Overcoming Fear Through The Risen Christ

As I was thinking about overcoming fear, I kept thinking about how a joy-filled person appears to me. When a person is full of joy, he can’t contain it — he has to show it. She radiates joy that is affirming and welcoming. Luke’s Gospel itself begins with joy: “I give you tidings of great joy.” And the Gospel ends with joy at the resurrection, at the empty tomb. So the Good News begins with joy and the Good News ends with joy.

Romans 14:17 proclaims: “The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” So the Holy Spirit is the juice who releases in us joy and peace, flowing through us and shooting up like a fountain dancing in the sunlight. Romans 15:13 petitions: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you would overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” More joy keeps coming, keeps flowing, keeps shooting up like a fountain, and now embracing peace is added to the flow and feel of joy.

So what does that have to do with fear?  Simply this: for anyone to overcome fear, he must first experience peace and joy.  These two realities together overcome fear. Christ’s resurrection appearance in John 20 is the place to visit to make my point.

Let’s go there now. Here’s the scene: Jesus has told the disciples, “I’m going to be crucified and I’m going to be raised from the dead.” They didn’t grasp what He meant. So what did they do? They became afraid, and they were scattered. They ran away and then they sealed themselves up in their house, their apartment, call it whatever you will.  They sealed themselves up in what I’m calling a self-imposed prison. And that’s the place where they huddled together: their self-imposed, sealed prison, erecting barriers between themselves and the objects of their fear — the Jews. I could use different words today: they were afraid of the terrorists. I could use those words for us. Are we afraid of the terrorists? Are we sealed up inside our apartments, inside our houses, inside our condos? Have we become frozen with fear inside our self-imposed prisons? 

And when we’re inside our self-isolating prisons, we are declaring to the people we’re afraid of, “You can’t see me. And if you can’t see me, you can’t find me, and if you can’t find me, you can’t hurt me. And for my further protection — while I’m inside my self-imposed prison — I can’t hear you, can’t hear your judgmental attacks, can’t hear your degrading insults, can’t hear your nasty threats. And to make my protection complete: you can’t touch me.”

I am going to unfold this later, but I want to proclaim it now: Yes, it is by Jesus’ wounds that we are healed but it is by His scars that we are transformed! It’s not enough that Jesus was wounded.  The cross without the resurrection would be a total failure for us. There had to be both healing and transformation! It was our scars that Jesus took to heaven, because He was scarred. It’s a scarred Jesus that I’m declaring: I love Jesus’ scars, because I’m not talking about a restored body. I’m talking about a resurrected and transformed body and the power that the resurrected Jesus gives us to overcome fear.

Back to self-imposed isolation. We don’t want to be seen. We don’t want to hear anything. We don’t want to be touched. “Whatever diminishes you, whatever makes you feel inferior, whatever overcomes you,” Peter (2 Pet 2:19) insists, “to that you are enslaved.” So if you have a fear in your life that still makes you feel inferior, still diminishes you, still overcomes you, Peter would insist that you’re enslaved to that fear but that Jesus is ready and willing to set you free.

So what is fear?  Fear is the jolting anticipation of being wounded.   And what is it about anticipating being wounded that makes us so afraid?  First, we’re afraid that our wounds are going to be too painful to bear. And second, we believe that our wounds are going to be too deep to heal. Too painful to bear, too deep to heal — that they’ll never become scars! They’ll always be bleeding, open wounds. I can remember the time that a doctor discovered a lump at the base of my spine, and he said, “Well, now, Jim, we can take this lump out right now in the office, or we can wait until the lump gets so large that you’ll have to go to the hospital for surgery.” I said, “Hey, man, let’s cut this lump out today in the office because, hey, I can bear pain. I don’t care how much it hurts, I can bear the pain. This wound is not going to be so deep that it won’t heal, right doc? You’ll suture that thing right up and I’ll be leaping out of the office¾today!” 

So the surgeon injected me with a needle, to numb me. But I made a mistake while he was doing the surgery. I arched up, looked back and saw the surgeon inside my body with a scalpel and curved metal instruments, digging, prying, cutting. And he looked up at me and said, “Jim, are you going to faint?”  I said, “Oh, yeah!” The next thing I remember is the nurse slapping my face and shouting, “Jim! Hey! Hey, Jim! Hey!” I woke up. 

