Trails Church Base Camp

How do we fear people? We fear they will reject us.

In When People Are Big and God Is Small, Ed Welch says, “Closely related to the fear that people will expose us is perhaps the most common reason we are controlled by other people: they can reject, ridicule, or despise us (rejection-fear). They don’t invite us to the party. They ignore us. They don’t like us. They aren’t pleased with us. So, they withhold the acceptance, love, or significance we want from them. As a result, we feel worthless.”

People do reject us.

Rejection hurts.

How do you fear people will reject you, and how do you manifest and deal with this fear?

We fear rejection for who we are: personality, education, job title, socioeconomic position, gender, race, experiences, relationships. You change your personality because you think people will like you better. You seek after a certain degree or job title so that you can be accepted. You fear discrimination because of your race or gender. You fear being rejected by certain people because of other friends you have chosen, or because of our vaccination status or using (or not using) our QR codes.

Fear of Rejection can also come about through perfectionism, or in what clothes we wear (or don't wear), and we see this exhibited in peer pressure.  Fear of Rejection can also seep into our evangelism and into our discipleship relationships among fellow Christians.

But how does fearing rejection and desiring approval harm us? Is there any harm?

Pride and Fear of Rejection.

Fear of rejection found in Scripture.

The Gospel: The One who was rejected by man, and by God the Father, that we might be accepted and never taste ultimate rejection.  We understand that because of this rejection that Jesus endured for us, any rejection we are called to face in this life will be temporary; just as the approval we so desperately seek to attain is fleeting, so any rejection we do experience will fade and be forgotten quickly.

Response: How does the Gospel intersect our fear of rejection?

What does this look like:

1) At Home

2) At Work

3) In our church

How do we minister to our families?

What the Bible Says About Family Worship? (Deut 6:1-9)

God’s will for His people is that they and their children worship Him, meaning that they serve him with every fiber of their being, in an attitude of awe and love, and that this requires His Word to be on the parent’s hearts and that they impress these commands on their children everywhere they go, during every part of the day.

Christian history shows the high value believers have consistently placed on formal family worship.

What this family worship time might look like for you:

1) Choose a Bible Reading Plan or Kids' Bible to read from

- Catherine Vos’s The Children’s Story Bible

- David Helm’s The Big Picture Story Bible

- Starr Meade’s Training Hearts, Teaching Minds,

2) Pray

3) Sing : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ZKGEasOtsthx5hs3aYIFW?si=ea3d365837fc4777

This series continues our Fear of Man series and, today, we are looking at our fear of being exposed

In this episode, we have uploaded a recording from our Launch Team Meeting which happened on October 17.  If you'd like more information about Launch Team Membership, please email: [email protected]

Families are vital in our ministry to the world.

Satan has always attacked the family—and at no time more than today. He wants to disintegrate and distort the family beyond recognition so that the Gospel is as inaccessible to people as possible.

We should view building strong vibrant families as a form of ministry, and opening our homes to non-Christian friends as an increasingly valuable evangelistic opportunity.

What does it mean to fear God?

To fear God means that we have a reverent submission to Him (we obey him and follow His commands) that leads to obedient trust AND worship.

We should fear God because he’s intrinsically worthy of our fear and obedience and worship.

Really all Scripture is proclaiming the worthiness of our God to be feared and worshiped.

And fearing God is also for our good. Thus, we should fear God because it’s for our good to do so.

- Ps. 111:10/Prov. 1:7—Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge

- Ps. 115:11—He is a help and shield to those who fear Him.

- Ps. 115:13—He will bless those who fear Him.

- Ps. 118:4— Let those who fear the Lord say, “His steadfast love endures forever.” Amen, His love endures forever.

The fear of the Lord is intimately tied to our own happiness and holiness.

Let’s think about what Fear of God actually looks like in action as presented in Scripture.

How do we begin to walk in the fear of the Lord, how do we walk in the fear of God rather than the fear of man?

Well, only a greater fear will displace a lesser fears. Our main concern should not be “finding solutions” to our fear of man, but instead seeking after a deeper fear of the Lord. I think this orientation is so important. If you leave this podcast episode feeling less controlled by what other people think, but with no greater fear of God, then you’ve missed the point entirely!

So, you might be wondering, how do we do we put on fear of the Lord every day?

1) First, meditate on the gospel.

2) Study the character of God.

A few books, apart from Scripture, that provide great starting points to knowing and understanding God better are:

3) Repent of pride (Prov. 3:7).

To fear God is to reverently submit to Him in such a way that leads to obedience and worship. It is to happily and joyfully obey Him. To fear God is the beginning of wisdom. God alone can bear the weight of your deepest longings. He alone can receive the worship you were created to give.

Building families is a vital Christian ministry - it’s not secondary to God’s mission in the world.

