35 Sermon Illustrations on Fear

As a child it was fun to watch the movies about the swamp monster that ate an entire city, or the space alien that tried to conquer New York or Tokyo. These movies were fun because you could be afraid for an hour or so, and then it was all over. The monster was killed; the aliens were fought off. It is not fun to be afraid in the "real" sense. Fear is that emotion that is so well known. It is produced by a sense of danger, impending calamity or some dire emergency, or even by walking into a dentist's office. It is a powerful emotion that can damage both the physical body and the personality. Fear can even block the thought processes. John Madden, of CBS Sports crisscrosses the country many times each fall in a customized bus because he is afraid of flying. A few years ago, one first-round draft choice in the NBA quickly ended his career with an unconditional release by his team because of his paralyzing fear of flying. Several years ago, a televised circus act with Bengal tigers was broadcast live. The tiger trainer went into the cage with several tigers to do a routine performance. The door was locked behind him. The spotlights highlighted the cage, the television cameras moved in close, and the audience watched in suspense as the trainer put the tigers through their act. However, in the middle of the performance, the lights went out! For 20 or 30 seconds the trainer was locked in a dark cage with Bengal tigers, a whip and a chair. The tigers could see the trainer, but he could not see them! After the event was over, in an interview, the trainer was asked how he felt about his situation in the cage. He first admitted to the chilling fear of the situation, but he pointed out that the tigers did not know that he could not see them. He said, "I just kept cracking my whip and talking to them until the lights came on. They never knew I could not see them as well as they could see me." This story says something about many fears. Face them and go on doing the best you can. As a child you may have had a fear of the dark. As an adult you may fear failure or rejection, the future, some potential health crisis, or of your death or the death of a loved one. The Bible has the answer for our fears. John wrote: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear...." (1 John 4:18). Christ's love is the perfect defense against the physical and mental effects of fear. Paul said it this way; "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). The phrase "fear not" is found at least 365 times in various forms throughout the Bible. The Hebrews writer says, "that we may confidently say, 'The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid....'" One writer said it this way: "The greatness of our fears shows us the littleness of our faith." We need to pray about our fears and our faith, and turn to the Lord for help to face our fears. The Fear of Risk Henry Fairlie of the Washington Post, writing in the Tulsa World, states that the "fear of risk is killing the American Spirit." He points out our over-reaction to Three Mile Island and the engine on one DC-10. He believes that the nation that won't build a dam because of a small snail darter, or that will delay a carriage to the stars because it might fall like Skylab is in deep trouble. He asked, "Was the Mayflower seaworthy?" He contends that a group of Americans today would not have the heart to cross the Rockies as our forefathers did years ago. It would be too risky! There is a lesson here for the church of our Lord. Many good works go wanting for fear of the risk involved. Some Christians will not become soul winners because of the risk of being hurt. Others have never given liberally to God because of fear of poverty. Elders refuse to become involved in domestic and world evangelism because they might not succeed. Another won't defend truth for the same reason. No doubt but what the "fear of risk" has killed many good programs in the church. There is no "fear of risk" for Christ. He knew that He came into the world to die for all. He asked his followers to deny themselves daily and take up their crosses and walk! There will always be some perils, but think of the risk if we don't! The Known or the Unknown Several generations ago, during one of the most turbulent of the desert wars in the Middle East, a spy was captured and sentenced to death by a general of the Persian army. The general, a man of intelligence and compassion, had adopted a strange and unusual custom in such cases. He permitted the condemned person to make a choice. The prisoner could either face a firing squad or pass through the Black Door. As the moment of the execution drew near, the general ordered the spy to be brought before him for a short, final interview, the primary purpose of which was to receive the answer of the doomed man to the query: "What shall it be-the firing squad or the Black Door?" This was not an easy decision, and the prisoner hesitated, but soon made it known that he much preferred the firing squad to the unknown horrors that might await him behind the ominous and mysterious door. Not long thereafter, a volley of shots in the courtyard announced that the grim sentence had been fulfilled. The general, staring at his boots, turned to his aide and said, "You see how it is with men; they will always prefer the known to the unknown. It is characteristic of people to be afraid of the undefined. Yet I gave him his choice." "What lies beyond the Black Door?" asked the aide. "Freedom," replied the general, "and I've known only a few brave enough to take it." The story illustrates the situation many people face each day-a choice between the known and the unknown. Few have the courage to come alive, to stop being engulfed in a sea of mediocrity-humbled and dulled by failure to recognize their own potential. They lack the fortitude to stop living their lives in a mentally-chloroformed condition in that ignoble mass of humanity... the uncommitted. The choice is yours (Philippians 4:13). "By grace ye are saved through faith" (Ephesians 4:28). "We live by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). From Whom Are You Running? Christian Clippings (Sept. 1993, pp. 14f) had this poignant example of a common human response: "Sometime ago, newspapers carried the story of a young fellow named William, who was a fugitive from the police. The teenager had run away with his girlfriend because the parents had been trying to break them up. What William didn't know was that an ailment he had been seeing the doctor about was diagnosed, just after his disappearance, as cancer. "Now, here was William, doing his best to elude the police, lest he lose his love, while they were doing their best to find him, lest he lose his life. He thought they were after him to punish him; they were really after him to save him. William is representative of every man, whose guilt tells him God is after him to straightjacket him in this life and torture him forever."

