I find it interesting that on the cross the Lord gave us freedom. With that freedom, we get to choose to live from a place of pain or a place of joy, a place of bad thoughts and feelings, or a place of the good the Lord offers. I find it sad that more often than not, we choose to live in the bad, causing us to focus on our own struggle rather than the Lord, making life about us. I am just as guilty as the next person of this, which is why I have been examining this further. Many people I’ve met shed light on their struggles rather than on their joys. The truth of the matter is that “we can depress satan with our joy and weary him with our rest.”
One of the things I had struggled with throughout my life was fear. If asked the opposite of fear, most people would say that the opposite of fear would be courage. All of those times I lived in fear, this is what I strived for. In the Bible the Lord does say to “take courage.” We are not to rely on our own courage, but to take courage from the Lord. However, according to the Lord, the opposite of fear is not courage, but rather, love, as it says in 1 John 4. Therefore, when we are living in fear, we should not be praying for courage, but rather that we would know how much the Lord loves us. His love drives out that fear. We should be praying that we would rest in the love of our Heavenly Father and know that He has preceded each and every situation that is put before us. Because of this, each situation has already been assigned an outcome. If we believe that the Lord loves us as much as He says He does, and wants us to have fullness of life, then we should not fear anything that comes up in our lives.
This month, we are in a country that is one of the poorest in Central America and therefore has a lot of robbery, violence, darkness, and oppression. The first few days we were here, we felt the oppression thick in the air. We were all weighed down by it in different ways and were getting to a point of irritation with it all. We knew spiritual darkness was real, but I personally had never felt it so tangibly. We knew it was time to fight against it, and so that is just what we did.
Knowing the Father’s love for us, we worshipped Him, we thanked Him, we invited His light to be ushered in to erase the darkness that surrounded us. After that, the atmosphere shifted. There was a weight lifted off, and an atmosphere of joy that we welcomed in with open arms.
The next day, we no longer had fear to go into the city. We went to the center of town to play music, to pray over people and to love the people He put in front of us to bring that same light into the run down city of Diriamba. We saw the Lord show up in incredible ways and got a new drive and excitement for the rest of the month ahead.
We know that we are no longer to pray for courage, because courage is not really what we need. We are now set out to pray for love, because “perfect love drives out fear,” and perfect love is the kind that the Lord has for His children.
