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    Fearless: Free in Christ in an Age of Anxiety
    Fearless: Free in Christ in an Age of Anxiety
    Fearless: Free in Christ in an Age of Anxiety
    Ebook144 pages3 hours

    Fearless: Free in Christ in an Age of Anxiety

    By Rachel Starr Thomson, Carolyn Currey and Mercy Hope

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    About this ebook

    You can live free from fear.

    Fear steals our lives from us. It steals our impact and cripples our joy.

    In our modern world, it can seem impossible to avoid it. Bad news is everywhere. There are a million reasons to be afraid.

    But what if you could be free from all of that? What if your default mode was courageand faith, not fear and timidity?

    True freedom is possible--through the presence of Jesus and the practice of his Word.

    In this book, we expose the insidious roots of fear and explore the answers found in the Bible. Learn how: 

    • The fear of the Lord will break the power of lesser fears
    • Holiness will change your identity--and give you courage to stand against the tide
    • The presence of God is the answer to the world's troubles
    • You can practice the gifts of power, love, and a sound mind

    Read it today. You can live fearless.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLittle Dozen Press
    Release dateDec 30, 2017
    ISBN9781386209881
    Fearless: Free in Christ in an Age of Anxiety
    Author

    Rachel Starr Thomson

    Rachel Starr Thomson is in love with Jesus and convinced the gospel will change the world. Rachel is a woman of many talents and even more interests: she’s a writer, editor, indie publisher, singer, speaker, Bible study teacher, and world traveler. The author of the Seventh World Trilogy, The Oneness Cycle, and many other books, she also tours North America and other parts of the world as a speaker and spoken-word artist with 1:11 Ministries. Adventures in the Kingdom launched in 2015 as a way to bring together Rachel’s explorations, in fiction and nonfiction, of what it means to live all of life in the kingdom of God. Rachel lives in the beautiful Niagara Region of southern Ontario, just down the river from the Falls. She drinks far too much coffee and tea, daydreams of visiting Florida all winter, and hikes the Bruce Trail when she gets a few minutes. A homeschool graduate from a highly creative and entrepreneurial family, she believes we’d all be much better off if we pitched our television sets out the nearest window. LIFE AND WORK (BRIEFLY) Rachel began writing on scrap paper sometime around grade 1. Her stories revolved around jungle animals and sometimes pirates (they were actual rats . . . she doesn’t remember if the pun was intended). Back then she also illustrated her own work, a habit she left behind with the scrap paper. Rachel’s first novel, a humorous romp called Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, was written when she was 13, followed within a year by the more serious adventure story Reap the Whirlwind. Around that time, she had a life-changing encounter with God. The next several years were spent getting to know God, developing a new love for the Scriptures, and discovering a passion for ministry through working with a local ministry with international reach, Sommer Haven Ranch International. Although Rachel was raised in a strong Christian home, where discipleship was as much a part of homeschooling as academics, these years were pivotal in making her faith her own. At age 17, Rachel started writing again, this time penning the essays that became Letters to a Samuel Generation and Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord’s Prayer. In 2001, Rachel returned to fiction, writing what would become her bestselling novel and then a bestselling series–Worlds Unseen, book 1 of The Seventh World Trilogy. A classic fantasy adventure marked by Rachel’s lyrical style, Worlds Unseen encapsulates much of what makes Rachel’s writing unique: fantasy settings with one foot in the real world; adventure stories that explore depths of spiritual truth; and a knack for opening readers’ eyes anew to the beauty of their own world–and of themselves. In 2003, Rachel began freelance editing, a side job that soon blossomed into a full-time career. Four years later, in 2007, she co-founded Soli Deo Gloria Ballet with Carolyn Currey, an arts ministry that in 2015 would be renamed as 1:11 Ministries. To a team of dancers and singers, Rachel brought the power of words, writing and delivering original narrations, spoken-word poetry, and songs for over a dozen productions. The team has ministered coast-to-coast in Canada as well as in the United States and internationally. Rachel began publishing her own work under the auspices of Little Dozen Press in 2007, but it was in 2011, with the e-book revolution in full swing, that writing became a true priority again. Since that time Rachel has published many of her older never-published titles and written two new fiction series, The Oneness Cycle and The Prophet Trilogy. Over 30 of Rachel’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction works are now available in digital editions. Many are available in paperback as well, with more released regularly. The God she fell in love with as a teenager has remained the focus of Rachel’s life, work, and speaking.

