Fear Factor

Fear: what do you really say about it? Fear is one of those things that addicts and non-addicts alike face everyday. They stem from childhood trauma's, self esteem, relationships, social standards, financial problems, grief, and many other things that are too numerous to mention. We as a people not just addicts have things that hold us back, keep us up at night, and hinder many aspects of our life including religion, sex, and relationships because of fear of something.

I personally am getting to the point where I have had enough. I have been doing some reading on spiritual warfare and have read some interesting points on what fear can do to a persons mind, body and soul. Satan knows his days are numbered and so do his fallen ones. I know I have mentioned life being like a game of chess and we the people are pawns in a spiritual battle that we don't see. But I have to tell you, I believe it. I have read in books and in the Bible how Satan uses our fears, our insecurities, and our self esteem against us. God has not given us a spirit of fear, fear is not a gift from God. It is a tool of Satan and he is using it to bring us down and drag us into a lifestyle that is built on decisions based in self. Now don't get me wrong I am not saying that I am perfect or that I don't make decisions based in self because I do. I do, I do and I do. I do not feel good about those decisions but I do make them because it is more comfortable to live in fear than to face what I know is going to require more of me than what I am comfortable doing. I can do some amazing things like tell people I am sex addict and stand and directly answer questions about it. But I can't tell my wife I am hurting still over our loss of miscarried children, because I have a fear of facing my pain about it. So I make the decision based in self to keep it inside and that pain comes out in anger, confusion, sexual acting out to receive comfort and feel normal. I get tired of running from my fears, I have been fearful since I was a kid about one thing or another. So having an addictive personality I seek comfort in something and it usually isn't positive. It has truly wore me down. So to find out that fear isn't a Gift from God to keep His believers safe but a tool of Satan I actually feel violated.

With that being said, I can't begin to know your fears only you know what they are. I can only say this as a sexual addict fear is our enemy, Satan is our enemy and we our falling right into his trap of seeking comfort in many things that is not God honoring. For every act of comfort from fear that isn't a prayer for help is a victory for Satan, a loss for us, and essentially it is a sadness for God I will bet. As believers in Christ we have to drag ourselves out of fear and quit seeking comfort in our addiction. I have had to face that fear head on this week and to say the least it is quite disturbing to realize my fear that keeps me in my addiction is the fear of living without my addiction. Remember I had a post that asked God about what my road block to my addiction was? He told me. "You have given me your heart but you have not given me your head, we have work to do there still" He was right. It is what I have known essentially 94% of my life and that is to be sexual, to seek comfort and hide. To use sex, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, isolation, anger, anxiety, selfishness, resentments, lies, and other clinical terms that I more than likely have done over the years to run from fears. Notice prayer didn't make that list. I did.

Fear is a tool of Satan, and we as a species of people are naive enough to call his work our comfort zone. Fear squashes the spirit. It is the hardest battle we fight as human beings because it requires more of us. We can fight for peace, or Independence or justice or something else. We can have opinions on others lives as to what they should do and how they need to act. What they need to stand up for blah, blah, blah! But we fail ourselves. I have a lot of fears to overcome. I still act within my "comfort zone", but I am fighting for myself to address those fears one fear at a time. I wouldn't say confront them if I wasn't trying to do that myself one day at a time. If I wasn't that would make me a hypocrite and Jesus makes his point very clear on hypocrites, He does not like it when people do that.

Lets talk about Jesus and fear for a minute though. Jesus is the son of God, He is God become man and paid the ultimate price of dying of horrible death to give us life eternal if we believe in Him and the reason He did it. But His death was horrible and He knew it was going to be. That day which He was sent to Earth to accomplish had arrived. He spent hours praying in solitude asking His Father to Take the cup from Him, He was very scared. I do not blame Him, He got beaten bloody, scorned, mocked, betrayed, spit on, nails driven through His bones and set up on a Cross to die for the whole town to see. Soldiers were auctioning His clothes and others continued to mock Him saying "why don't you save your self" while he was intense pain, then to top it all off He got stabbed in the process. I myself couldn't of walked over to soldiers to give myself up knowing that was going to happen. So in that regard I think He even took care of our fear of death by confronting His own. He gave us knowledge that we should not fear death because we will have life everlasting through His sacrifice of being innocent and dying a criminals death. Fear is a tool of Satan and Jesus once again defeated him by not letting His fear keep Him from what was the right thing to do.

Fear is such an individual subject that only we know what we need to confront and what we make be walking into by confronting it. Jesus did it. It is not easy, I still struggle with lots of fears, I am working on them. We all need to. Because if we stay caught in fear, Satan can work in our lives as he has done in mine and continues to do. But each time we confront a fear, it is no longer a fear, it becomes something that we will know how to deal with later if it comes up, if that makes sense. Or it will completely alleviate a problem that has been plaguing us for years.

So in conclusion, from a stand point of addiction, we all know what our fears have made us do, what we know we probably will do, and keeps us from what we know is right. I myself do not want to get to my last breath and have it be one of fear because of the sins I have done to avoid fear.

I searched for scripture on fear and this is the passage I have been led to share and I think it is a really good tie up to us running to everything else but God to escape fear. This passage is from the book of John. 1John 5;21: Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God's place in your hearts.

My prayers are with you all. Jason.