too seriously, walk to the looking glass and burst out laughing. I often do it; it lets down tensions. As you stand before the looking glass, repeat these words, “O fool, to carry yourself upon your own shoulders! O beggar, to come to beg at your own door!” And then burst out laughing at yourself.
(12) Think faith, speak faith, and act faith. I overheard the following conversation in a train, “A man is what he eats. America is the greatest nation because we eat better than others.” But you can upset the digestion of what you eat by wrong emotions, fears, and worries. So it’s what you think that determines the effect of what you eat. Therefore think faith, speak faith, and act faith.
(13) Fear is self-centered; faith is God-centered. Fear turns you toward yourself; faith turns you toward God. One is ingrowing; the other is outgrowing. One is illness; the other is health. Fear nervously tries to hold your world together; faith surrenders your world to God, and you and God work it out together.
O Christ, I see, I see I’ve tried to be my own savior by my fussing and fuming and worry. You are my Savior. I turn over to you, forever, myself, my worries, my all. You have me, and I’m released. I’m grateful. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Think of self, and trouble grows. Think of God, and trouble goes.
*Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne (London: Routledge, 1886), 563.
**François de Sales, A Selection from the Spiritual Letters of S. Francis de Sales, H. L. Sidney Lear, trans. (London: Rivingtons, 1871), 90.
Week 14 Saturday
God and You Meet Life Together
Isaiah 30:15; 35:3-4
We continue the steps for overcoming fear:
(14) Do something for someone every day. A businessman, nervous and upset, was ordered by his doctor to go to Grand Central Terminal, New York, and look for someone who needed help. He felt like a fool in obeying, but found a woman seated on her suitcase weeping. Someone had failed to meet her. He found out where she wanted to go, got a taxi, went with her, bought her some flowers on the way, and delivered her to her daughter’s home. He went to the telephone, called his doctor, and said, “Doc, it works. I feel better already.” He was well—when he thought of someone else!
(15) Identify yourself, not with your fears, but with Christ. By surrendering fears to Christ, you are no longer identified with them. You are identified with him. “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). He has overcome your world of fear. You have become identified with him, and therefore you are identified with his victory.
Here is a man who did just that. He was getting thinner and more nervous all the time. He was told that he would die if he stayed in his job, but he couldn’t get out. He heard me talk on wrong attitudes producing illness. He surrendered his fears to Christ, and today he is happy and released and is getting far—in the same job! Christ overcame his world, and when he accepted that fact, he was released. Jesus said, “It is I, have no fear” (Matt.14:27 Moffatt). Where Jesus is, there is no fear; where he is not, there is fear. Here is a life equation: minus Christ = plus fear. Fear plus Christ = minus fear.
(16) Surrendered to God, you and God can work out life together. You are not alone; you are not facing life alone. You are facing the future with God. As a wise man put it, “I do not know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.” Someone asked an African American, a radiant soul, how he managed to keep that way. He replied, “I know that God won’t let anything come my way that he and I together can’t handle.” You and God are now working cooperatively. You supply the willingness, and God supplies the power.
O God, I thank you that at last I have come to the place of release, for I have come to you—you are my solution. Without you, not one step over the threshold; with you, anywhere!” I am not afraid of anything, for you have conquered all things. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “It is no weak Christ you have to do with, but a Christ of power” (2 Cor. 13:3 Moffatt).