Fear really comes from unbelief

“When you look at something and you’re afraid you’re going to lose it—how many people get afraid of losing their possessions?” says Jordan. “Losing your children to the world? Losing the respect of others? Losing your health?

“Why do you fear losing those things? Did you know that every one of those things you’re going to lose anyway? Naked you came in and naked you’re going to go out.

“All the things that you try and accumulate, you’re going to leave them. The only thing that’s going to last forever are the spiritual things you have; your identity in Christ, your riches in Christ.

“Why do we fear then? Because we have this idea that our identity, our worth, our meaning, our justification for existence, resides in what I can accumulate, how many people I can get to be happy with me, how well my children are doing so people give me accolades for that. Our fear comes from understanding we really can’t produce all that on our own.

“Your identity has to be founded in something that can’t be changed. It’s unbelief--it’s a lack of dependence on who God has made you in Jesus Christ, and who God has made Christ to you--for you to get your identity out of anything but Him.

“It’s not what you do, it’s what He did that makes you valuable. It’s not what you accomplish, it’s what He’s accomplished that gives you worth and meaning. Because He’s given you HIS value.

“I Corinthians 1:30 says, ‘But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.’

“God has given you everything your heart could ever desire or long for--all the things you seek and chase and look for behind every tree and under every rock, you have in Christ.

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“At the most basic level, sin is a refusal to trust God to give you what you’re looking for in Christ. Anger becomes fear in disguise, striking out, and fear really is unbelief.

“There’s that arrogance syndrome. It starts out with self-justification. ‘I’m going to prove that I’m right!’ As soon as you start proving that you’re right, it moves immediately into self-deception. And in order to prove that you’re right, you deceive yourself into believing that you can be right, that you are right, and pretty soon that leads into self-absorption and that creates bitterness; it’s brooding about why you’re right, and bitterness against those that don’t see it.

“You run that syndrome out there and your old sin nature turns it around and comes back, and once it’s created bitterness, that self-absorption goes right back into self-deception; goes right back into self-justification. That just intensifies the bitterness and then it becomes what Hebrews 12 calls a ‘root of bitterness' that can’t be rooted out.

“You go out into my yard, my wife and I hate dandelions. She has a little metal thing about that long and she goes out and gets that dandelion, and if you don’t get that root out way down deep, pop the top off, it will be back in two days.

“So she’ll take that thing and run it down into the ground but I can always go out and see where the dandelions were because there’s a hole where she’s dug that thing out and a root of bitterness is like that.

“To get it out it leaves a scar in your soul, in your emotions, in your heart, and you carry that along in life.

“Now, what happens in this issue of anger, and it’s obviously something Paul understood that leaders are going to face, is it’s one of the chief motivating things of religion: ‘I got to be right, I am right, I know I’m right because I got to be right, because if I’m not right, I’m nothing.’

“You always camouflage it by, ‘Well, I’m just defending the truth; I’m set for the defense and confirmation of the gospel.’ Defending the truth is a good thing, but when it morphs into self-defense, what you discover, and what you have demonstrated, is how deeply rooted your identity is in you being right. And that’s a burden you can’t bear because you aren’t right. You’re a sinner and your righteousness isn’t in you; it’s in Him.

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“If you can get that monkey off your back that you got to be right to measure up and to belong and have value, then you’re free to let His life produce His rightness in and through you. And instead of anger, you see, ‘I don’t have to be right.’ I can have the humility of mind to say, ‘I’m probably wrong somewhere in this.’ As soon as you do that, there’s that humbling of your mind, that lowliness of mind, that doesn’t say, ‘I know I’m right and I know I know the truth.’

“Listen, being right doesn’t depend on you. Would you relax and realize that? Paul says, ‘You can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.’

“Truth doesn’t depend on you. Close up shop and go fishing. Truth is still truth. That doesn’t mean you don't preach the Word and contend for the truth; it means it doesn’t depend on you.

“The other thing is you’re never 100 percent right. Not you. And when you realize and remember, ‘I’m never 100 percent right,’ No. 1 that means I’ve got more to learn if it’s doctrine. There’s always more for me to learn. If I had it all right, I could just sit down and do nothing because there’s nothing else to learn. There’s more to learn and the fact is, if you could be 100 percent right, you wouldn’t need a Savior who is.

“So when you go down through these things, it’s fascinating to me how many of the qualifications—at least 20 percent of them—have to do with that issue of pride manifesting itself in conduct through anger. Only be pride comes contention.

“What he’s looking for here, and obviously what Timothy was facing at Ephesus, were leaders who weren’t doing these things. But where does that come from? It comes from that lack of leadership.

 “In Acts 20, when Paul’s talking to these elders and bishops at Ephesus, when he called them together and met with them at Miletus, he says in verse 19 about his own manner with them, ‘Serving the Lord with all humility of mind, and with many tears, and temptations, which befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews.’

“Notice, he says ‘serving the Lord with all humility of mind.’ That’s the inside attitude he had. It’s not about me, it’s not about me being right, I don’t have to defend myself, I don’t have to make it look like I’m okay and I’m right, but ‘with many tears, and temptations.’ He was willing to appear weak so that the power of Christ might be the real issue.

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Proverbs 13:10 says, ‘Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.’

“Pride brings anger. There’s a fascinating thing about anger. Anger, more often than not, is really fear in disguise. Because when you sit down and analyze where anger comes from--and I say that because one of the issues that men, especially in leadership and ministry, have to deal with is this issue that comes out of pride—it’s that contentious, ‘I’m right and I’m going to prove that I am.’

“That anger really comes out of fear. There’s something I’m afraid I’m going to lose, there’s something I’m afraid I’m not going to get, and in order to get what I think I have a right to and not lose what I think I should keep up with, I develop anger, contention. But fear, disguised as anger, really comes from unbelief.”