Overcoming Fear with God’s Grace: Trusting Him to Finish the Task

This reflection explores how God’s grace meets us in fear, failure, and the call to obedience.

When Fear Paralyzes: The Weight of Not Knowing

I like plans. I like knowing the next step. When I don’t have that information, I often feel paralyzed. I start to get anxious and indecisive and before I realize what happened I’m in full out panic mode or just mentally shut down and stare at the wall or my phone for an hour or two.

I feel the same way about starting new things. It’s just too much work mentally and so I just avoid or procrastinate. It’s more than just stress, I literally feel like I cannot do anything right, and so why even try, “I’ll just mess it all up!”

Well, I reject that thought pattern. Mistakes DO Not have to define my life. In fact, they can enhance it. God’s grace covers the lack and fills in the cracks that my mistakes reveal. I CAN choose differently from my past. And if I choose the less than ideal, even when making the best choice based on the information I do have, God’s grace is there.

God isn’t looking for perfection but rather offers grace filled redemption.

Jehovah Jireh: The God Who Sees to It

Genesis 22:1-14 records an account of trusting God. Isaac was Abraham’s promise child, truly a miracle baby. In chapter 21 of Genesis, Abraham’s wife, Sarah, gave birth when she was 90 years old to this son. Abraham was 100. And now, God decided to test Abraham by telling him to offer Isaac as a burnt sacrifice in the land of Moriah, several days’ worth of travel (vs 1-2).

Abraham obeyed and set out with everything he needed to obey God (vs 3-4). When he caught sight of the place this sacrifice was supposed to happen, Abraham told his servants to remain where they were, and he and Isaac walked the rest of the way with the wood, the fire, and the knife (vs 6).

But Isaac was keen, and he noticed something out of the ordinary.

Isaac said to his father, Abraham,” My father?” “What is it, my son?” he replied. “Here is the fire and the wood,” Isaac said,” but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

Genesis 22:7

Notice what Abraham said in answer to this question.

God will provide for himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Abraham replied. The two of them continued on together.

Genesis 22:8

They get to the place and Abraham builds an altar and prepares the wood. Then he ties up Isaac and is nearly about to kill him with a knife, when all of a sudden!

“ABRAHAM! ABRAHAM!” The angel of the Lord calls out his name!

“Here I am! he answered.

“Do not harm the boy!” the angel said. “Do not do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God because you did not withhold your son, your only son, from me.”

Genesis 22:12

It says then that Abraham looked up and saw a ram caught in the brush nearby. He sacrificed the ram instead of his son. And in response to this whole situation, he named the place Jehovah-Jireh, which in Hebrew means,” The One Who Is, Will See To It.”

“Jehovah Jireh” becomes a guiding truth for life’s trials. The lesson is not simply that God grants material blessings, but that He intimately knows every situation. As shown in Abraham’s test, believers are called to trust in God’s timing and method of provision. This anticipation can shape a person’s response to challenges, believing confidently that the living God sees and will see to every need.

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It isn’t on us to get everything right. God knows that, and he doesn’t expect us to. He knows I will make mistakes and that is why he offers grace. Thats why Jesus came to earth, to offer rescue and redemption for our mistakes.

Psalm 103 tells us,” As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on his faithful followers. For he knows what we are made of; he realizes we are made of clay.”

Grace Over Perfection: What God Actually Requires

“Although a righteous person may fall seven times, he gets back up again, but the wicked will be brought down by calamity.”

Proverbs 24:16

You and I have a choice every day. When I fall, will I stay on the ground? Or will I choose, by God’s Grace, to get back up and trust God more than I fear my circumstances or mistakes.

Because when I stay on the ground, paralyzed by fear, when God is offering His hand of grace to me, I’m saying since I can’t do it, I’m not going to do it at all. I’m not living surrendered to His Will. I’m living pridefully.

I’m telling God,” If I stay right here, I don’t need You… You aren’t enough for me or this situation and never possibly could be.” I’m telling all those around me, believers and unbelievers alike, that they shouldn’t trust Him either.

The Truth?… ALL lies, straight from the father of lies himself. It’s also a really old lie. Like, from-the-garden-old.

