Fear is powerful. Scripture teaches that the fear of God is the way of knowledge, wisdom, fruitfulness and joy. There is such a thing as healthy fear, but often our fear is unhealthy. You may discern the difference when your fear leads you to sinful practices. Fearing poverty, some put their career before anything and anyone else. Fearing loneliness, many behave against their better judgment thirsting for acceptance. Fearing failure, many will lie, cheat, steal, or worse. This means that the problem isn’t fear but what we do with our fears. 

 

The greatest of all fears is the fear of death. That fears is universal, because death comes to us all. The rich cannot buy their way out of it. The intellectual can’t outsmart it. The physically gifted cannot outrun or outlast it. Death is the great leveler of humanity. No event is so sobering because no event is so final or so mysterious. The prospect of going through the veil by ourselves is enough to overwhelm any of us with fear.

 

Fear is what has humanity by the throat right now. We’re afraid to touch or be touched. We’re afraid of the air we breathe because we’re afraid of COVID-19. Our fear what we don’t understand, and we don’t know much about this new coronavirus other than out fears that it is a death sentence, either for ourselves or our loved ones.

Here is some good news. Christ Jesus came into this world to free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. John 11 recounts the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and provides a preview of Christ’s own resurrection. That chapter teaches us some comforting truths as we think about our own mortality. That will be our text this Easter morning.

 

One of my favorite passages of all scripture is John 11:25-6, “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”

 

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