When the passengers gallop by as if fear made them speedy, the ear follows them with an open mouth. Let them walk by in confident neglect, and the dog will not stir at all. It is a weakness that every creature takes advantage of.

— J. Beaumont

It is curious to think how often these needless fears, which cause so much unnecessary anxiety and misery, are the result of pure miscalculation; and this miscalculation not made in a hurry, but deliberately. I have a friend who told me this. When he was married, he had exactly five hundred pounds a year, and no means of adding to that income. So, as he could not increase his income, his business was to keep down his expenditure below it. But neither he nor his wife knew much about household management, and he was a good deal victimized by his servants. After doing all he could to economize he found, at the end of the third month of his financial year, that he had spent exactly one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Four times one hundred and twenty-five pounds he calculated, made six hundred pounds a year; which was just one hundred more than he had got. So the debtor's prison appeared to loom in view or some total change in his mode of life, which it seemed almost impossible for him to make without very painful circumstances: and he weeks the thought almost drove him distracted. Day and night: it never was absent. At length one day, brooding over his prospects, he suddenly discovered that four times one hundred and twenty-five made just five hundred, an not six hundred: so that all his fears were groundless. He was relieved, he told me; but somehow his heart had been so burdened and sunk by those anxious weeks; that, though the cause of anxiety was removed, it was a long time before it seemed to recover its spring.

— Boyd

St. Ambrose says that a Christian wife was on a journey with her heathen husband, when a terrific thunder-storm arose, which overwhelmed the man with terror. His wife asked the cause. He replied, "Are not you afraid?" She answered, "No, not at all: for I know that it is the voice of my heavenly Father; and shall a child be afraid of a father's voice?" The husband saw that his wife had what he had not; and this led him to the adoption of Christianity.

A ship was on her voyage for a southern port, when a fearful storm burst upon her, filling all hearts with fear. A sailor had his little boy on board with him. Seeing his confidence, a passenger asked him, "Don't you think the bark will be lost, and all be drowned?"—"Oh, no!" he answered: "I have just been out on deck; and I know we are all safe, for father's at the wheel."

He that stands below, and looks to the top of St. Paul's, or any other high place, thinks the people upon the height but children, while those below are giants. If he stands on the height, and looks down, the case is reversed. So it is with men. Their troubles and worldly interests seem great while grovelling among them; but let them get up where God resides, and how trivial will all appear!

A royal Bengal tiger, kept at the Residency, Calcutta, exhibited the greatest terror at the sight of a mouse. If the mouse moved about, the tiger ran or sprang away, as if in dread of destruction. A fall of his foot would have crushed his enemy; but his fear made him blind to the truth.

