“Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.
But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living.
But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua 24: 14,15
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life,
neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future,
nor any powers, neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:37-39
The overcoming of fear—that is what we are proclaiming here. The Bible, the gospel, Christ, the church, the faith—all are one great battle cry against fear in the lives of human beings.
Fear is, somehow or other, the archenemy itself. It crouches in people’s hearts. It hollows out their insides, until their resistance and strength are spent and they suddenly break down.
Fear secretly gnaws and eats away at all the ties that bind a person to God and to others, and when in a time of need
that person reaches for those ties and clings to them, they break and the individual sinks back into himself or herself, helpless and despairing,
while hell rejoices….
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
From “The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” edited and introduced by Isabel Best.