Two Kinds of Fear

Dannah Gresh: Mary Kassian says the right kind of confidence needs to come from a right understanding of the Lord.

Mary Kassian: Every problem we have with confidence stems back to an inadequate view of God. We don’t view God as big enough, strong enough, powerful enough, worthy enough, glorious enough, beautiful enough.

When we view Him as big, then we begin to fear Him, and the fear of our problems or circumstances begins to fade.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for October 28, 2021. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: If you could cut us open and see inside our hearts, I think you’d find that most of us are, by nature, fearful people. I don’t know what you might be afraid of, but I’m told that if you’re phalacrophobic that means you fear baldness and bald people!

If you’re aerophobic, that means you’re afraid of drafts—like drafty windows or drafty doors. And then there’s (let me see if I can say this one), porphyrophobia; that’s the fear of the color purple! I don’t know anybody who has that, but maybe you do.

Or if you’ve been diagnosed with papyrophobia, that means you’re afraid of paper. Well, the list goes on and on. Another interesting fear is phobophobia. As you might guess, that’s the fear of being afraid. Wow. 

Well, God’s Word has a lot to say about fear—a lot to say. And as you may be aware, it’s not all negative. In other words, there are certain things we should fear, and there are other things we should not fear. 

Our guest today is my dear friend, Mary Kassian, who lives up North, that is, in Canada . . . where I suspect they’re probably expecting their first snow, if they haven’t had it already. If you listen to 

Revive Our Hearts on a regular basis, Mary’s name and voice are probably familiar to you.

Recently, she was one of our featured speakers at the Revive ’21conference. Her newest book is called The Right Kind of Confident. In that book she addresses both healthy and unhealthy fear. Here’s Dannah Gresh with Mary Kassian to talk about these two kinds of fear.

Dannah: Okay, Mary, it’s amazing what you learn about your friends when you prepare to do an interview with them! I read your bio—I didn’t feel like I needed to—but I didn’t know that you are a fellow snorkel fan!

Mary: I love snorkeling!

Dannah: You love snorkeling?

Mary: I do. I love snorkeling.

Dannah: We have to go sometime!

Mary: We absolutely need to meet somewhere warm this winter and go snorkeling! Wouldn’t that be fun?

Dannah: I would love it! This past summer, Bob took me on a snorkeling trip, and he was snorkeled out. I am the snorkel lover in the family. And so I was like, “I’m just going to go outside the hotel.” I read online that there’s this online community of snorkel addicts; it describes where I can find certain things.

Apparently, there was an electric eel right to the north of our hotel, in a crevice. “I’m going to go find him!” So I was so excited! I’ve never found an electric eel under the water! So I listened to the instructions, I followed the path. 

And suddenly, there he was in all his glory with kind of these round circles on him, these dots and tan colors and his mouth opening at me, and his eyeballs. And, Mary, I was terrified, absolutely terrified! I imagined that when I got there I would be like, “We’re going to hang out, and I’m going to check it out.” That’s what I do when I find something underwater, but I got out of the water as fast as I could! I was afraid!

Mary: I love snorkeling, but I remember when Brent and I were going to learn how to scuba dive. We went into a pool for instruction, and I had what can only be described as a full-blown panic attack as soon as I went underwater with all my equipment.

And that really surprised me, because I love sort of extreme adventures and doing that kind of thing. I didn’t connect the dots until afterward to think, “Well, I know why that is.” It’s because I have intermittent asthma, and the fear of not being able to breathe is huge! Whenever I feel that I can’t breathe, it’s very, very difficult for me, and my heart starts pounding, and I just have big anxiety. 

You know, there are so many different things that women fear in their lives; the list is almost endless. It goes way beyond scuba diving or skydiving or the electric eels (which, that would have been cool! I would have loved to see an electric eel!) But things like just fear of disapproval or fear of disappointment, of difficulty.

Dannah: Fear of speaking in front of people; that’s a big one.

Mary: Exactly, that’s a huge one. Fear of embarrassment, fear of getting sick. How about the fear of COVID? Let’s add that one into that list, the fear that I’m going to catch COVID. Some people are even afraid of strange things, like being afraid of being successful.

Dannah: Being too big, being too much, yeah.

Mary: Fear of being unloved, fear of being unknown. For older women, I think the fear of aging, the fear of losing your own capacities and your own abilities, fear that you’re not going to have enough. There are so many different fears.

As we’re talking about confidence, fear is really the archenemy of confidence. Fear comes in many different shapes and sizes. It can show up in just stress or anxiety or the full blown panic attack like I had under the water with my scuba diving equipment.

So it can be horror. Or it can be the somebody’s attacking me, breaking into my house kind of fear. Or it can be just that churning, day to day level of unease and anxiety. All of those are fear, all of them fall under the fear family—whether it’s slow and low level, ongoing, or whether it’s sudden and high level panic. All of those are enemies of confidence.