One day when D'Alembert and Condorcet were dining with Voltaire, they proposed to converse of atheism; but Voltaire stopped them at once. "Wait," said he, "till my servants have withdrawn: I do not wish to have my throat cut to-night."

Those who "halt between two opinions," in the matter of religion, are like travellers who halt in indecision at cross-roads, with tempest and the night hurrying up behind them; like a railway pointsman, who hesitates which way to move the points whilst a train is rapidly approaching; like a pilot, who doubts what to do with the helm when the ship is driving before the wind through a dangerous channel.

— Union Magazine

The Duke of Brunswick, whose diamonds are valued at two million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, dares not leave Paris at any period of the year: his diamonds keep him chained there. He dares not sleep away a single night. Then he lives in a house constructed not so much for comfort as security. It is burglar-proof, surrounded on every side by a high wall: the wall itself is surmounted by a lofty iron railing defended by innumerable sharp spear-heads, which are so contrived, that, if any person touches one of them, a chime of bells begins instantly to ring an alarm: this iron railing cost him £2,821. He keeps his diamonds in a thick wall: his bed is placed against it, that no burglar may break into it without killing, or at least waking him, and that he may amuse himself without leaving his bed. The safe is lined with granite and with iron: if it is opened by violence, a discharge of fire-arms, which will inevitably kill the burglar, takes place; and, at the same time, a chime of bells in every room in the house is set ringing. He has but one window in his bedroom; the sash of the stoutest iron, and cannot be entered unless one be master of the secret combination of the lock. A case of a dozen six-barelled revolvers, loaded and capped, lies upon a table within reach of his bed. Jeffers.

In some parts of Canada, where the country is still thinly settled by people, wild animals are quite numerous. In one of these communities there once lived a boy who was in the village late one night. He had been at the village-store, and had heard the men talking about a wildcat that had been seen in that neighbourhood a short time before. The boy was not a coward, but when he started for his home, three miles away, in the country, he was nervous. Nothing happened, however, until he was climbing over a set of bars at the end of a lane leading through a piece of woods near his home. Then he heard the bushes moving and twigs crackling under the feet of some animal the other side of the lane-fence. He thought of the wildcat. He jumped to the ground, picked up a heavy stick he had seen under a tree on his way through that day and listened. Nearer and nearer came the rustling of the bushes, and every little while he could hear an animal sniff the air. Finally it came to the fence, clambered up opposite him. The boy raised his club and waited, and when the animal jumped down beside him, its eyes shining in the darkness, he struck with all his might. Off the beast went into the darkness. All was silence again, and the boy stood listening and trembling. Then from the top of a nearby hill he heard a dog howl with pain. He found, next morning, that it was only a neighbour's dog that had frightened him so. That boy is not the only one who has seen things mistakenly, just because he was afraid. If you are dreading something, you will think that everything that happens brings the thing you dread. Usually nothing happens at all. The trouble was only in the person's mind, just as that wildcat was in the boy's mind, and so every noise he could not explain was a wildcat. I am sure David must have known something about that fear when, as a boy, he watched his sheep out on the lonely hills at night. But David learned that there was One who was able to protect him by night as well as by day. It was God. And so he wrote of God: "He that keepeth thee will not slumber. God is thy keeper. God is thy shade upon thy right hand. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day; for the pestilence that walketh in darkness.... It shall not come nigh thee." Let us remember that no real harm can come to us unless it comes from within ourselves. God is our protector. In His love we can trust by day, and in His care we can lay us down to sleep at night without a fear.