The serpent said to the woman,” Surely you will not die, for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open, and you will be like divine beings who know good and evil.”

Genesis 3:4-5

God reveals in His Word what we must do and how we must become in order to walk daily in victory, in peace, in joy, and in love. We reject God just as surely as Adam and Eve did, when we tell Him, by our life and thoughts, I don’t believe you and I don’t want to live the way You’ve said. And that separates us from Him because it is sin.

Sanctification Starts in the Mind

God has been showing me recently how this is true mentally and emotionally. I used to think as long as I did all the right things and didn’t do the wrong things, that I was living right. But I was constantly thinking of worries, negativity, and problems-living in a cloud of depression and anxiety- entertaining fantasies and stories in my mind. They weren’t necessarily morally impure, but they were impure in the sense they were filling my mind and life with the dark heaviness of this world.

Instead of casting all my cares on God, I was trying to figure out a way to get through the next “emergency” that I was sure was just around the corner.

I wasn’t trusting Him to be Who He Is.

And you know what? It really wasn’t helping me be a good friend, or a caring sister, or loving daughter, or to be faithful to God. Even with all my “solutions”, I was miserable.

It truly is only by God’s grace, that He has opened my eyes to His Truth. He showed me just how selfish, burdened, and frustrated I had become by trying to live a sanctified life without a sanctified mind.

• Sanctification: the action of making or declaring something holy; the action or process of being freed from sin or purified

And here’s a wonderful, amazing, astounding thing… We can’t DO sanctification. It’s the result of God’s Grace being truly accepted for one’s own life and heart. God works when we surrender.

And God will exalt you in due time, if you humble yourselves under his mighty hand by casting all your cares on him because he cares for you. Be sober and alert. Your enemy the devil, like a roaring lion, is on the prowl looking for someone to devour. Resist him, strong in your faith, because you know that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are enduring the same kinds of suffering. And, after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace who called you to his eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him belongs the power forever. Amen.”

1 Peter 5:6-11

Rejecting the Lie, Receiving the Truth

When I refuse God’s way, I receive Satan’s lies. When I accept God’s way, I reject Satan’s lies. In the glory of God’s way, in His humility, everything else shrinks. Everything grows dim in the light of His beauty.

Including the lies. Including our own sense of identity, self-preservation, and independence.

All is dimmed.

But one thing grows brilliant, in the middle of this dimness, something that otherwise we would overlook the wonder and loveliness of.

Finish the Task: Living as an Image Bearer of Grace

But I do not consider my life worth anything to myself, so that I may finish my task and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the good news of God’s Grace.”

Acts 20:24 Emphasis mine

But above all pursue his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. “

Matthew 6:33

God grants us all we need so we can finish what He has given us. In fact, that is the point of laying all our cares on Him, so we can truly pursue Christ’s Kingdom. The point of that pursuit is that we would finish what we’ve been given through Christ. We all have a task that God has given us to finish. In order to finish, though, we must first begin and once we begin, we must keep at that beginning. Jesus told us this in Luke 9.

Jesus said to him,” No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Luke 9:62

How do we finish then?

Happy is the one who endures testing, because when he has proven to be genuine, he will receive the crown of life that God promised to those who love him.

James 1:12

When we keep at our God-given tasks, regardless of anything, because we are focused on Christ and walking and falling and rising in God’s Grace, our lives will bear testimony of His Good News of Grace.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control Against such things, there is no law.”

Galatians 5:22-23

The fruits of the Spirit evidenced in our lives and minds is to testify of God’s Grace.

Why do we finish our given tasks?

To testify of the good news of God’s grace. And that’s a fulfillment of our purpose as human beings, which is to be image bearers of God. As we work at the tasks God has given us it builds us up in Him, because in order to do what He calls us to, we must rely upon Him totally for all we need.

A life lived in, with, and for God is an absolutely beautiful one. One that brings praise to Him, from those around us when they see how He has worked, and from our own hearts.

‘Not by strength, and not be power, but by my Spirit’ says the Lord who rules overall.”

Zechariah 4:6

May God’s grace work mightily in your life and season today!

-Liz