For I am the Lord your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.
isaiah 41:13
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about Pastor Alvin’s message about moving forward in challenging times. One line that Pastor Alvin shared in his devotion especially stuck out to me. He said, “God’s word is always instructing us to move forward and not stay stuck and worse still, look back.”
I think as human beings, we all have different ways of dealing with challenges when they come up in our lives. Some of us look for support from others, someone to talk through our troubles with. Others might need some time to be alone and process their thoughts and feelings. Some people take time to think through their challenges carefully, weighing out their next steps and possible outcomes moving forward. Others like to take challenges head on, launching into action and finding solutions.
No matter what your style for dealing with challenges may be, I think there is one common denominator that we all need to address when facing stressful situations. In order to move forward, we need to overcome our fear and anxiety.
Like Pastor Alvin said, God instructs us to move forward and not stay stuck or look back when we face challenges. What can really cause us to get stuck and look backwards are fear and anxiety. These worries may be expressed in different ways, depending on our style of tackling challenges. For those who need time to be alone and process, we can get stuck in mulling over our difficulties and combing through the fine details of our problems. This can get us stuck in loops of negative thinking, holding us back from moving forward. For those who launch into action, we may act out of fear and anxiety instead of a place of faith and peace. We may scramble to solve problems ourselves, without paying attention to what God may be saying or doing.
Overcoming fear and anxiety isn’t about ignoring our challenges or choosing to look the other way. It’s not about becoming “strong enough” to power through our problems. In the end, there is only one way to truly combat fear and worry–faith. Overcoming challenges is not about minimizing our challenges and making them smaller. It’s about growing our faith to be larger than our fear. Isaiah 41:13 tells us about not being fearful because God takes hold of our hand. God promises to see us through our most difficult times, if we can only put our full trust in him and devote ourselves to him.
The call to overcome fear is not a call to become personally stronger or more capable. It’s a call to deeper faith. As we grow in faith, we grow in our ability to overcome–not by our own power, but by the grace of God. Growing in faith requires deeper discipleship, better listening to God, and a stronger willingness to be obedient. As we grow in these things, we’ll slowly see our troubles become smaller, as God becomes bigger in our lives. Then we can truly combat fear and anxiety, by the grace of God.