Then the surgeon said to me, “Jim, this is one of those wounds that I’m not going to sew up right away. You’re going to have to come back each week, and I’m going to take a metal probe and I’m going to break that wound open, and I’m going to let that wound heal on its own.” I thought, “Well, I may have fainted during the surgery, but I’ll be able to take the metal probing because I’m tough enough to bear that.” But each week I went to the surgeon’s office I struggled to bear the pain. At times, the wound felt too painful to bear and too deep to heal.

My point is that some wounds that we bear, whether they be physical, mental or spiritual, need time to heal. Some wounds have to be broken open so they can get more air! That’s what the surgeon told me: “Jim, this needs air. This needs a lot of air. We can’t just sew that up. It won’t get enough air. It could become infected. It needs air to heal naturally.” Well, we all need the air of the Holy Spirit. We need His Holy air — His life-restoring breath — and the healing available to us through Christ’s wounds. 

So we need time for wounds to heal. Some wounds need a long while to heal. Other wounds are healed instantly. A person’s salvation would be an example of a wound being healed instantly, because sin is an open wound. It’s an open wound that cannot close on its own. No matter how hard you try to doctor it up, no matter how many pads you put on it to absorb seeping fluids and the bleeding — it will not heal on its own. And every time you commit a sin, it’s a self-inflicted wound to your spirit, maybe to your mind, sometimes to your body.

Some people are trying to understand why their wounds are still there, why they haven’t been healed, why their wounds haven’t become scars. And there are probably people reading these words who are still wounded in some way. You may have been wounded in your childhood by an overbearing father, by an abandoning mother, by a sibling who hurt you, by a humiliating teacher, or by a betrayal by a friend. It could be anything or anyone that is still keeping you wounded. You may be in a self-imposed prison. You may be thinking, “Well, as long as I’m in here, I’ll be safe.”

But I believe that scars are good, and I’m going to go into some detail as to why scars are good. Because if they weren’t good, Jesus wouldn’t have kept them. When He was raised from the dead, if he thought scars were not good, He would have said, “I think I’ll just erase these scars, seal these open spaces, and produce a body that has absolutely no mark on it.” That’s not what He chose to do. He chose to keep the scars. He took our wounded humanity with Him into heaven, His action in effect declaring, “I’m not only going to take your wounded humanity there, I’m going to transform it into a new life,” and that’s what the scars are about.

Back to the scene in John 20. The disciples are in the house. They are afraid. They are huddled together. They locked the doors. So Jesus comes up to, let’s call it a house.  Notice Jesus doesn’t knock on the door, and ask, “Is anybody home?”  He doesn’t say, “Gee! They took the doorbell out. I wanted to ring that and let them know I’m here.” No.  The Word proclaims that Jesus walks right through the wall. The point is that in His resurrected body, His scarred body, His transformed body, He could do that. He walks right through the wall and stands in their midst. The Word “midst” literally means that He stood in the center of them. Fear was the center of their life. Now Christ is the center of their life. When Christ is the center of your life, you’re at the very beginning of overcoming fear. He walks into the center of their lives and He proclaims, “Peace is with you. Here I am.”

Paul tells us (Eph 2:14) that Christ Himself is our peace.  “Peace is with you. I am with you. I am your peace. I am here. I have walked through the wall. Surprise! I knew you didn’t expect Me. You thought I was dead. I’m not dead. I’m here. I’m alive!” The disciples are confused. They did not respond. Then the Word says that Jesus showed the disciples His hands and His side — He showed them His scars. And then the Word pronounces, “Therefore, because He did this, showed them His scars, they rejoiced.”

And what is joy?  Joy is many things, but one of the qualities of joy is its radiance.  It radiates outwardly in all directions. Unlike love, joy doesn’t have an object. Joy is like the sun: it radiates in all directions.  Joy doesn’t say, “I’m not shining on Pluto or in the direction of Mercury, but I’ll only shine on Earth.” Joy shines in all directions. Joy makes no distinctions. Joy is so overflowing, so radiant, so shining, so beaming, so full of gladness that it shines on everybody and on everything. And anybody who steps inside that radiance and radius is going to feel that joy. Its uplifting warmth is going to pour over you.