Dannah: So, we learned yesterday that confidence is placing our trust in one Source, God alone. So that’s why we need to overcome fear. But, if I’m afraid of a bear, that’s kind of a good thing, right? Is there ever a situation where fear is okay?

Mary: Well, that’s the thing that’s so interesting about the Bible’s formula for confidence. There’s a verse that I mentioned yesterday in the program, Proverbs 14:26: “In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence . . .” 

So this is kind of like a paradox, because on the one hand fear is the archenemy of confidence, and fear decreases our confidence. But then on the other hand, we’re told that in the fear of the Lord, that’s where we’re going to find strong confidence. 

So the Bible kind of has this formula for confidence where the way to overcome fear is with more fear, or rather, fear of a different kind.

Dannah: Okay, so fear isn’t always bad, as I was saying. A bear is chasing me, I’m running!

Mary: That’s a good thing! Or you’re going to trip, you’re going to fall, and you’re scared and you put out your hands because you want to break that fall. Or you’re startled and you jump. I think God created us to have this fear network in our lives, and fear isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I think of Adam and Eve in the Garden. I think that God gave them fear in a good way. If a branch was falling, Adam had the fear network to cause him to startle so he would jump back. That’s a type of fear; it would protect him from getting hurt.

He would have this awareness. He had to learn that gravity hurts! If you jump off a cliff, when you fall, that’s going to hurt! Fear gave him a healthy respect for things like gravity or momentum or friction—all of the natural laws that God wove into the universe. God equipped Adam and Eve to deal with those things by giving them a healthy right kind of fear toward them.

I don’t think bears chased Adam and Eve in the garden, but when a bear is chasing you, fear is a very good thing to have! It equips you; it’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing to have a respectful kind of fear for something that could potentially hurt you.

But then, what’s really interesting about the whole story in the Garden is, then the snake came along and started talking to Eve and started introducing these weird kinds of twisted fear into Eve’s mind. I know that God created Adam and Eve with a healthy, good kind of fear. They feared the Lord in the right way.

But then, the snake came and started introducing other fears. And when you think about it, what kind of fear did Satan introduce? He tempted Eve to believe, “Well, God isn’t good enough. God isn’t on my side. God doesn’t have my best interests at heart.”

And what’s also interesting is that to combat those kinds of nagging, anxious kind of fears that Satan introduced into Eve’s heart and mind, he encouraged her to step up and have some self-confidence, and take matters into her own hand and to be a confident woman and to act in a way that went against the Lord’s directive.

Dannah: The wrong kind of confidence, like we talked about yesterday.

Mary: The wrong kind of confidence, exactly! So it’s so interesting that fear and confidence had this interplay right back in the Garden, that Satan used fear as a weapon and encouraged Eve’s confidence in a way that was twisted and wrong.

As a result, I believe that ever since then, we’ve lost the right kind of fear, and are being controlled by the wrong kind of fear, so we’ve lost our natural fear of the Lord, and we’re being controlled by all sorts of other fears—the fears of all sorts of other things that the Lord doesn’t want us to be afraid of. We don’t fear the Lord, and because we don’t fear the Lord, we’re scared of all sorts of other things.

Dannah: Okay, I feel like we really need to unpack “fear of the Lord,” because when you’re telling the story about the tree, I’m thinking, Okay, so Eve’s kind of getting afraid that God isn’t going to take care of her, that He doesn’t have her back. So there’s this fear of God, but it’s not the kind of fear that you’re talking about and that the Scripture tells us to have, that fear of the Lord.

So define the right kind of “fear of the Lord.” 

Mary: We think of fear as a negative emotion, and that’s all that comes to mind when we think of fear. But if you were to go back to the 1800s and crack open a dictionary—the 1828 Noah Webster dictionary—you see that fear has a whole lot of other connotations, that there was a real positive aspect to fear.

In that dictionary, it talks about fear being “respect,” fear being worship of God, the fear of the Lord being a positive thing. But if you crack open a dictionary today, you’re not going to find that positive definition of fear. You will find just that fear is an apprehensive feeling.

Dannah: Interesting!

Mary: Yes. So, here’s my definition of fear, because I think that we need to rethink what fear is: I think that fear is the feeling that something is more powerful than I am and beyond my control. So that can be positive or negative.

So if I’m throwing myself out of an airplane and going skydiving, I feel fear, but it’s exhilarating. This is more powerful than me; it’s beyond my control. I feel excited, exhilarated by it, but it’s a positive type of fear because I think that my parachute is going to hold me up.

Dannah: So, you would do that, wouldn’t you? You would actually do that, Mary?

