What Should We Fear: Death Or Life Without Christ?

What Should We Fear: Death Or Life Without Christ?

The answer is simple and may surprise you.  After living through a pandemic in which at various times we have not been able to attend Church, this may seem like an odd question to ask.  However, we have many people who have not been back to Church since the beginning of the pandemic.  Social media, TV, and friends may have played into our fears.  We might be worried about going to Church because we feel like we might get sick from Church.  Brothers and sisters we should not be so worried about the pandemic and more worried about our life without Christ. 

Without Christ we are nothing or nowhere on both this earth and the next. What really has the pandemic done to our thinking?

Could it be that it got us to be afraid of each other?  Where are our priorities now?  Where are your priorities?  Do you live under fear?  

 ‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself.’ Those words – and the sentiment they convey – are inextricably bound up with Franklin D. Roosevelt. But what are the origins of the phrase ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’? Did Roosevelt originate it?

Let’s start with FDR. Certainly, at his 1933 Presidential Inauguration, Franklin D. Roosevelt did express such a sentiment:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

It’s a fine speech, and conveys a sentiment which will find an echo in many a bosom (indeed, has). The context in which Roosevelt made this speech was the Great Depression that the US was plunged into following the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the gist is that a ‘positive mental attitude’, as it were, will help to prevent the worst possible outcomes from materialising.

But the idea that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself was hardly new with Roosevelt. Indeed, it’s worth tracing the history of this phrase, because it sheds light on just how popular and widespread both the phrase (albeit with varied wording) and the sentiment were, long before Roosevelt was made President.

In the sixteenth century, the great French writer Michel de Montaigne (pictured right) – the man who pretty much invented a whole new genre, the essay – wrote: ‘the thing of which I have most fear is fear’. Although it depends on which translation you read. In another, the wording is slightly different: ‘The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents.’

Then, in the seventeenth century, the English writer who brought Montaigne’s new invention of the essay form to England and made it his own, Francis Bacon, wrote in his 1623 book De Augmentis Scientiarum: ‘Nil terribile nisi ipse timor’, or ‘Nothing is terrible except fear itself.’

Then, in the nineteenth century and in yet another country, the United States, Henry David Thoreau offered in his journal entry for 7 September 1851: ‘Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.’ The context was an entry about atheism.

That is exactly what we are talking about here- atheism and the evil that brings to a God Fearing Nation. We have been told a story where we are given two choices.  It reminds me of a short story, "The Lady, or the Tiger?"  This was a much-anthologized short story written by Frank R. Stockton for publication in the magazine The Century in 1882. "The Lady, or the Tiger?" has entered the English language as an allegorical expression, a shorthand indication or signifier, for a problem that is unsolvable.

The short story takes place in a land ruled by a "semi-barbaric" king in the past. Some of the king's ideas are progressive, but others cause people to suffer. One of the king's innovations is the use of a public trial by ordeal as "an agent of poetic justice", with guilt or innocence decided by the result of chance. A person accused of a crime is brought into a public arena and must choose one of two doors.  Behind one door is a lady whom the king has deemed an appropriate match for the accused; behind the other is a fierce, hungry tiger. Both doors are heavily soundproofed to prevent the accused from hearing what is behind each one. If he chooses the door with the lady behind it, he is innocent and must immediately marry her, but if he chooses the door with the tiger behind it, he is deemed guilty and is immediately devoured by the animal.

Do you find yourself in this situation? Are you in fear so much that you are making the decision to not attend Church?  Or are you just not attending Church?  If this is the case, who are you hurting?  

Brother and sisters, the answer is that you only hurt yourself, your family, and our posterity.  We will not live in fear if we put our trust in Jesus.  What direction are you going?  If you need some please check out the comment section below.  Amen