So joy has that quality of radiance. Joy also has the quality of expansion. Joy wants to expand and include everybody. It’s expansive and inclusive. And it’s spontaneous. Jesus wants us to be spontaneous — not be afraid. So joy is spontaneous. And joy is full of power. People that are joyful — power is flowing out of them. They’re vibrant, radiantly alive. If your wounds have been made scars, you’re going to be much more likely to risk discovering and being who you are, and to be real with people. If you still have some wounds that haven’t become scars, then to become a joy-filled person you need to be healed of those wounds, whatever they might be.

When Jesus came through the wall and He proclaimed, “Peace is with you,” Jesus was now completely transformed, completely whole in His resurrected body. So when Paul says, “The Kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit,” you’ve got to have righteousness first. That means you have to be in right relationship with God, and Jesus made that possible through the Cross.

You then have to have to embrace peace. Jesus made peace. He is our peace. And that means that you are safe. What do I mean by safe? Somebody once said, “Well, Jim, I might be in a difficult relationship. I might have a parent who’s abusive. If they’ve physically hurt me, I’m not safe.” That’s not want I’m talking about. Of course you’re not safe physically and you need to take steps to make sure you are safe, because there is not a single shred of evidence in the New Testament that says that it’s ever justified for one Christian to hit or verbally abuse another Christian. Violence is never preached. No Christian is ever violent in the New Testament except for Jesus Himself who cleanses the temple once, and for Peter who chops off Malchus’ear, and Jesus disapproves of that, and immediately restores Malchus’ ear, as if to say that faith comes through hearing and if this man has no ear, he’s not going to be able to hear Me calling him into salvation.

Paul teaches us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and they are not to be polluted. They’re not to have a bruise on them. They’re not to be stained: stained meaning that someone uses profanity against you. That’s like defacing a building. If your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, using profanity against you is like throwing garbage on a building. Jesus doesn’t want our bodies to be full of garbage. No one has a right to stain you with profanity or negative kinds of attacking, judging language. Those are stains.  You’re sanctified. You’re clean. We’re all clean, sanctified, empowered to live the Christian life.

So Jesus said that peace is with them. Then He shows them His scars. They rejoice. What is so important about scarring? We all have scars. It’s one thing we all have in common.  Everybody has some physical scars. So we all have scars, and the fact is that they¾our scars¾are identifying marks of our own individuality. The disciples immediately saw Jesus’ scars and they realized right away that only He could have scars like those. Jesus displayed His scarred heart. He showed them His scarred hands. When the disciples saw those scars, then they recognized Him, His own individuality. So every scar that you have is a mark, an identifying mark of your own individuality. And yet every scar is also a mark of our common humanity. We’re all —everyone one of us — scarred.

So scars are marks of our unique individuality. At the same time they give us a common sense of identity. The next time you begin to judge someone, it would be fruitful to recall your own scars, and then think, “Well, this person must have scars too. They must have felt some of the same kind of emotional pain, physical pain, or spiritual pain that I’ve felt, they must have felt pain in some way and they were healed of it; so they have the scar.”  So we all have these scars. But nobody has the same scar in exactly the same way, so the scars are both marks of our individuality and at the same time they mark our common humanity.

Scars also are signs and indications that we’ve endured, we’ve persevered, and we’ve overcome. There’s too much focus in our psychologically-oriented society to keep going back over and over again to the things that we haven’t done, the things that we failed at, rather than focus on the things we have endured, the things we have persevered in, and the things that we have overcome. If you have scars, physical scars, you’ve overcome.  You’ve overcome something. If you have emotional scars, someone who had demeaned you, tried to take away your self-worth in Christ, someone who played mind games with you, tried to diminish you, tried to shame you, that’s a wound. If you’ve overcome that wound, if it has been healed¾that’s now a scar. That’s a celebration. You endured. You persevered. You overcame. You were transformed through that experience with Jesus: from wounding, to healing, to scarring — to a transformed life!

