Free From Fear

“Sanctify the Lord of hosts Himself; and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread” Isa.8:13 .

For you to fulfill your destiny, you will have to do some things regardless of the fear you feel. Being fearless is not the “absence of fear” but the absence of “the fear” of fear. Over the next few days we are going to be looking at three “fears” that attempt to dislocate or displace us from our Stand and prevent us from Standing Tall as the light of the world.

The first is the fear of people’s opinion. Some people have been prevented from being the best they can be because of people’s opinions. The fear of what this person or that person would say has kept so many people from Standing Tall. Some businesses have died, while some never existed because of the fear of what people will think or what people will say. Sadly also many marriages never came to be because of the fear of people’s opinions. What will they say if I marry a foreigner? Someone asked me if I was saying a Christian could marry from any tribe as long as it is God approved… even an outcast? Who has called the person an outcast, is it God or is it man? Yet you are afraid of what people will say. You need to be delivered form people pleasing. It is totally scary the number of destinies that have been truncated because of the fear of people’s opinions.

Craig Groeschel puts it this way, “Becoming obsessed with what people think about you is the quickest way to forget what God thinks about you”. You cannot be a God pleaser and a people pleaser at the same time. It will not work! If you chose to please God sometimes you will rub off negatively on some people. You have to be able to live with that. You probably are doing a soul search to ascertain if you are a people pleaser or not. Well, you know you are a people pleaser when:

#1. You feel less than adequate if you do not have clothing or car with the “right labels”.

#2. You feel you must have the “right friends”, join the “right social club” to be accepted.

#3. Your decisions are laced with these underlying questions: “What will they think?” “Will they like me if I do this?” “Will this help me fit in?”

If you struggle with these things then you are a people pleaser. And that fear can keep you from your destiny. The only person you are capable of totally pleasing is God.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, please set me totally free from the conscious and unconscious fear of people’s opinions and from people pleasing, in Jesus Name.