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A well-known officer of Her Majesty’s army, who has proved his strength and courage in more than one campaign, turns pale at the sight of a cat. On one occasion, when asked out to dinner, his host, who was rather skeptical as to the reality of this feeling, concealed a cat in an ottoman in the dining-room. Dinner was announced and commenced, but his guest was evidently ill at ease; and at length declared his inability to go on eating, as he was sure there was a cat in the room. An apparently thorough but unavailing search was made; but his visitor was so completely upset that the host, with many apologies for his experiment, “let the cat out of the bag,” and out of the ottoman at the same time.--_Cassell’s Family Magazine._

This incident is told by Dr. R. F. Horton in the _Christian Endeavor World_:

I had been addressing a large midday congregation in Leeds, and a deep seriousness pervaded the atmosphere. The closing hymn appointed began, “Sin-sick and Sorrow-laden”; and by some inconceivable oddity of my own mind I gave it out, quite deliberately and distinctly, “Seasick and Sorrow-laden.” I perceived what I had done in a second. I literally trembled, for it was impossible to recall the slip without calling attention to it. I feared that there would be an awful titter, or even an explosion of laughter. Wonderful to say, it was as if no one but myself noticed the blunder, and I was awed into gravity, not only by the occasion, but by my fear of what might happen.

Admiral Dupont was once explaining to Farragut the reason why he failed to enter Charlestown harbor with his fleet of iron-clads. He gave this reason and that reason and the other reason; and Farragut remained silent until he had got through, and then said, “Ah, Dupont, there was one more reason.” “What is that?” “You didn’t believe you could do it.”

Is there not an Eastern apologue which tells how the Angel of Pestilence was questioned as to the ten thousand victims he had slain? And did he not answer, “Nay, Lord, I took but a thousand; the rest were slain by my friend Panic.” How many, too, have sunk into the deep waters of the black river and been floated on to the ocean of eternity, for very paralysis of hope when the evil hour was upon them and they had just wetted their feet on the brink! They could, and they would have stept back to the solid shore; but they had no courage for the attempt, no energy to strike out to the land. The waters closed over their bowed head, and they sobbed away their breath in the very supineness of terror, the very lethargy of hopeless fear. Death is like everything else--a foe to be fought, a wild beast to be kept at bay. They who contend with most spirit live the greater number of days. The will to live and the determination not to die make the most efficacious antidote against the poison of the “lethal dart.” The hopelessness of fear is that poison itself.--E. LYNN LINTON--_The Forum_.

The New York _Evening Post_ thus describes the condition of panic on our ships at the beginning of the Spanish War:

Almost any officer who served in the fleet before Santiago could relate not one, but a great many incidents that occurred where the men of our ships would have slaughtered each other if the good little angel that sits up aloft (and our exceedingly bad marksmanship at that time) had not protected us from the mistakes (incomprehensible to landsmen) which caused our ships to fire at each other, at colliers, dispatch-boats, torpedo-boats, and at nothing at all--and all this in the clear atmosphere of the tropical seas.

Such was the effect of the long, nervous tension that thousands of shots were fired at pure fantoms of the imagination. The broadsides of powerful battleships repeatedly burst into a furious cannonade that was arrested only with the complete annihilation of the supposed enemy. For one of our ships to approach the fleet at night was to run a grave risk. The sea was alive with Spanish torpedo-boats. Signals, lights, etc., were misunderstood or disregarded. The enemy might have obtained possession of them and displayed them for our confusion. There were many narrow escapes. Several of our vessels were struck by shells, but the luck that followed us throughout the war prevented a disaster. I could mention the names of officers who have never been able to comb their hair down flat since the particular night on which they came within an ace of sinking a friend--with whom they have never since ceased to exchange congratulatory drinks. (Text.)--New York _Evening Post_.

Dr. S. B. Dunn gives some good advice in this bit of verse:

The heart too often hath quailed with dread, And quite its courage lost, By casting its glance too far ahead For the bridge that never was crossed.

The toughest fight, the bitterest dregs, The stormiest sea that tossed, Was the passage-at-arms--no, the passage-at-legs, Of the bridge that never was crossed.

A wind that withers wherever it goes, And biting as winter frost; Is the icy blast that constantly blows From the bridge that never was crossed.

What folly for mortals to travel that way, As many have found to their cost-- To tempt the terrors by night or by day Of the bridge that never was crossed.

The adage is old and worn a bit, But worthy of being embossed-- Never cross a bridge till you come to it

— The bridge that must be crossed