There is a difference between a restored body and a resurrected body. Lazarus was restored. He was a corpse restored to life only to die again. Jesus was transformed and that is the promise and the reality that we are going to experience. We are going to experience exactly the same endpoint as Jesus is experiencing even now — a transformed body! That’s what the resurrection is about: fellowship with Him, and because there was His Cross, there is also an empty tomb. If there’s a crown of thorns, then there’s going to be a halo of light. We have to suffer with Him, so we can be glorified and risen with Him. And right now, Paul says in Romans 8:11, that we are walking in the resurrected power of Christ through the Holy Spirit. Paul proclaims that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is alive in us.

So if you’re wounded, I pray that you would have the courage to ask to be healed by Jesus’ wounds, and then let Him turn those wounds into scars. If you are scarred but you are finding it difficult to find the courage to walk in faith and live as a scarred but transformed Christian, then I also pray that your healing, scarring, and transformative living would happen right now.

Jesus’ scars also showed the disciples that He was in a state then that we can catch a glimpse of, have a feel for, and get a taste of now — a state of completion without striving. If there is anything true of American life, it’s busyness, speed, and everything is like fast food, and that’s how we want our theology. We want to pull up and order, “I’ll have Romans 5 on a bun, hold the mustard.” But God wants us to meditate on His Word. He wants us to be bathed and soaked in His Word. Like the thrust of Jesus’ words pronounce, “If you abide in My Word, if you stay in it, stay at home in it, keep bathing and soaking yourself in it, keep washing and being cleansed by it, My Word will continue to get into you farther and farther until it’s part of your life. And then when you go to risk something about who you are, you won’t feel alone and lonely, striving to work up the will to do the right thing. You’ll actually feel as though you have Me in you and with you through the Holy Spirit.” So we have the presence and the power of His life in us.

And those are just some of the qualities of the scars. But the point is that the scars need to show transformation in a person’s life. The resurrected Jesus is the embodied presence of a transformed life. He’s for freeing people from their self-imposed prisons. So the Word says, “The letter of the law kills.” If you are a Christian trying to live a good life by following the Law — that is a killing way to live. It’s a wounding kind of life because nobody can live the kind of perfection that life demands. It’s a life of continuous self-inflicted wounds because you’ll never measure up. Looking for approval based on your performance. Looking for your worth based on matching your behavior perfectly to the dictates of moral rules. The result of such actions: Self-inflicted wounds. Paul (2 Cor 3:7) tells us the Law is death engraved on stones. You’ll be bleeding if you choose this course of action. You’ll have nothing but a life of open wounds. Jesus is about relationship, transformation. 

The Word (Rom 7:6) says, “We serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter,” and this Greek word translated newness is kainos, and it means untouched by time or use. Now if anybody would look at your shirt or your shoes, you would see that they are touched by time and use. Or your body: you can see that your body is in fact touched by a lot of time and a lot of use. However, you’re kainosed, untouched by time or use in the Holy Spirit! The Word promises that you can be renewed — now, and moment by moment. You are being renewed according to the true knowledge in the image of the One who created you, and that’s Jesus Christ (Col 3:10). He lives in you, and when you let the Spirit flow through you in that kainosed way, you are untouched by time or use. You are as fresh and new as the moment you were saved.

Untouched by time and use.  There are so many people walking around, looking like they’re carrying stone tablets on their back, and they are. And stone tablets are very, very heavy. And if you’ve ever noticed, the thing about stone, it’s cold. It’s abrasive. And to keep those ponderous weights on your back and try to live according to the Law is going to be very tiring, you’re going to be very depressed, very anxious, and you’ll become very angry.

Did you notice that Jesus never refers to the Holy Spirit as anything heavy, cold, and frozen — like a stone? Can you imagine the Holy Spirit as a stone dove? And this stone dove came down and rested on Jesus’ head at His baptism. No. The Holy Spirit! He’s moving. He’s flowing water. He’s dancing fire. He’s blowing wind. He’s free. We don’t know where He’s come from, or where He’s going. The question is: Can you go along with the ride? Are you willing to spread your wings and soar on the wings of His freedom? Are you willing to do that? That’s the question, because as the song goes, “He is high and lifted up,” and you will be too on the wings of freedom. As I’ve come to say, a dove can’t fly with stone tablets for wings. The little bird just can’t get off the ground if he has stone tablets for wings. So the Holy Dove wants us to be light, be free, and be on the move — soaring with Him!

