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Sermon Series Introduction

A little girl who has just mastered the skill of pedaling her bicycle without those clanking training wheels. She feels confident as she beams through missing teeth, “Daddy, I’m doing it!” And then it happens; not that same day, nor the next. But almost two weeks later, she falls. This isn’t like one of those little falls that she had as she first learned to balance. This is a bad fall; a 7 band-aid fall. And just like that, the confident beam is gone. The blissful freedom that she enjoyed has been stolen from her and has been replaced with the smothering cloud of fear.

Fear isn’t just the enemy of little girls and boys learning to ride bikes. Fear is a hateful beast that haunts all of us, no matter who we are. Sometimes ​it’s subtle, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s rational, and sometimes it’s just not. But one thing is constant: fear is a reality for us because we are finite. We are limited in our knowledge and abilities. We just don’t know everything! We know a fraction about the past, less about the present, and the future is just a dream. When we reach the end of our knowledge, these powerful minds – God-given, yet cursed by sin – slip into the “The Land of Possibilities” and torture us with what “could” happen. Pastor David Jeremiah said, “Our greatest fear is the conditional might—the threat of what might happen. Fear trades in the market of possibility. Or even impossibility—for fear is the tyrant of the imagination. It imposes itself upon us from the shadows, from its hazy mirror of maybe.” So it’s​ not only the endless list of phobias that we’re concerned with, rather the fears that keep us up at night. The fears that rob us of our joy and steal our peace. The fears that cause us to sin against God and each other. These fears that destroy our lives are all around us, rushing in like unrelenting flood waters, drowning out our hope.

So the question becomes, “how do we deal with this basic and seemingly unconquerable enemy of fear? Are we all doomed?” Well, according to God the Father and His perfect Son, Jesus the answer is simple: “Fear not​.” Some people might be thinking, “That’s easy for them to say, their infinite! They know everything and can do everything!” This sermon series is intended to help us understand why our gracious and compassionate God would say something like that to His beloved, yet exceedingly worrisome creation. We will also take a glimpse into His heart as we study the lives of Esther and Ruth, two women who had every reason to fear.

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