Mary: Yes, absolutely, I would do that!

Dannah: You would probably like the electric eel, too. Alright, so that’s a good definition of fear. I like that—the feeling that something is more powerful than I am, and that I’m not in control. That’s where we start.

Mary: That’s right. That I can’t control it; so that’s what fear is. And under that, I think there are three different kinds of fear that the Bible presents. The first is the apprehensive type of fear. So that’s the, “I’m scared of something that’s going to hurt me. It’s bigger and more powerful than I am, and I am feeling afraid.” 

That’s the kind of fear where we fear failure, or we fear a circumstance, or we fear a situation that we’re facing. We’re really scared and we feel apprehensive or worried, or we’re just anxious about that situation. So that’s apprehensive fear.

But then the Bible talks about a second category of fear, and that’s respectful fear. So that kind of fear is that something is bigger and more powerful than me. Therefore, it deserves my respect. So that’s like the authorities, perhaps, or the government or law givers or a policeman. The Bible even talks about children fearing their parents, or a wife—get this—fearing her husband.

Now that’s not an, “I’m afraid,” type of fear. That’s just a respectful type of fear, that you’re respecting that something is in a position of authority or something is more powerful. For instance, I use the example: I have a fear of my power saw . . . out in my garage, my electric power saw.

Now, I’m not afraid of it in an apprehensive sense, but I am afraid of it in a respectful sense. I’m super careful with the way I interact with it and use it, because I know that it’s powerful . . . more powerful than me. So that’s the second kind of fear.

The third kind of fear is the fear of the Lord, so the fear of the Lord is: He is bigger and more powerful than me, and He deserves my veneration. He deserves my worship. He deserves my allegiance. He deserves my obedience. He is God and I am not God, and therefore, I do what He says. 

So that’s the fear of the Lord, and there’s so much to unpack in terms of what the fear of the Lord actually is. The fear of the Lord involves so many different aspects; it’s like a beautiful jewel with lots of different facets (and we can talk about that).

But the point is, I think we need to broaden our perspective on what fear is. Fear isn’t just negative; fear is also positive. If indeed it is the fear of the Lord that brings us strong confidence, then in order to have strong confidence, we need to grow in the fear of the Lord. So we need to embrace that positive kind of fear that, really, we have lost in terms of our culture.

Dannah: You know, let me throw in here . . . I think I was about twenty-six years old when I finally started to understand the fear of the Lord conceptually, and at the same time understand that I didn’t have it! 

One of the things that I was really afraid of was, if people really knew my sins, if people really knew my secrets, if people really knew my junk, they wouldn’t really love me. They wouldn’t really accept me. That also showed up when God would prompt me to share my faith with someone. I would be like, “If I shared my faith, what would they think of me?”

So what I was living under was the opposite of the fear of the Lord; it was the fear of man. It was like, “I am terrified of anything you might think of me that wouldn’t bring approval.” And instead of obeying God in those circumstances—confessing my sin to a Christian sister who could help me overcome it, sharing my faith with someone God had prompted me to be in relationship with because they were lost—I would fall short, because I was more afraid of those people than I was of God! And that was the crippling fear in my life that really didn’t allow me to live in confidence as a woman.

Mary: Absolutely, because when we have confidence in the Lord, it takes care of those other fears. Those other fears become smaller as He becomes bigger. And I think that every problem we have with confidence stems back to an inadequate view of God. We don’t view God as big enough, strong enough, powerful enough, worthy enough, glorious enough, beautiful enough.

When we have a small view of God, and we view Him small and our problems as big, then we fear our problems rather than fearing the Lord. And when we view Him as big, then we begin to fear Him, and the fear of our problems or circumstances begins to fade. So it’s this really interesting paradox that Scripture presents when it comes to fear and confidence. 

You know, Dannah, in our culture when we think of fearing the Lord, or God is awesome, we don’t really have a sense of that. I think we think of God as awesome, that He’s really nice, or He’s awesome like a cup of cappuccino is awesome. You know, He’s our buddy, He’s our friend. We have this really casual, small view of God.

Often we aren’t awe-struck and breathless and amazed by the God who is so big and so powerful and mighty, whose power is matchless. His holiness is absolute. His excellence is unmatched, His beauty is unspeakable. His glory is transcendent! 

We’ve lost our view of God being God, and I think until we reinstate that with the fear of the Lord, we’re going to struggle with confidence. We will struggle with putting our confidence in the right place, because we’re going to put our confidence in the thing that looks to us to be the most strong and most reliable.

So, if my view of God is small, then I might put my confidence in my education, because that looks more strong and reliable to me than God does. So, I think that it’s so important to understand this concept of the fear of the Lord.

