If you missed last week’s post, “Bullies Beware,” please read it first HERE. This is the second half of the chapter, on how to “order our fears” so that appropriate fear can serve us rather than hinder us. Puritan Richard Baxter warns of an inappropriate religious fear that can be devastating to our spiritual health. The proper ordering of our fears is an essential art to live a fruitful life in Christ. When God begins to use you in any way, you put your soul in peril if you start to fear anyone but Him.
One fear that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should is religious fear. Puritan Richard Baxter warns of Satan attempting to make our faith “burdensome and grievous” by overwhelming a believer with fear and sorrow.[i] This isn’t a common temptation, but it’s a serious one. The mistake is thinking that the most honorable attitude toward God is “unprofitable grieving” and excessive sorrow. You think, perhaps, that you make up for your sins by always keeping them before you, berating yourself for them, or thinking of the ugliness of the world. When grief and fear are a mindset instead of a practice, they become the spiritual equivalent of continuing to give someone chemotherapy who no longer has cancer.
There’s a place for grief and sorrow—including for our sins—but here’s when you know it has become unprofitable: when every thought of God becomes a torment to your soul instead of a balm and joy. If you think of God and think first of how you have failed Him instead of how He loves you; your most recent sin (perhaps one you have already repented of a dozen times or more), as if God still remembers it; or your first inclination is to believe that God’s patience has finally run out and you are now beyond His grace, you have slipped into a serious spiritual disease.
Baxter asks: has religious fear become a tyrant that rules over you, to the extent that you “perceive almost nothing else”?[ii] It’s not healthy if the practice of your faith becomes a torment and feels unpleasant. Yes, there are times when we struggle to say no to sin and feel the bite of the cross on our backs as we practice self-denial. But our faith, first and foremost, should remind us of God’s love, forgiveness, and affirmation—that He is for us, that, in Christ, we are indeed, good enough for Him, which unleashes tremendous joy and light and peace and comfort.
The religious fear mindset doesn’t come from God; it is not true conviction, it is not sanctity; it is human frailty. “God hath commanded you a sweeter work. It is a life of love, and joy, and cheerful progress to eternal joy, that he requireth of you; and no more fear or grief than is necessary to separate you from sin, and teach you to value and use the remedy.”[iii]
Use fear and grief when you must, but take them off like filthy work clothes after you have mucked out the stall. Holding on to them, Baxter warns, is itself an act of sin. “Religious fears, when they are inordinate and hurtful, are sinful, and indeed against religion; and must be resisted as other hurtful passions.”[iv]
The solution to this mindset is to remember and practice just about everything we’ve been writing in this book! “Be better acquainted with Christ and his promises, and you will find enough in him to pacify the soul, and give you confidence and holy boldness in your access to God, Heb. iv. 16; Eph. iii. 12; Heb. x. 19. The spirit which he giveth, is not the spirit of bondage, but the spirit of adoption, of love and confidence, Rom. viii. 15; Heb. ii.”[v]
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