What God Actually Says About the War in Your Head: The Relationship Between Faith and Fear
I want to talk about something that walks through the door of almost every single session I have. It comes in wearing different outfits. Sometimes it looks like people pleasing. Followed by questions about fear. Sometimes it looks like perfectionism or control. Followed by questioning of faith. Sometimes it looks like that 3 am spiral where you cannot turn your brain off. Followed by the need to shut down thoughts. But underneath all of it? It is almost always the same thing.
Fear.
And here is what I have learned after almost 30 years of sitting with people, and trust me, I have sat with a lot of people, fear and faith are not just feelings. They are postures. They are the direction your whole inner life is pointing. And you cannot point in both directions at the same time.
So let us talk about this. Really talk about it. Not the Sunday school version. The real version.
What Fear Actually Does To You
First, I want you to know something important. God is not sitting up in heaven pointing at you, saying, “What is wrong with you? Why are you afraid? He is not doing that. We have a God who understands our biology because He designed it. He wired us with the capacity for fear because it is a gift of self-preservation. It keeps us from walking into traffic. It is why you look both ways before you cross the street, and a deer does not.
But here is the thing, and this is where my psychology background and my Bible come together, and I just love when that happens, fear becomes a problem when it stops being a warning signal and starts being a governing voice. When it moves from instinct to identity.
When fear is governing you, it interprets everything through the lens of danger, loss, and what if. And I will tell you what that does to your brain. All that anxiety coursing through your body is what we call cortisol, the fight, flight, or freeze hormone. It is flooding your system because your body cannot tell the difference between a real bear and an imagined catastrophe you have been replaying since Tuesday. You cannot think straight. You cannot hear the Holy Spirit. You cannot make good decisions. You are just spinning.
And who benefits from that? The wolf.
The same enemy who said to Eve, ” Did God really say… He is still in the business of twisting truth just enough to send you into a spiral. He wants you looking down. He wants you horizontal. He wants you so consumed with your circumstances that you forget to look up.
Faith Is Not What Most People Think It Is
Let me be honest with you. A lot of people in the church have reduced faith down to a feeling. Like, if you just feel peace, then that means you have faith. And if you feel afraid, that means your faith is weak.
That is not what the Bible says.
Look at Psalm 56:3. David, the man after God’s own heart, the one who wrote half the Psalms we love, writes, “When I am afraid, I will trust in you. He did not write if I am afraid. He wrote when. He expected to feel fear. He just decided ahead of time where he was going to turn when it showed up.
That is faith. Faith is not the absence of fear. Faith is the decision to trust God in spite of fear.
And look at Hebrews 11:1. Faith is described as the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. That word conviction is a legal term. It means evidence. It means certainty. Not certainty based on what you can see in front of you, but certainty based on the character of the One making the promise.
I say it all the time in my sessions. You can have enormous amounts of knowledge about God, you can quote scripture all day long, but if you do not trust that knowledge, if it never moves from your head down into your behavior, you do not have faith. You have information. And information alone will not carry you through a storm.
The Two Voices: One Promotes Fear
This is where I want you to stop and really sit with me for a minute.
There are two voices constantly speaking to you. I have talked about this from the very beginning of our time together because it is the foundation of everything. You cannot even begin to address anxiety, fear, people pleasing, control, or any of it until you understand whose voice you are listening to.
One voice says, what if it all falls apart. What if God does not come through? What if you are not enough? What if it is too late?
The other voice says, I have you. I know what I am doing. Trust me.
Second Timothy 1:7 makes this plain. God did not give us a spirit of fear. He gave us a spirit of power and love and self-control. So when the fear voice shows up, and it will show up, you have to ask yourself, whose spirit is this? Because it is not coming from your Father.
And I will tell you what I tell my clients. You do not have to entertain it. You do not have to argue with it. You do not have to figure out if it is your own flesh, your own trauma, or the enemy. You just say, out loud, because they cannot hear your thoughts, in the name of Jesus, I am not receiving this. And then you redirect.
That is not a weakness. That is warfare. That is Philippians 4 in action.
The Verse I Come Back to Over and Over Again
I cannot talk about fear and faith without stopping in Philippians 4. This is where I live. I prescribe this chapter more than any other in the Bible because anxiety is the number one reason people walk into my sessions. And this is God’s answer.
Paul writes, ” Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Now, let me tell you how most people read that verse wrong. They think it is saying, stop thinking about the scary thing, make a list of everything you are grateful for, and maybe you will feel better. That is not what Paul is saying at all.
He is saying, bring it all to God. The scary thing included. In everything, that means your cancer diagnosis, that means your marriage falling apart, that means the bank account, that means the difficult child. All of it. And then add thanksgiving.
I had cancer once. And I had to sit with God and say, Lord, thank you for this cancer. That sounds insane. I know it sounds insane. But that is obedience. That is what Paul is prescribing. Not because the cancer is good, but because you are trusting the God who is present in the cancer with you.
And then, only then, after that act of surrender, Paul says the peace of God will guard your heart and mind. Not your place. His peace. Peace that does not make any logical sense given your circumstances. Peace that can only come from one source.
That is what I want for every woman I work with. Not happiness. Happiness is horizontal. It depends on what is happening around you. But peace. That is vertical. That is from God. And it is available to you right now, in the middle of whatever you are walking through.
But What About the Fear of the Lord?
I want to make sure I address this because I have met so many women who grew up being taught to be afraid of God. He is sitting there with a scoreboard just waiting to punish you. And that kind of thinking does not produce faith. It produces either performance or paralysis.
The fear of the Lord in Scripture is something completely different from the fear that produces anxiety. The Hebrew word yirah, fear of the Lord, is closer to the word awe. It is reverence. It is standing in front of something so big and so holy and so other that you recognize you are not in charge. That He is.
Proverbs 9:10 says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Not the end. The beginning. It is the starting point. And here is the beautiful thing about it. When God becomes the biggest thing in your field of vision, all the other things you were afraid of start to shrink.
When you have the right fear, the big holy awe-filled reverence for who God is, you do not need the small fears anymore. Because you already know who holds it all.
I think of it like this. I am a child standing next to my Father. He is big, and He is powerful, and yes, there is some healthy respect there. But I am not cringing. I am not hiding. I am holding His hand. And nothing else in that room looks as big as it did before I knew He was standing with me.
So What Do You Actually Do With This?
I am action-oriented. God did not make us to just sit and wait and feel things. He made us to move. So let me give you something practical.
When fear shows up, and it will, do not white-knuckle it. Do not pretend it is not there. But do not let it lead either.
Start with acknowledgment. God, I am afraid. I am telling You that. I do not understand what You are doing right now and I do not like how this feels. But I know who You are. I know You are present. I know You have not left me. And I am choosing right now to trust You not because of what I see but because of who You are.
That is faith. Right there. Small, messy, imperfect faith. And that is all He is asking for.
That peace that surpasses understanding? He brings that. Your job is just to show up, acknowledge Him, and keep looking up instead of down.
Draw near to Him, and He will draw near to you. That is a promise. Not a suggestion. A promise.
He always keeps His promises.
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