Families are vital in three areas:

An Important Caveat

Jesus and Paul understood human families – while not eternal – as immensely significant for this age. Just because building families is not the only valid Christian ministry, then, does not mean that it is not valid Christian ministry. Indeed, as we will now see, it is vital Christian ministry.

Building families is vital to the church, because the church is fundamentally a spiritual family.

In all of this, notice the beautiful symbiotic relationship: the family blesses the church and the church blesses the family.

Who struggles with the fear of man?

-The apparently strong

-The weak

-The rich and influential

-The poor and inconsequential

-The timid

-The bold

-The believer

-The unbeliever

One of Satan’s first lines of attack is to convince us that we are the only ones struggling with a particular sin or that our struggle is particularly unique.

One of the surest ways to continue struggling with the fear of man is to continue believing you’re the only one going through this struggle or to see your struggle as unique and to refuse to share that struggle with another person.

Why do we fear man?

1. Well, Past experience tells us that man can cause us harm and pain and difficulties;

2. We are proud and self-centered.

3. We have a needs based view of other people.

4. We have a wrong view of what we truly need and what we deserve.

What does Scripture say about the fear of man?

-It originated at the Fall. Genesis 3:6-7

-It is shortsighted. Luke 12:4-5

-It is a destructive trap. Proverbs 29:25

-It is the opposite of love. I John 4:18,

-It minimizes the nature of our position in Christ. Romans 8:35, 38-39,

-It can only be overcome through the power of the Gospel (Romans 8:31-34/ I John 4:7-12).

Examples of men and women who feared man more than God:

- Abraham

- Isaac

- Lot

- Jacob

- Moses

- Aaron

- Saul

- The Pharisees

- Peter (Luke 22:54-62) denies Christ; (Galatians 2:11-21) Paul confronts Peter

What evil fruit does the fear of man produce in our lives?

Fear of others begins to become sinful when it governs our lives, when we cross the line from enjoying the approval of others to believing that we need or deserve it. When we are so gripped by fear of being physically hurt that we are unwilling to live as the Lord has called us to live in this world, as strangers and pilgrims, recognizing that we will encounter physical pain. The Christian life is not one that needlessly pursues pain, suffering, rejection, exposure and abuse, but neither is it a religion that understands these things to be ultimate. If you are struggling to know whether you have a right or wrong fear of man, think back to the questions we asked at the beginning, I refer you back to Ed Welch’s book, "When People are Big and God is Small" - chapter 1.

Without being reductionistic, we fear man because we do not fear God or we do not fear God enough. Each time we give ourselves over to the fear of man we are choosing to love ourselves more and fear God less.

People we know, people we don’t know, we all want others to have a good opinion of us.

See, Fear of man is not limited merely to how we act or what we say, it is also related to what we choose not to say or do.

So, in the way we often respond to conflict, we demonstrate our tendency to fear man more than God.

Do you see any fear of man running through your experience?

Ed Welch, “When People are Big and God is Small”

During these podcast episodes, we will explore the various ways we most often tend to be controlled by fear of man, for only as we begin to categorize our struggles in this area, are we able to see the paths that biblical repentance must travel. And we will see, explicitly, that overcoming the fear of others is not something we can accomplish on our own. There is One who didn’t give into the fear of man and gave Himself up so that we could fear God rightly and thereby begin seeing enslavement to the fear of man eliminated.

So, in the upcoming episodes, we will talk about some of the fears that we have. For example:

1) We might fear that people will physically hurt us; this can relate to any number of things:

2) we might also fear that people will reject us; this is often connected to things about us in comparison to other people:

3) again, we might also fear that people will expose us; a fear of exposure may manifest itself in a variety of activities and attitudes:

*But, as we will see, the center of a heart that wrongly fears man is a heart that loves self more than God.

Parenthood is meant to portray a portrait of God, Himself.

Our love for, unity with, and likeness to our children bears witness to God’s very nature.

Implications for our families in understanding that God intends to project His image in part through parent-child relationships:

The family also provides a profoundly personal picture of our salvation.

J.I. Packer:

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. “Father” is the Christian name for God. (Knowing God, p. 201)

Wayne Grudem similarly writes, “This relationship to God as our Father is the foundation of many other blessings of the Christian life, and it becomes the primary way in which we relate to God” (Systematic Theology, p. 739).

The family, presents a portrait of the Church

As a church, at how we are doing at loving one another as brothers and sisters. Are we treating one another like this? Do we celebrate victories, mourn losses, share meals, and serve one another like we do our own family members? And how would our church look if we did this? If we treated one another, and the kids in our church, as brothers and sisters and our older women and men as mothers and fathers?

Also, in strange times like these, we have grown closer together as a church?