Living Fearless: Exchanging the Lies of the World for the Liberating Truth of God

If you endeavor to love God with your mind, your mind is opened up beyond the rational into the intuitive. The intuitive mind is the place where we pray and dream and hope for things as they ought to be, things yet unseen by the rational mind. If you endeavor to love God with your heart, you engage the emotional intelligence center of your being. Both negative and positive emotions become invitations from God into transformation. If you endeavor to love God with your soul, life becomes nearly unimaginable—the impossible moves into the sphere of possibility. If you endeavor to love God with your body, you will physically change. You will look different. You will move beyond being well into being fit.

the most common form of human despair is not being who you are.

All who are obsessed with being secure in life will lose it all—including their lives.

Speaking again on the topic of prayer, Jesus said that the Father knows what we need before we ask him.8 What does that tell us about how we should pray? How does it inform our prayer life? What should we be asking God? Perhaps when we pray, we should ask, “Lord, what do I need?

Don’t only read the Bible in some formulaic pattern. Instead, ask God, “What does this say to me? How is this related to my identity? What do you want me to know?” You might truth tell and confess that a certain Scripture passage frightens you. Ask the Lord, “Why am I afraid? What am I afraid of?” After

People are mostly afraid all the time. In fact, the number one exhortation in Scripture is, “Do not be afraid.” We can only become fearless as we follow God in our true identity and experience in real life the truth of God’s promises to us.

The next question is, “Lord, where in my life do I feel like I’m not beloved by you? Where in my life am I not trusting you? Where in my life do I think I’m not good enough for you? Where in my life am I listening to the wrong voice?

I want the God who initiates life and relationship with me even when I’m not asking. I want the God who loved me even when I was his enemy. I want the God who says to David, “Hey, let me teach you how to fight in a new way, because one day, about ten years from now, you’re going to really need it. You don’t know it yet, you’re not going to trust me yet, but you will. Trust me now in the small, seemingly unimportant things. Learn to do what I say. Throw a rock at that lion. Do it. Trust me, because one day it’s going to make you king. You can do this, trust me.” Is

Why is it that we often look for the quick answer, the get-spiritual-quick scheme that will magically turn us into the person we think we are supposed to be?

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world. JOEL A. BARKER

The journey in discovering your true identity in the kingdom of God is an eternal journey. There is no end to the depths of who God made you to be.

Fear is an interesting thing. It is said that a crisis doesn't make a person; a crisis reveals a person.

Emotions were given to us by God. Emotions are a warning mechanism in our limbic system. Negative emotions warn us something is wrong. Just like physical pain tells us something is physically wrong, emotional pain tells us something is emotionally wrong. Negative emotions tell is that what we believe is false. That's the value of negative emotions. Negative emotions are not our enemy.

The journey in discovering your true identity in the

Jesus is right there with you saying, “Ready? Let’s go.” You will start walking into the appointed times for you, straight into the kingdom of God. That is the beauty of your future. You haven’t missed anything yet in your life, not one thing. God says to ask him and he’ll give you the years the locusts have eaten away.

Imagine yourself as a ten-year-old filled with the Holy Spirit and understanding your identity from God in Christ. Children today are getting their identity from friends and social media because parents are getting their identity from what they do, what they have, and what people think of them. It is no wonder that our nation is struggling with such internal and external conflict. We as a nation have lost our sense of identity and destiny.

I feel fear because the scenario I’m playing out in my mind is false. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real.

When you ask the questions Should I go? Will I win? and How should I go? your life with God will become generative and creative.

We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13:33 KJV, emphasis added).

First, I am your field training officer.10 Second, as your FTO I have one simple rule for you, reader. As you read this book, you are only allowed to receive from God all that he has for you in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Third, as your FTO I will teach through telling stories, looking at various Scripture passages, and asking questions. I, however, will not be answering the questions posed; we will be listening to God and writing down the answers he gives through his Spirit. Fourth, as the disciples of Jesus spent time abiding with him, they became more attentive to the things of God, which led them to a greater awareness of the world around them. This awareness impressed upon them their great need to hear and understand the annunciations11 of Jesus, which directed them into lives of transformative action. Abiding = Attention, Awareness, Annunciation, Action. In our shift together, we will walk through this process. Finally, the narrative that follows is from an actual ten-hour (7 a.m.–5 p.m.) interaction between three hundred people and me as we spent a day together abiding with Christ. I suggest that you also set aside a day to work through the material in a single encounter and see how it impacts you. I want you to experience how much can happen in your life in just one day with Christ. Trust me, you’ll want more.

The knowledge of good and evil always leads to a form of death. Always.

In the garden, Adam and Eve separated themselves from God and his truth of their identity and destiny. They began deciding for themselves what is good and bad, what is right and wrong. They transferred their trust from the true life source, God, to their own knowledge of good and bad. They were trying to figure out how to make themselves good. God ceased to become their source of truth. Instead, they became their own source of truth, separate from their Creator. The irony here is that they were already good—created in God’s likeness and image.

Do you understand the role shame plays in your life?

If your identity is unworthiness, you will act like an unworthy person. It doesn’t matter where you are or whom you are with. You’ll still act to prove your worth and value.

The obstacle to experiencing God anywhere in life is shame. Shame (feeling unworthy, not good enough) needs to be confessed. You know why? Shame is a false identity. Everything from “I look at pornography,” “I eat too much,” “I drink too much,” “I don’t do this,” “I need to do that,” and so on makes me feel one of three things: fear, guilt, or shame. Fear, guilt, and shame are false identities. It won’t matter how many accountability groups you go to, podcasts you listen to, or books you read. If you live in fear, you are still going to try to control things in order to cope with your anxiety. Your identity is fear.

As a follow-up, you might ask Jesus, “What is preventing me from experiencing God at a deep, personal level in my life?

Most of us were told that our problem is that we do wrong things. But that’s not really the issue. The issue is wrong belief or believing what is not true. This wrong or false belief leads us to separate or deviate from God, ourselves, and others. The result of this separation, this sin, is wrong action. Our tendency is to focus on wrong actions, and we miss the source, which is wrong belief.

The Bible says that we are to confess our sins to one another in order that we may be healed.6 Wellness is connected to confessing our sins to one another. The word used for sin in this verse in some of the older Greek texts is paraptōma, meaning “a deviation from what is true.” Confession is not telling all your moral failures to somebody. That’s not particularly helpful. When we confess, we are telling the truth about where we have deviated or moved away from what is true about God, ourselves, and others. Moral failures are the result of this deviation.