ANNOUNCER: Fear of the unknown is normal, and being afraid of things that are dangerous that might happen is wise. But is the believer supposed to fear death? “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Psalm 23. Well, let’s have a little discussion about this today. I think it’ll be good, and we’ll do that next right here on Grace In Focus. Grace In Focus is the radio and broadcast ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society. Our website is faithalone.org. Please be sure to get registered for our annual national conference, coming May 18th through the 21st. This year we celebrate our 40th anniversary, and we want you to be there with us. Our theme is, “Believe in Christ for Life.” There’s VBS for the kids who are going to be studying crowns and rewards. Make sure and get them signed up for that also. All the details you’ll need are found at faithalone.org. 

And now with today’s question and answer discussion, here’s Bob Wilkin, along with Sam Marr. 

SAM: All right, Bob, we’ve got a question from Austin. He asks, is it wrong for believers to fear death itself? Not their placement in eternity, but the act of physically dying and being with the Lord. Death is a scary experience for most humans since we haven’t encountered death. We’re generally afraid of the things that we don’t know much about or haven’t experienced yet. So this is one that you can’t really know about until it happens to you. 

BOB: This is a great question. And first of all, yes, implicitly he’s saying, we shouldn’t fear going to hell. We shouldn’t fear our eternal destiny, not being with the Lord. Because if we believe the promise of John 3:16, then we know we’ll never perish and we know we have everlasting life. And so I’m right with him on that. We don’t fear what happens after we die. 

We should have some fear, of course, of the Judgment Seat of Christ. Because after Paul talks about the Judgment Seat of Christ in 2 Corinthians 5:9-10, he says, therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men. There is fear concerning the Judgment Seat of Christ because we do not want to disappoint Him. We want His approval. We want His praise. And we want His rewards as well. So in that sense, there are some things we fear that are related to death, that is, the Judgment Seat of Christ, but we’re not to fear our eternal destiny because if we are fearing that, then we’ve stopped looking to Christ because He promises us that. 

But in terms of Austin’s question about fearing death, which we don’t really know what the process is going to be like, this reminds me of, I was taking senior preaching at Dallas Seminary. We had three different preaching classes. And in this senior preaching class with Bill Lawrence, Dr. Lawrence was critiquing each of us as we would give our sermons. We would present like a, I think if I remember right, there were something like 20-minute sermons. And then the different students would say three things we liked about the message, three things we thought the person could work on. And then the prof would come in and make some comments. 

Well, this one particular guy was talking about fear, fear not for I am with thee, something like that. His message was, a believer should never fear anything. Believers should be fearless going through life. And so when the guy finished, Dr. Lawrence said, so are you saying then that if a person is holding a gun on us that we should not be afraid? And he said, well, no, no, obviously that’s not the case. And he said, are you saying that we shouldn’t fear for the well-being of our children? Well, no, I’m not saying you shouldn’t fear for the well-being of our children. And what Dr. Lawrence said is when you’re preaching, you need to realize possible objections and deal with those. And he said, if you look up all references to the word fear in the Bible, and of course the guy hadn’t and there are places where we are told to fear, right? We’re told to fear the Lord that’s for sure. And we’re also to fear negative consequences that will come if we don’t follow Christ, if we don’t walk on the path of righteousness. 

So in the case of fearing death, there’s lots of things we should fear about death. For one thing, it can be pretty painful. So let’s say you’re a soldier. Would a soldier be afraid of being disabled in war? Of course. Would a soldier be afraid of being burned to death? Of course, that’s very painful. That’s a very painful death. Or be afraid of drowning? Yeah, that’s a very painful way to die. 

And so it’s not just the unknown of dying, in other words, the process, but it’s the pain that can be associated with it. And dying doesn’t necessarily just happen in a snap, right? I mean, dying in your sleep, that’d be a nice way to die, right? But what if you got hurt and it took you weeks to die? And it was painful weeks to die? Now, of course, today we’ve advanced with medicine such that we can give what’s called palliative care, where we can give lots and lots of morphine or, if need be, stronger drugs and people’s pain becomes manageable. And if it’s not, we can put people in a medically-induced coma. 