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      Book preview

      Fearless - Rachel Starr Thomson

      Before You Begin ...

      TTA%20Waterfall%20Image

      YOU’RE READING A BOOK on overcoming fear—so we know you’re serious about aligning your life with the will and character of God. To go deeper, join us for a personal journey through 8 key areas of life in our free email-based course, Time to Align.

      This free, 11-week course is a spiritual recalibration: a chance to bring your heart, soul, mind, and strength into alignment.

      Click here to enroll today, and you’ll get the first lesson in your inbox immediately.

      Chapter 1: Power, Love, and a Sound Mind

      Shortly before he was crucified, Jesus told the story of the parable of the talents. The story goes like this: a rich man called three of his servants together just before he went away on a journey and entrusted parts of his fortune to them. He gave one servant five talents (a talent was a unit of money), one servant two, and the final servant one, to each according to his own ability (Matthew 25:14-30).

      The rich man went on his journey, and the three servants went to work with their gifts—well, two of them did. After a long time the master returned to settle accounts.

      The first servant proudly told the master that he had invested his five talents and produced five more. The gift given to him had multiplied. Well done, good and faithful servant! the master declared. You were faithful over a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Share your master’s joy!

      The second servant likewise presented his results: he too had doubled his money. He received exactly the same reward from the master.

      Finally the third servant came forward. This time the scene was different. Rather than mutual joy and excitement over multiplication and fruitfulness, this servant says, "Master, I know you. You’re a difficult man, reaping where you haven’t sown and gathering where you haven’t scattered seed. So I was afraid and went off and hid your talent in the ground. Look, you have what is yours."

      The master’s response is harsh. Rather than being sympathetic toward the man’s fear, he calls him You evil, lazy servant, and says that at the very least, he should have put the money in a bank so it would gather interest.

      He then instructs that the one talent be taken away from this servant and given to the one who has ten. The servant himself is thrown out of the master’s service.

      This is a familiar story, and for many of us the reaction is the same. Something inside us says, Not fair!

      This man was only given one talent. He wasn’t equipped. He got shorted from the start. Maybe his fears were justified; the master was harsh and unreasonable.

      But There’s a Twist

      This story isn’t all it seems to be on the surface. Its ancient hearers would have heard it correctly, but we’re a little deafened by the word talent.

      In its original context, this word was a unit of measurement, specifically of weight. A talent was like a pound or a ton. Since money in the ancient world had its value measured by substance (gold, silver) and weight, a talent was a certain amount of money.

      A pretty big amount.

      How big? Just how much money are we talking? When we read this story through modern eyes we’re tempted to think the last servant got the equivalent of ten bucks. No wonder he buried it; that kind of money can be lost in a matter of minutes. With so little to work with, he only had one chance to get it right. That kind of scarcity can be paralyzing!

      Most of us probably identify more with the one-talent guy than the other two servants. Compared to others, we don’t feel like we have much to offer. We’re afraid of losing the little we do have. We may feel like the world (or even God) is against us.

      The man with only one talent buried it out of fear. We tend to feel like that wasn’t such a bad call.

      But we don’t quite read the numbers correctly. A talent wasn’t equivalent to ten bucks, or twenty, or even a hundred. What the man was given equaled fifty years’ wages—in today’s dollars, roughly $1.25 million dollars.

      You Have a Gift, and It Is Immensely Valuable

      The point of Jesus’s parable isn’t that God has given each of us an enormous sum of money. Obviously that’s not true. He’s using money as a picture of something else—the gifts God has given and entrusted to every person.

      This is actually how talent came to have its current meaning in English—that of a gift or an innate skill that someone is born with. Even today we tend to describe such gifts as God-given.

      Several key points stand out in this story, and we want you to see them clearly:

      Every person—including you—has been given a gift by God.

      Every gift is of immense value, no matter how it might compare to someone else’s gifts. No one got a cheap or valueless gift from God.

      Every gift has the capacity to multiply (and is meant to do so).

      The gifts are essentially on loan, meant to be stewarded.

      To recap: You have been given something of immense value. You have also been given the ability to multiply it. Even if you have received the least of all possible gifts, it is still the spiritual equivalent of a million dollars!

