Letting Love In: How God Crushes Your Inner Critic Sample

 The Lie of Fear

Caring at all what people think is exhausting. Trying to protect or manage everyone’s perceptions of us won’t work. I know, I tried. 

Fear is not usually isolated to just one thing; it tends to penetrate to different areas of life.

For me, it felt like I was being intensely harassed and bullied and I couldn’t escape. 

Fear made me feel as though I was in the prison of my very own soul. 

The fear I was dealing with was simply from the dark side. I constantly wondered what the devil would try next and if I would ever break free. I thought he had the power to kill me—and that he was going to. 

But then I learned the devil only has the power we give him. He is indeed real and can torment and harass us. But only when we buy into his lies do we give him major power in our lives.

At points in my journey, I almost thought more about the devil than I did about God. I actually believed for a long part of my Christian walk—especially after moving to Los Angeles—that the devil was more powerful than God. I can’t even explain the terror and destruction that lie will cause in your life.

What Scripture confirms about the devil is that he is the father of lies (See John 8:44). We get the free will to either agree with what he is saying about us or what God is saying about us. 

Fear is just a lie, a distraction, an attack on our ability to trust God. Plus we know we were not given a Spirit of Fear from God, Scripture confirms in 2 Timothy 1:7