Dannah: Okay, Mary, I think you’re one of the most confident women I know. I love that about you. As I listened to you yesterday explaining what confidence is, today explaining what fear is—the right kind of fear that leads us to have confidence in God—I’m wondering, what’s the story? 

Were you just born confident, Mary, and you understood the fear of the Lord? What’s the story that helped you to understand the wonder and awe and the magnificence of God . . . that switched you from being fearful of whatever you were fearful of to being in the fear of the Lord, a confident woman?

Mary: Here’s the thing. If someone would have asked me when I was young, “How confident are you?” I think I would have put my confidence pretty high. I’m just a naturally confident kind of person. So I think that just in terms of personality, different women are confident and different women are more insecure.

And then, your life experience. If you’ve had a lot of affirmation and not encountered a lot of challenges that have really tested your confidence, perhaps you are more confident, or perhaps you’ve been trained to be confident. I think a lot of women in our culture have been raised to be strong, confident women.

If I were to ask them, “How confident are you? On a scale of one to ten, where would you put that knob?” They might put it pretty high. I think I would naturally put it at about eight or nine; I’m a fairly confident woman.

However, there’s a different question that I think I had to face, and the question is this: How much am I putting my confidence in God on a day-to-day basis? So if I had another confidence meter that I had to turn and pick a number, I think if I were being honest with myself, that number would be fairly low, that number would be three or four.

Dannah: You’re talking about in the past.

Mary: In the past, and sometimes now, too, Dannah, to be quite honest. On an ongoing basis, am I relying on myself, on my own stuff, on my own resources, on my own know-how, or am I truly relying on the Lord in this situation?

So there’s a disparity between how confident I judge myself to be or how confident I feel vs. how much I’m actually putting my confidence in the Lord. So, here’s the odd thing: you can have a woman who is really, really feels confident, but Scripture says that if her confidence isn’t put in the right thing, then her confidence is fragile and foolish.

And so, I think that in my journey and in my story, it wasn’t a one-time “aha!” moment. I think over the course of my lifetime, as the Lord began to test and to put me through trials and to put me through difficult situations that really made that spider’s web that I was leaning on give way, that’s when I began to build stronger and stronger confidence in the Lord, instead of confidence in the wrong things. So, putting confidence in the right things instead of the wrong things, and growing in the fear of the Lord. 

I think we grow in the fear of the Lord as we grow in worship, as we spend more time in the Word, as we just meditate on His greatness, as we allow ourselves to wait on Him and cut out all the craziness that’s going on in the world, and just spend time with the Lord. I think that’s how we begin to grow in the fear of the Lord.

Dannah: Yes. Well, here’s your homework. I am going to issue homework to my dear Revive Our Hearts sisters, and it’s this: as you go throughout the rest of your day, I want you to rate yourself on that confident scale . . . the second one that Mary talked about. How is your confidence in the Lord?

On a scale of one to ten, are you putting your confidence in God? Do you have a strong fear of the Lord? Or, are you putting your confidence in other things, anything other than God, and are you fearful? Rate yourself and then sit in that. 

Tomorrow, Mary, I’m going to have to ask you to come back one more day, so that you can help us with our scales and get those scales moving in the right direction so that we are showing up as confident women who do fear the Lord.

Nancy: That’s Dannah Gresh, who has been talking about some really important reminders from God’s Word with our dear friend, Mary Kassian. We’re in the middle of a short series here on Revive Our Hearts called “The Right Kind of Confident.”That’s also the title of Mary’s newest book. 

And then, listen to the subtitle for that book: The Remarkable Grit of a God-Fearing Woman. I love that! God doesn’t call us to be wimpy women who are constantly in fear of every possible thing. Instead, He wants us to fear Him with that reverential awe, as we heard from Mary and Dannah today.

How about you? Is the needle on your “fear-o-meter” pointing more toward unhealthy, controlling, debilitating fears or toward the healthy, freeing fear of the Lord, which the Scripture tells us leads to life? I want to encourage you to get a copy of Mary’s book so you can think more deeply about this whole subject.

In fact, this week we’d love to send you a copy of the book as our way of saying “thank you” for coming alongside to support this ministry with your donation. Revive Our Hearts is listener supported, and that means that we depend on the prayers and the gifts of listeners like you who have been impacted by this ministry so we can continue taking the message of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ to women all around the world. 

To make a donation today, just visit our website ReviveOurHearts.com. When you get there, you’ll have a chance to choose Mary’s book as our gift to you when you send your gift to this ministry. 

And if you’d rather call to make your donation, that works, too. Our number is 1–800–569–5959. Be sure to ask for Mary’s book on confidence and fearing God when you call. Tomorrow, Mary returns to tell us how to turn wrong fear upside down. She’ll explain what that means, so be sure and join us again for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to lead you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ as you grow in the fear of the Lord.

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