CURSE OF FEAR

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 286, 28 July 1932, Page 6

CURSE OF FEAR

LESSON IN FAITH/ MAN'S WANT OF COJHffDENCE IN GOD A^D HIS FELLCIW^MAN. SERMON AT ST. LUKE'S. The tremendous influences of fear and the counteracting influences of true and honest Christian precept were the theme of a sermon pa-aached at St. Luke's Church on Sunday evening by Archdeacon F. W. Chatterton. Archdeacon Chatterton took his texts from II Timothy, i— "God hath given us the spirit of fear" — and from - Psalms xlvi, "Therefore will we not fear though the earth he removed into the midst of the sea." One of the most widespread of hindrances to human progress, said the speaker, is fear. Jesus Christ came to sweep away fear from men's minds by implanting in them trust and confidence in God to replace it. "Fear not" was frequently on His lips. The announcement of His birth to the shepherds by the angel was preceded by the words "Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy," and on the morn of His resurreetion, the first words that reached human ears of the great event, again spoken by an angel to the women, were "Fear not, he is not here for he is risen." Fear is a disease of the mind, as tuberculosis is of the body, and Jesus came to show us the way to h'eal both. There is a right and a wrong way of dealing with fear, and we may be sure that He who came to restpre our nature by removing whatever stood in the way of human progress, would not leave us without giving valuable help in dealing with such a universal obstacle as this. Even physical diseases are often (as we know) induced by fear, especially in times of epidemics. Fear often seriously affects the minds of rich and poor alike, lest they should not be able to meet their own needs or the needs of those dependent on them. Even those who have laid by considerable means are sometimes, late in life, obsessed by the fear that they are poor or that their investments may all provs unsafe and sometimes even lose' their mental balance by such fears. Most of our industrial troubles can he traced back to fear. Fear lies at the root of many of the wars in ancient and in modern times. There is little doubt that the last great war was preeipitated by fear — Germany fearing, as soon as she heard that Russia was mobilising, that if she did not strike at once without waiting to formally declare war, she would lose her only chance of success, while Russia feared that if she did not secretly mobilise some time before a declaration of war, she would never be able to move her troops sufficiently rapidly to protect her western frontier from the attaeks of a more highly organised and disciplined army which had made every lcind of preparation years in advance The Fear Complex. The great difficulty that the Disarmament Conference is facing is to get rid of this fear complex, and to move the eentre of thought from national isolation to international eooperation. Then there are the private fears of individuals. Most of us have some private fears of our own — the fear of sulfering, the fear of poverty, the fear of what the future may bring, the fear of what other people may think of us if we do this or don't do that, and the commonest of all fears, the fear of death. Some are afraid of God, afraid of religion beeause it teaches of God, and they would rather keep all such thoughts away. In all these varied experiences of life, we see how fear dominates the situation Jesus' Teachings. When Jesus was born into this world of ours, fears were even more widespread than they are now, and so we shall notiee that in His teaching of His disciples, one of the first things He strove to deal witli in them was to dispel this fear complex, otherwise they would be unable to convey His message to the world — a message of confidence and hope to take the place of the disease of fear and p'essimism. To do this he had to clarify and enlargo their religious ideas, to remove the misconceptions that were mixed up with their ideas of God, to show that His message was intended to replace all the faise ideas of God that dominated the minds of not only the heathen nations, b„ even of the Jews also. If we examine the religions of the world of those days, and of those of the heathen in the world of to-day, we shall see that the underlying spirit of them all is one of fear. The many saerifieas in all heathen worship are attempts to try and appease the spirits or the deities which seem to the worshippers to be bent on their destruction. Their whole conception of the Divine Being or Beings was that they were malevolent powers who needed in some way to be propitiated, if disasters were to be averted. And even now among ourselves who have accepted the Christian faith, many retain some of the relics of the heathen superstitions of their early ancestors which it was Christ's purpose to eliminate. The New Testament teaching of the Atonement upon the Cross for the sins of the whole world, and such statements as that of St. John "if any man sin we have an Advocate with the Father Jesus Christ the righteous and He is the propitiation for our sins," are given as the true answer to these needs of human nature, to give an assurance of reconciliation (which is the meaning of atonement) capable of removing fear from the diseased mind in its distorted conception of God, and replacing it with a picture of Divine love — for as the same St. John reminds lis: "Perfect love casteth out fear " It is no use trying to get rid of fear by simply driving it underground by mere force of will. It will be sure to re-appear at some inconvenient moment, for in this way it is never really conquered. The only way is to trace it to its source and deal with it at its root. The real root of fear is want of confidence and trust We fear men when we do not trust them. W. fear nations when we have no confid ence in them, and this is intensified

the more we hold aloof from them. We are afraid of God when we have no faith in His love or justice, and when we hold aloof from Him as revealed to us in Christ. Need for Confidence. The business of the world is built up on. confidence, and when that confidence is lost, business ceases, and all artificial ways of restoring it are useless. So in the individual heart and mind, the root of peace and the seeret of the absenee of fear lies in confidence in God and in His righteous government. This is the teaching of Seripture from Genesis to Revelation. It was what our Lord emphasised in His own life and in all His teaching.