Notice that Jesus declares that peace is with them, He shows His scars, and then they rejoice, and Jesus seals all of this with reiterating “Peace is with you.” All this happens before there is any commandment for the disciples to do anything. First, He comes in, and in effect commands, “Fear — get out of here! I’m going to be the center of your life. Next there is My peace. Then I’ll show you My scars. I don’t care what kind of pain you’ve been through: physical, emotional, or what kind of pain you’ve been through in relationship with Me, the Heavenly Father, or the Holy Spirit. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere, because I love you. You’re precious beyond measure. I want a relationship with you and I want to empower you and infuse you with My life. If you need to be healed, I want to heal you first, then transform those wounds into scars, and then transform you, setting you on the wings of a free and new life.”

After Jesus is the center, their fear is overcome, then His peace comes, then their joy comes, then His peace comes again to seal all that has happened, and it’s only then that Jesus says, “As the Father has sent Me, so I send you. Now we can talk about working for Me.”  I can imagine the disciples shouting, “Yeah! Let’s get going!” But Jesus restraining them with “Whoa! Wait a minute! Where do you think you’re going?” The disciples retort, “We’re going out to work for You.” Jesus replies, “Well you’re going to be failures at that if you try to do that right now.” Stunned, the disciples ask, “Well, why is that?” Jesus answers, “Because you don’t have the Holy Spirit. Get back here.” They come back to Him, and He takes a deep breath and blows on them, pronouncing, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

It’s only because of your relationship with the resurrected Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that you have the power to do work for the Lord. So many of us are not letting ourselves be empowered to do the Lord’s work: We are striving using our own willpower. We’re not relying on the Holy Spirit. We have no peace and no joy. So you might want to ask yourself a question. I see this so often in counseling with Christians. They’re operating in other people’s giftedness. So let’s say you have the gift for teaching but someone’s convinced you that you should have the gift of hospitality, and then you’re feeding people and inviting them to different places. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not your gift, and you’re wondering why you’re tired, wondering why there’s no peace, no joy, no power in what you’re doing. It could be you’re not operating in your gift. So that would be a question you could ask yourself: Do I know what my gift is?

The difference between being scared and being scarred is an extra letter “r” in scarred and that “r” stands for resurrection. You either can be too scared to live or you can be scarred for living the Christian life. I want to be scarred. I am scarred. And I’m grateful for my scars, not grateful in the sense that I’ve accomplished anything on my own, but grateful in that kind of freedom that comes from accepting Jesus as my healer, someone who took those transformed wounds as scars into heaven. He could have left those scars behind, but He didn’t. Those precious marks revealing the victory of the Cross — He took those with Him!

I will close in a prayer: Father, I thank You for Your Son, and Jesus, I thank You for Your scars, for those wounds that were transformed into new life, those scars that show me no matter what the physical pain, no matter what the emotional pain, no matter what the pain in my relationship with You, that in the final analysis, and there is a final analysis, there is victory, that Your scars show there is victory, there’s transformation that the wounds cannot only be healed but transformed into new life, even overcoming death itself. So we thank You for Your scars and for the transformation that they invite and welcome me into. 

If there’s anybody reading these words, Father, who still has an open wound from the past, someone that had violence done to your body, someone who had violence done to your mind or violence done to your relationship with God, particularly when you were too little or too small to be able to defend yourself, Father, I just pray that You would bring in that flowing, healing oil of the Holy Spirit and that You would heal that wound, the wound that’s like a hurting and crying open mouth, a wound that would able — finally and completely — to be closed, finally be able to become a scar with a smile, finally able to be transformed into new life, and then into the freedom to go forward risking, being authentic, being himself or herself.

And if there’s anybody who is healed of your wounds, wounds that have become scars, but somehow you are finding it difficult to move out in the freedom of that transformation, I pray that through the Holy Spirit that You, Father, would empower that person, releasing him or her into the freedom and the courage to live in that transformed reality of those scars, that the person would be able to draw closer to the scars and wounds of others, that he or she would be able to have compassion and empathy for other people in pain, and that the person would be able to encourage other people to be released into the freedom to be themselves in Christ.  In Jesus’ name, I pray, amen.