But the truth is fear of death is something I have and I think we all should have. It’s not that I’m afraid of the consequences afterwards. It’s the actual process of the dying. I don’t want to die from years of battling cancer, for example. If that’s God’s will for me, okay, I accept it. For example, I would hate to have ALS and have my muscles degenerate and get to the point where I could no longer speak. But if that was my lot, okay, God, He will give me the grace to handle it. 

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SAM: The important thing to recognize here, and this is something that I’ve become more aware of and I think it’s important to point out, fear and a lot of other human emotions are that. They’re human, natural emotions that God gave us when He created our biology. If something scary happens, we get afraid, if something dangerous happens, we get angry. If something sad happens, we get sad, we get depressed or whatever. And so those are natural reactions to external stimuli or whatever you want to call it. 

So being afraid is not a sin and it’s not something that you should feel ashamed of or beat yourself up over. It’s what you do as a result of that emotion or that feeling that’s happening. So, if you’re afraid of death and you lock yourself in your house and you never leave, you never talk to anybody, you never do anything that might lead to early death, that’s not a way to live your life. That’s not the way that God intended for you to live. So like your soldier example, a soldier at war should be afraid of being injured, being killed, his enemy. But if that fear leads him to hide instead of protecting other people, then he’s let fear rule him instead of ruling over his own fear. 

And as Christians, I think it’s the same. Like you said, I’m afraid of dying. I don’t want to get hit by a car or get shot or fall off a cliff or something. That’s scary. But I’m not going to live my life in light of the things I’m afraid of. I’m going to live my life in light of the things that God has commanded us to do. And the things that God has told us is worth our time. We’re supposed to fix our eyes on Him and on the coming kingdom. And then we don’t need to worry about what we’re going to eat, where we’re going to sleep, what we’re going to wear. He gives food for the birds every day. They don’t worry about it. So we shouldn’t either. We need to focus our attention on the kingdom. And then those fears will start to have less power over us. 

BOB: When you think of emotions, for example, be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication, bring your request to God. That doesn’t mean that we don’t feel anxiety. What it means is we bring our request to God. Having brought my request to God for me doesn’t eliminate my anxiety. Now, maybe it does for some people, but for me with the alcoholic family I grew up and everything else, I have to deal with a lot of anxiety through every day. And I don’t view those things as sin. I do bring them to the Lord. I do get help from Him. But it doesn’t mean my anxiety goes away completely. I deal with it. I move on. I go on. That doesn’t mean that’s sin. 

And when you think about your point about we can’t just hide in our room to avoid all danger, right? Well, that’s a good point. But there’s kind of a balance there. I know people who, they love to go on these crotch rockets and drive at 90 and 100 miles an hour. That’s a very risky behavior. If you’ve ever seen these wing suits where people jump and they don’t even have, they’re just jumping with a wing suit. I think that’s exciting, but I would never do it because your risk of dying is pretty high. 

But on the other hand, I did a half marathon in December, another one in January. I’m supposed to do another one this Saturday. And as I’m training for those, I’m doing a lot of walking out there on the streets. And I risk getting hit by a car. To me, that’s a reasonable risk. And there are people who ride bikes, right? And they sometimes get hit and killed. So I think we want to find the happy balance there. But I would agree with you wholeheartedly that our feelings come and go. And we have to live with our feelings. 

Life is a risk. In other words, if you’re willing to ride in a car or drive a car, you’re taking a lot of risk, something like one out of every 3,600 people riding in cars die every year. And in your lifetime, your odds are about one in 60, I think that you’re going to die in a car accident. So cars are one of the most dangerous things you could do. And yet we all do it. Or most of us. 

SAM: Well, there’s some cheerful good news for everybody. But the important takeaway is that’s not how our mindset should be. That’s not what our framework should be. Our framework is the promises that Christ made, the encouragements, the love that He gave us through His book. And those are the things that we use to determine how am I going to live my life. Not, here’s a list of 100 things that could kill me. I’m going to do my best to avoid them every day. 

We should live in light of His commands, His promises, the example that He set. And within that, make your own judgment calls, don’t do anything reckless or stupid or whatever. But don’t live in fear, live in love and peace that we can only have as believers. 

BOB: That’s very good. And in the meantime, let’s keep grace in focus. Amen.

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Now, friend, we thank you for joining us all this week on Grace in Focus. We hope you have a great weekend. Get signed up for our national annual conference at our website faithalone.org, and we’ll see you again next week here on Grace in Focus.