      First Corinthians 12:4-11 tells us the same thing in plain language: Now there are different gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different ministries, but the same Lord. And there are different activities, but the same God activates each gift in each person . . . One and the same Spirit is active in all these, distributing to each person as He wills.

      We should notice a couple of other things as well. The gifts in the parable were given according to each one’s ability. God knew exactly what each person was equipped to handle and to handle well. The third servant didn’t lack ability to make good use of the gift given to him.

      Finally, the master did not return until after a long time. The servant had all the time, money, and ability to do something great with what he was given, but he chose not to use any of it. He feared risk so much that his fears became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given an enormous gift he was afraid to lose, he ended up with nothing.

      The Thief in the Background

      The servant in the parable got robbed. Because of his master’s generosity, he was made quite rich—but a thief stole everything he had and then some.

      The thief was fear.

      Why, in a book about fear, are we making such a big deal out of the principle that you have been given something of immense value?

      Because fear is more than a feeling, and the consequences of being controlled by fear are bigger than you are. The Bible uses many pictures to describe our lives in this world, and fear will make you ineffective in every single one of them.

      ●  If life is a battle, fear will keep you off the front lines.

      ●  If life is a race, fear will stop you from running it.

      ●  If life is a wrestling match, fear will prevent you from getting in the ring.

      ●  If life is an opportunity, fear will stop you from investing.

      Life is full of real risks. In one sense, there are lots of good reasons to be afraid. Victory requires a fight. But the greatest risk of all is that you won’t fight—that you’ll allow fear to keep you on the couch, with your talent buried in the ground and all of its multiplying effects dormant and dead.

      If you get up to fight a battle, you might lose. But if you choose never to fight, the loss is guaranteed.

      Freedom from Feelings?

      The legendary World War II general George S. Patton once said, All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty.

      Irrational fears exist. They range from extreme phobias (of things as varied as the outdoors, insects, and the number thirteen) to common irrational fears like the anxiety many of us feel in the dark. But there are also rational fears—good reasons to be afraid. How do we deal with these?

      In this book, we’re going to talk about living free from fear. But we aren’t proposing that you can (or should) live free from feelings. Fear is something of a catch-all term in English, so we want to break it down here and make it clear what we’re talking about.

      At its most basic, fear is a feeling or instinct given to us for our own protection. For example, most of us would feel fear if asked to jump off a skyscraper or wrestle an alligator. We might feel instinctively afraid of a stranger in a dark alley or of walking across thin ice.

      This kind of fear, just a feeling that tells you there is danger ahead, isn’t bad. Fear becomes a bad thing, a thief and an enemy, when the good instinct goes too far. It doesn’t discriminate well between what really is harmful and what is just scary because it’s outside of our comfort zone. It predicts the future for us and tells us what we can’t do. It starts to run roughshod in our thought lives and in our emotions. And so it begins to direct our lives.

      When fear gets the reins of our lives, it becomes what we might call cowardice. We don’t like to think of ourselves as cowards, but the temptation to cowardice is very strong, and when we give in, this type of fear will displace God and control our lives. This is just as true for Christians as for anyone else!

      This bad fear is the good natural instinct given to us by God after it has morphed into a monster. It is a helpful instinct blown out of all proportion, applied indiscriminately and often irrationally. It particularly becomes a problem when it stops us from walking out the call of God in our lives—whether that means obeying God by moving to Africa or just obeying him by loving the neighbor down the street.

      So in this book, we aren’t talking about getting free from feelings of anxiety, stress, or worry (even though one side effect of living free from fear is that those feelings can and will lessen). We are talking about getting free of cowardice: getting out of the grip and control of fear as a guiding force in our lives and putting God in the first place where he deserves to be.

      Do It Afraid

      In her book Do It Afraid: Obeying God in the Face of Fear, Joyce Meyer writes, Just because you feel fear doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Do it afraid.

      Carolyn’s Story: Over my years as a dancer I've had my share of injuries, but none so dramatic as the five times my kneecap dislocated. The first time this happened I was about fourteen, and recovering from that injury was a real mental hurdle. As I began the daily routine of class again, I faced fear even when standing on the leg that had suffered the injury. Landing a jump on that leg or turning on it was terrifying because the possibility of

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