“Fear Factors”

(part 1 of 2)

“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.”

Job 3:25

What would you do, if one day you woke up and everything you feared came to pass? That is a sobering thought, but that is precisely what happened to Job. In a moment, Job lost his wealth, his source of income, his children, and his health. To make matters worse, his friends and his wife all turned against him. Job was grieving, heartbroken and in pain, but his greatest hurt was that God seemed to have abandoned him.

Job, like all of us, had played out this nightmare scenario in his mind before. It is evident in Job 3:25 that he had thought about it and came to dread the idea of any of these things happening to him. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Satan came to God and was given permission to test Job. He was not allowed to take Job’s life, but basically everything else was fair game:

“Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has and he will surely curse you to your face. The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”
Job 1:8-12

Satan then methodically goes on a rampage destroying Job’s herds, wealth, children, health and relationships.

For a long time I felt like Satan was “randomly” attacking Job to try and cause him to curse God, but after reading Job 3:25 I realized that Satan was not being “random” at all! On the contrary, he was targeting Job in specific areas…areas in which he feared. Although God had given Satan permission to test Job, it was Job’s own fears that Satan used against him.

Everyone of us could probably make a list, like Job, of the things we fear. Scenarios that we have played out in our minds, a hundred times, that are crippling us emotionally, physically and spiritually! Fears, that if we allow them to, will stop us in our tracks, strip us of our confidence and leave us feeling abandoned.


However, God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Timothy 1:7), but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline. In trying to get a handle on fear, I began to reflect upon all the fears, both rational and irrational (phobias), that people struggle to overcome. When I considered them all, I began to realize that all of them stem from one of two things:

1. We have lost the inward sense of God’s presence in our lives.
2. We’ve lost perspective regarding our relationship with God.

Pastor Scott Burr
http://faithandworshipseries.blogspot.com