Fear shines a light on those areas of our lives where we have not given up everything to Christ. Think about the Rich Young Man. When Jesus asked him to sell everything and to follow him, the young man went away sad.

There a secret areas of our heart where we fear God’s plan may not be our plan.

Think about Job. He jumped through hoops and performed religious acts almost in a superstitious manner to make sure God did not take what matter most to him.

A few years back, God took me on a long bible study of fear and faith. Every service I attended, every book I read and the studies I did on my own seemed to be focused on fear.

One pastor said Idols worshiped by people of old were physical representations of what they feared most. We do the same thing.

We pray to God asking Him to answer our prayers. When God’s answer seems to be no, we grab it back and say, I will handle this. We equate hard times and loss of someone we love or something important to us as being God not answering.

We place it before God when we think he is our only answer but as long as we think we can handle the issue we keep it in our control. Why? Because we fear God might say no.

Where there is fear we do not trust God to be in control and that if He says no in that area of our life than it is for His higher purpose. A purpose we may never understand.